Books:
Night Heron by Adam Brookes (Phillip Mangan Series #1)
What do you think of a spy thriller writer the plot of which hinges on a middle-aged White intelligence officer who goes so gaga over nailing young Asian poon that he showboats by spilling state secrets to her? Would you think something along of the lines of, "that's so completely idiotic, sexist, and oh did I mention IDIOTIC and frankly pretty downright offensive to all genders that a professional intelligence officer would blow the entirety of his career over his dick as if he hadn't had a lifetime of training to avoid spilling secrets during sex and therefore I can't trust this writer for one second longer and am therefore DNFing"? Because if so, you're totally me! The frustrating thing was that I was actually enjoying the book - a spy novel about a journalist in China who gets drawn into freelancing for British intelligence - until that turd showed up about 60% in. A piece of me wanted to continue and just kind of blow past it, but I couldn't for the simple reason that a spy novel is entirely about clever plotting - that's literally all it is. And the fact that the author was too, I don't know what, self-oblivious? to come up with anything other sex for secrets made me realize I couldn't trust him to take me to the end of the book let alone read more in the series because someone who would allow that to appear in their writing is someone, IJHO, who doesn't care about their writing and, by extension, their readers. What's particularly frustrating is this: I totally would've been game to see a career intelligence officer outfoxed and outmaneuvered by an even more brilliant intelligence officer - that would've been cool and logical - but "ooh hot lady parts I HAVE NO BRAIN ANYMORE I’M JUST PENIS PENIS PENIS" is just so... awful not merely because it degrades him into being a total moron but it doesn't offer many favors for her either, like all she had to do was issue compliments and spread her legs and is that any character you're interested in knowing more about? This kind of thing stops me dead cold because, as mentioned, I can't continue down a road with an author who either thinks that's a good idea or knows it's a bad idea but leaves it in the final draft anyway because he either can't think of anything better or just doesn't care, but if that's not you and you don't get annoyed at the notion that men lose all rationality at the whiff of sex and that women have nothing to offer the spy game other than that whiff, then up to that point it was a pretty entertaining book and you might like it if you're looking for a modern spy novel. I'm a little bummed I can't continue because I was thinking it could be a good series, but that sequence made me lose all faith that my investment in the author would be remotely worth my time so, oh well.
TV/Streaming:
Gomorrah (Seasons 1-5):
This Italian-set Mafia show is far and away one of the best series in recent memory and definitely up there in the top percentile of all shows ever (akin to how good the first four seasons of The Bureau were IJHO in terms of character, plotting, consistency, and overall series arc). I wouldn't say the show is easy to get into for the same reason that The Wire isn't easy to get into which is that it just kind of throws you into the middle of things with a lot of characters and without explaining much and just counts on you to figure it out as you go. In fact this technique never stops across the seasons - even in the final season for the first episode I was like wait who are those people and am I supposed to have seen them before? - but all that is part of its brilliance. It's telling you its story kind of embedded in the lives of its main characters meaning exposition comes across through interaction and plot rather than through explanation. The top-level plot - and I'm not going beyond this because this is 100% a spoilerable show in the best possible way in that it's filled with completely plausible yet also totally surprising plot twists and character turns - focuses on the dealings of a particular Neapolitan mafia family and that's all I'm telling you. What distinguishes the show from others of its ilk is that there's zero romanticization of the mob, like these people are not the Sopranos nor are they from a Coppola or Scorcese movie, but rather they're scum, riveting scum, insanely violent scum, smart and devious scum, but scum nonetheless. In fact part of what makes this show so interesting is its modernity in the way it deals with issues around how the mob is intertwined with Italian society and government and also complex economic issues around drug supply chains and trading between foreign mobs. There's some fantastically good drama across the whole series around the various season arcs which usually involve an incredibly complex set of shifting motives and efforts to achieve a goal that in turn actually achieves a completely different goal meaning even if you think you know where the season's headed, you discover it takes you somewhere even better. Yes, I know that's all vague but honestly what's so satisfying about this show is seeing, say, some assassination that you think you understand - that one was interfering with this one's drug business so this one killed that one - but which turns out to be more complex, e.g. this one killed that one because that one's wife's uncle had access to a politician that this one needed to get to etc. etc. I must note: the violence in this show is at a level I really don't think I've seen before. People are killed left and right and in non-sexy non-slo-mo ways but just brutally murdered. There are corpses everywhere and that level of violence, often public violence, really makes you understand the danger of being a mafioso (to hardly mention anyone going up against a mafioso) in Italy. Unlike in TV/Streaming presentations of the American mob where it tries to keep itself low-profile, this show presents the mob as being somewhat uncaring about government responses and in fact using killings to manipulate the government into a particular response in order to achieve a financial end. Okay I've waxed rhapsodic enough. The only reason not to watch this show and spend the first few episodes getting into it - there's something that happens at the end of the fifth (fourth? sixth?) episode that made me go "holy crap!" and which completely turned me from "yeah I like this show but it's just okay" to "I'm 100% in" - is if you really hate violence as there's just no avoiding it in this show. Great series, loved.
