Books:
We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages, and Ransom by Joel Simon
This is a very short but pretty interesting book about the business of hostages and kidnapping. It really looks at the nitty-gritty of how it happens, how and why governments do (or don't) negotiate, the consequences of the various strategies, and things like the machinations of K&R (kidnapping & ransom) insurance which is an industry I didn't even know existed until I read this book. The author is a journalist which you can tell both from the level of research and the fact that his interest in the topic stems in part from his organization’s efforts to get governments to recover kidnapped journalists. The format is that the book takes the reader through various real-world kidnappings for various different reasons - money, political statement, etc. - from beginning to end with detailed explanations of how it all went down and what happened as a result of the decisions that were made along the way. Worth a read if the topic is of interest.
The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air #1) by Holly Black
I need to rip the band-aid off right now: I INHALED this book about… (is there some way to make the font smaller?) faeries. Ugh, it’s so painful to type! Not only do I normally hate fantasy books about the “fey” or whatever the fuck they’re called but to make matters even worse, this book combined itself with another genre I despise - urban fantasy - and it’s just unthinkable that I, a Janice, far from ripping it to shreds in a few cruel pithy sentences (thanks for that, me!) instead loved the eff out of it. Am I okay? Oh WHATEVER, the plot is fun, the characters are fun, the writing is facile and easy to read, the twists are fun, and I couldn’t get through this book quickly enough and need to stop typing now so I can go mainline the sequels.
TV/Streaming:
Better Than Us:
This is a popcorn Russian action show set in the near future about an overly protective escaped assassin robot, the family it bonds to, and a corporation’s snaky (and somewhat insane) efforts to recover it. While it has a surface resemblance to the show Humans (the Brit remake of the Swedish original), it plays out very differently. Humans, also a fun show if you haven’t seen it and filled - surprisingly for British TV - with at least two super hot people, was about robots developing consciousness whereas in this show, the robots are basically advanced coffee makers, little more than articulated-limbed Google Assistants, i.e. a complete idiot who understands about 50% of what you say and gives you a fucking heart attack by interrupting hours of pleasurable napping silence to randomly scream at top volume, “NECROMANCER!” and then read you the Wikipedia definition of such while you shout “shut up!” over and over before ripping the plug out of the wall (the someone this happened to may have muted their Google Assistant as a result in case you were wondering). In any event, I really liked this show. It’s nothing genius but it’s 16 episodes that zip along with enough fun family stuff, evil plotting, and Russian oddness to make it all pretty entertaining. Tonally, I'd say its closest analogue is Orphan Black if you’ve seen that; in the same way that that show was a big interpersonal drama intersected by a clone story and evil corporate plot, this is the same but with an assassin robot so if you liked that one you'll probably like this one.
Exterminate All the Brutes:
I'm about to say what no non-Janice-reviewer dared say about this documentary because, I think, it’s about a subject that other reviewers felt they had to get behind thereby abdicating their responsibility to review the art and not the subject but also making themselves look on the side of the right, subject being, kind of, the history of White, mostly American but European as well, colonialism and its subsequent genocides. Well this Janice is here to tell you that this documentary is awful and I'ma tell you why it's awful: it’s an aimless mess that says nothing, absolutely zero, about the ostensible topic about which it’s supposedly saying an enormous amount. Zippo. I watched all 4 episodes and I still don't know what it was trying to say. It starts off with what we all know (by "we all" I mean anyone who went to public school - I'm thinking any public school and not just Left Coast ones btw - in the past 60-80 years): our ancestors, meaning the Brits so not really everyone's ancestors but White America’s ancestors as far as 8th grade History is concerned, showed up here, were starving, were helped by Native Americans (or American Indians depending on when you went to school), to which we responded by wiping them all out both through murder and disease, stealing all the land they'd inhabited, herding them onto reservations, violating multiple treaties, and taking over the entire country. I don't think it was called genocide when I was in public school but I think it’s called that now and regardless that’s what it was. While we were doing all that we also enslaved bajillions of Black Africans for good measure. This is not news, right?
Okay, so somewhere in the second episode, after watching a bunch of historical photos of Whites slaughtering non-Whites and quotes from 1800s racists mysteriously intercut with the director's Haitian/Congo/Brooklyn upbringing plus some random reenactments with Josh Hartnett for reasons that still elude me, it slowly began to dawn on me that the filmmaker thought he was ripping the wool from our eyes and revealing what I, for one, had learned in every American History class I ever took. Like he thought Americans had some other myth, a self-aggrandizing one in which the above happened but for excellent reasons, and he was showing us what we really did and how racist and genocidal we really were. I think - I genuinely don't know. It made me feel a little bad for him that he thought he was telling us something we already knew but also kind of resentful of the all the non-Janice reviewers, to hardly mention every executive up and down the food chain, for not pointing out to him that a potentially more interesting documentary would've been to start with going around the country and finding out what America’s self-myth is and then, if desired, debunking that. Because telling me that we're here due to genocide and racism isn't really new info, and it was presented as if it were which made the entire thing feel pointless. It tried to tie American history to Hitler and then, as things spiraled completely out of control theme-wise, to White scientists performing cruel experiments on chickens for I don't know what reason.