The Walking Dead (Season 3):
No, just no. I knew this show was awful from season 1 and remained pretty bad in season 2 but I was determined - if staring at a screen can count as "determination" - to keep watching given its huge ratings because, I believed, surely it had to improve as there was just no way millions of people could've sat through 11 seasons of a show as bad as the first two seasons. And I was so wrong; they did - congrats! The reason I had to DNF this show midway through this season isn't that it was badly shot with moronic characters in idiotic and repetitive plot circumstances (it was) but because of a level of sexism - a theme for this week’s Media Report (sadly I must say) - I found so unbearable that I really just couldn't continue. I’ve noted this before in my Marvel movie reviews because look these things weren't made in the '80s, which is how they feel in terms of how they treat women and all non-White males, but rather more or less within the past decade. So either this show is completely overseen by old, straight, White men - which honestly is probably true but I'm too lazy to Google - or (and/or) the less-old, less-straight, less-White, less-male writers have just bought into the weird notion that, in the face of a zombie apocalypse, men would be notional capital M Men and women would fretting in the kitchen. And any women who don't do that are either bitchy feminists or angry/weird/mentally-ill. It is beyond my comprehension how no one said ANYTHING about any of this (oh if only Media Report had been around back in those days I know everyone is thinking). It's appalling and I was kind of able to live with it because I thought it was just part of the sum total of the dumbness of this show and swept it up in that, but this season was just the end. Here's what happened and I don't think any of it's a spoiler but whatever.
So this season the group splits, most of them go take over a prison in order to find safety (there's a baby involved meaning crazy sexism around pregnant ladies and child-rearing but that felt like just part and parcel of the overall idiocy noted a second ago) and another tiny group which is taken in by this town. You can immediately tell there's something wrong, that the guy in charge is a controlling I don't know something - rapist, megalomaniac, fascist i.e. someone our Congress would find to be suitable as a Supreme Court justice - and whatever there's plot back and forth and you can tell there's gonna be a showdown at some point between the prison people and the town. So in one episode a couple (straight of course) that's romantically involved gets kidnapped by one of the townspeople the details of which are irrelevant, but here's where I went over the edge. So the man and woman are separated and the guy is beaten and has a zombie sicced on him and the woman for no reason other than sexism is left alone, i.e. manly male suffers torture and lady left alone because women are weak anyway so who needs to torture them plus it’s impolite. But I could sort of buy it because the town leader is a total sexist (maybe he's one of the writers) so you could say it's in character. But fine, the guy is tortured and beaten and he won't give up the location of the prison because the people there are his friends plus his girlfriend's father is part of that group plus there's a kid and baby so, yeah he holds out. So then the town leader decides he's going to get the info out of the woman and the way he does that is, of course, by degrading her sexually and making her strip.