And even if you didn't know all that - like I said, I'd certainly like to know if that history is taught everywhere and not just in Blue states as I’m aware other states try to paint a more White-supremacy-friendly picture of American history - I'm not even sure what the documentary’s larger point about colonialism is. Stealing resources and trampling on those already inhabiting a place isn't new. Colonialism isn’t even specifically human as anyone who's had a, say, ant or kudzu invasion can attest. And really isn’t the history of Life in some ways nothing more than violent claims of ownership by dispossession, i.e. what is COVID other than the microbiology equivalent of a land grab? Nor is there even some universal agreement on colonialism’s moral status for all of us to be grounded in since I’m hard pressed to think of a single existing country that didn’t, at some point in its history, either arise from colonialism or colonize someplace else. I mean, if you believe colonialism is immoral then what you’re implicitly stating is that you believe in the morality of first dibs… and do you? Does first-human-arrival come with attendant ownership and moral rights, like getting there first equates to moral superiority? If I call the front seat, is it mine and are you (meaning my front-and-good-TV-seat-snatching older brother) immoral for ignoring my claim and grabbing/shoving me off (FYI 100% according to my younger self)? And if you believe colonialism is moral, then aren’t you essentially saying you believe might makes right, in which case what does it even mean to “own” something other than that most other people have agreed not to tear that something away from you? By that logic, thieves own what they steal, right?
Anyhoo, agree or disagree with the above, none of it was in the documentary and shouldn’t a documentary on the ostensible evils of colonialism address the moral basis of such? So what are you, the documentarian, saying about colonialism other the obvious which is that the losers lose and do so painfully? What am I, the beneficiary of colonialism (as, btw, is the documentarian himself), supposed to think about it? Where's that documentary? Not here! So there, I'm saying it: this thing is a 4 hour senseless piece of ultimately dull junk (though Josh Hartnett does disrobe and bathe in a river at one point so there’s that) on a topic that could have been interesting, revelatory, eye-opening, a slap in the face, etc. etc. but simply wasn't. Honestly if you're interested in the topic of how Europe conquered so much of world, read Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture which was rec’ed to me by some Janice years ago and which shows you exactly how and why White European colonialism succeeded (hint: it had nothing to do with skin color or, to a certain extent, technology (though technology was definitely part of it) but with a relentlessness that can only come with the powerful deciding that the bulk of the population is disposable - and that bulk agreeing to their own disposability by calling it “patriotism” - and sending in wave after wave after wave and letting them all die and not caring about it). In any event, this docu is eminently skippable.
Interior Design Masters (Season 2):
Let’s just do a brief cleanse of the above by asking: who doesn’t love a British interior design challenge? Not not me (I think)! I thought the first season of this show was fun and the second equally so. It’s pretty straightforward – contestants are given various real-world spaces to design, sometimes individually, sometimes in teams – and you get to see the result. It’s pretty well produced, and the judge critiques actually make sense and manage to effectively translate why a design does or doesn’t achieve its goal. If you like a Brit-paced reality competition show, meaning one that focuses on the competition more than the contestant drama, you’ll like this one.
Movies:
I Care A Lot - Some Janice recommended this movie to me, and I drunkenly said to that equally drunken Janice’s face what I’m soberly sayin’ here: I hated this movie so friggin’ much! This atrocious mess is a “black comedy” (which I’m quoting/air-quoting because it’s really just sociopaths doing OTT and idiotic things which doth not a black comedy make IJHO) about an elder care provider who bilks the seniors she’s caring for and what happens when she goes after the wrong senior. Not only is it fucking stupid – no spoilers here but the behavior of the lead in regard to the person who’s opposing her is just so unrealistically DUMB – but the characters behave like idiots nonstop and, really, what are we all hoping for at the end? What?! I watched the whole thing but I hated every fucking second of it. However, y’alls, at least one Janice had the opposite reaction so whether you end up loving it or hating it, Janice, as usual, is always right!
The Box - This is a Cameron Diaz/James Marsden movie from like a decade ago by the guy who who did Donnie Darko. I think the best way for you to understand my feelings about this movie is to share with you my gummied internal monologue trajectory: Oh boy, this thing is starting out kind of dull. Maybe I should DNF? […] Hmm, is this trying to be a '70s movie? And if so is it trying to be a classy '70s movie like The Parallax View or a classy '70s MOW like The Stepford Wives? […] Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, I see, it's THAT kind of movie, well that’s a letdown cause I was kind of getting into it. […] Wait, what's going on? […] No hang on a second WTF?!? […] Oh, okay, it IS that kind of letdown movie. […] Wait whaaaaaa?!?! Followed by an ending that both totally pays off everything that comes before and about which I have absolutely zero understanding of what it was all supposed to mean. Do what you will with that review and I make no promises one way or the other for the ungummied.