And here we reach the point where I was like I'm done. I was already on the edge with man beaten and woman booo hoo forced to stand in her bra - would you call that equal treatment? - but let's remember: these people have been at war with FUCKING ZOMBIES for the past years, slicing them up, fighting for their lives nonstop. These are strong, capable people who've been forced by the circumstances of the show to find inner and physical strength even if that's not what they were before because it's literally the only way they've been able to survive. We spent the first few episodes of this season watching all these people murder and beat the crap out of slews of zombies to hardly mention some fellow humans who were coming after them. Yet despite all that, the only thing weak female is capable of in this show in the face of a man questioning and humiliating her with an implication of rape if she doesn't talk is covering her boobs and crying. Weep weep weep weep weep! You know as opposed to beating the crap out of him and taking him hostage or doing literally anything else since she's now highly trained by life at killing people. To make matters worse - and this was where I had to stop - she's then taken into her boyfriend's cell where the leader says if she doesn't talk, the boyfriend will die and the boyfriend keeps giving her looks indicating she shouldn't say anything but sad, weepy, emotional, caring woman opens her trap and, rather than, say, LYING which would seem to be the best thing to do in order to save your boyfriend and buy some time because of course the bad guys will have no means of knowing whether you're lying or not without physically confirming what you say but also you have no idea whether or not these rapist, kidnapping torturers will even keep their word re saving your boyfriend in exchange for information, but no in this show weak female becomes quivering, sad, boobs-covered emotional jelly and idiotically tells the bad guys everything. And I was DONE. If you haven't watched this show, there is literally zero here to recommend it; it’s all of the above plus dumb and boring to boot. If you like zombie shows, watch the far better and not remotely sexist Black Summer which even though I was meh on season 1 I really ended up enjoying in season 2 and stay far away from this show where the primary brain-eating apocalypse clearly took place in the writer's room.
Movies:
From Afar - So this movie was strange for two reasons. The first is that it borders on being a silent film - I mean it sort of hits the height of arty (and that's really not a compliment) in that it's obtuse about its underlying plot (of which there isn't much (see "arty" from about half a second ago)) and relies a lot on things like shots of framed photos on an end table held for like 20 seconds. The second reason is I didn't DNF and trust me no one was more amazed by that fact than I. The basic plot, from what I could glean, is an older maybe closeted guy picks up young punky boys and pays then, not to have sex, but to kind of stand there with their pants half-down while he jacks off (would this be the "from afar" part of the title? dunno) and what happens when he meets a punk who beats the crap out of him and steals his money and the relationship they form as a result. If you're hoping to discover a reason for this, you will be sorely disappointed (I'll refer you back once again to "arty" and "obtuse"). There's also an entire subplot if I can call something referenced and given screen time but never explained in the least a “plot” about the older guy's dad where he spies on him around the city - Caracas - and which has a major impact on the completely and totally obtuse ending but which never makes a lick of sense. The punky kid, who's maybe a secretly self-loathing gay guy at the beginning, kind of (I think) falls in love with the older guy and brings him to a family party where he forcibly makes out with the older guy in the bathroom and the older guy pushes him away and someone witnesses all this in the bathroom and then the young guy’s mother throws him out and he moves in with the older guy but they don't have sex and them he forces the older guy to have sex and then - spoiler if you're still awake though honestly can you spoiler something that has no plot and makes zero sense of the little it has? - decides to kill the older guy's father and yeah. All of that happens, kind of the way a polar bear in a zoo might spot a bird sitting on a rock and look at it then look away then go over to it then lie down then roll over then the bird might land on the bear's stomach and they might lie there for a few minutes and then the bear jumps up and the bird flies off. Is that a plot? By the same token, if you were at the zoo and that all was happening wouldn't you maybe stand around and stare at it for a while? That's kind of what happened with me. I'm definitely not recommending this movie but I also definitely sat through it I think primarily because it seemed, as with the polar bear and the bird, to vaguely imply things would happen and I kind of sat around waiting to see if they would. And they didn’t and that was that.