Books:
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Reid Jenkins
Well this was a very entertaining piece of fiction recommended to me by some Janice when we were in a bookstore (remember bookstores?) about the rise of a '50s vavavoom actress and her life and loves as tracked via the various men she married. This thing was (I think) a bestseller (whatever that means these days) and I can see why. It's fun, there's lots of plot, and the writing is serviceable enough to sustain it all. It has an old-fashioned - by which I mean anything that predates the atrocious plotlessness in favor of "voice" that seems to have permeated the publishing industry in the last decade or so where story has gone out the window in favor of snory (waah waah) - tale structured around a present-tense narrative in which a magazine writer is interviewing the eponymous Evelyn Hugo with a bit of narrative drama as to why that interviewer in particular was chosen with intercuts of the first-person account by Evelyn herself. There are no real surprises here in that I wouldn't say there was revelatory insight into the workings of Hollywood through the years or anything like that, but the predictability also didn't detract. Like you know from the seven husbands of the title that you're in for a lot of interpersonal relationship drama and whatnot plus a lot of machinating around becoming famous and things of that ilk and, despite the fact that you can see most plot beats before they show up, it kind of doesn't matter. The world is fun; the book isn't particularly demanding (in a good way); the framing mystery around the magazine writer is engaging in its own right; and while I probably won't remember much about this book in a few weeks, I would also totally recommend it as the perfect thing if you want something absorbing without being stressful, like the reading equivalent of watching a primetime soap. I was thoroughly happy to pick it up every time and it all flew by and, for easy popcorn fiction reading, I really couldn't ask for anything more. Thanks for the rec, Janice!
TV/Streaming:
The Crown (Season 1):
This is a deeply strange show which ultimately demonstrates that, when it comes to non-documentary entertainment, fiction is better than truth - I’m making that as a formal declarative statement! The gist of the series is that it's a docudrama (presumably - more on this in a second), tracking British royalty from around post-WWII through roughly the end of the '50s in this season and, based on the marketing, right up to around the present tense by the end of the series. To show you what I mean about historical accuracy being dramatically problematic, I'm going to recount the plot as if it were fiction to demonstrate. Just FYI, no one could be less interested in the British royal family than I - I challenge anyone who claims to be less interested to a duel of disinterest - and other than what's permeated my brainpan via cultural osmosis, I know nothing about them. This is why I'm assuming this show is a docudrama but in reality I have zero idea how closely it hews to history.
So basically you have a nuclear family of rich people, mostly cancer-ridden from all the smoking. They all, like the grandparents in Willy Wonka, live in the same house (though not the same bed) together, a big palace, but more like a big fancy brocade-laden prison as, despite being rich and in some ways revered, they're highly constrained due to a law that more or less places them as the nominal head of the government though legally forbids them from having an opinion, meaning they're consulted on things but can't really do anything about anything. In fact, their prime job seems to be holding up some kind of image of themselves as this otherwordly detached force floating through humanity but also somehow above it all. Prior to the show's start, one of them created a scandaaaaaaaaahl because he married a divorcee and, because somehow that act could topple the whole shmagill in a way that's never really made clear though is stated numerous times (and remember these people are delusional golden-handcuffed prisoners so it's equally possible they just talked themselves into all this though the season never explores that either), he abdicates so he can, you know, live his life, and his family is very angry about that because they say he's shirked his duty and shoved it onto his brother who's forced to take over, though, as far as I can gather, the sole duty is the one above, i.e. staying in fancy prison and being very rich and annoyed about it because, again, they don't do anything because they legally can't. Okay so he's a big smoker and - no spoiler here I promise - dies and his eldest daughter takes over and very quickly learns the ropes about eliminating all desire and having no opinion about anything and presenting a neutral dull face and she does that very well. And the way we know she does that well is because absolutely nothing whatsoever happens in the entire season. Job accomplished! If she weren't already a supreme leader of doing nothing, she'd certainly be promoted to one given her amazing skill at it.
Does a show in which the leads can do nothing other than, at most, complain and pout about being unable to do anything combined with convincing themselves that doing nothing is "duty" (read: pathological adherence to meaningless principles held to solely because their ancestors did) sound like compelling drama to you? This is not entertainment. Entertainment would be, to lift a plot from the season, when the older sister, obsessed with maintaining a neutral image, actively lies to and interferes with her young sister's lovelife... a whole juicy plot in which the younger sister tries to submarine the older sister or sneak around the rules or obey them but plot an angry revenge or whatever. You know what entertainment isn't? The exact same plot setup only the younger sister does nothing but the above pouting plus telling the older sister she's mean. Shrug.
I wouldn't say this show is outright boring, but I also wouldn't say it's not not-boring. There's lot of setup and stuff that could happen and frankly even the basic setup - you're in charge but powerless and in order to remain in charge you have to project an image that your powerlessness is a choice to stay above the fray as opposed to a legal constraint - is actually a pretty good setup for a series, right? I mean if this were fiction, you could immediately imagine all kind of plots unraveling from that construct. But, because that never happens (at least in this season), you have entire episodes devoted to things like "the widow buys a house in Scotland" as in that quote unquote plot is literally a third of the episode. Another third is the eldest sister becoming exhausted by her "duty" which in this case is a big worldwide tour where she's does a lot of public gladhanding but let's remind ourselves the only one saying she needs to do anything... is her and the reason she's doing any of it is self-delusion - again, could be a good setup if this were fiction but, since I'm guessing it's history, what you get is a third of an episode of someone buying a house, a third of someone getting tired of their calendar but doing it anyway, and a third of the younger sister going stark raving mad (apparently) by daring to express an opinion in public, for which she's later rebuked but which you also know - and this is really a central problem with this show - will go absolutely nowhere because the show leaves no room for the viewer to even have a hope that a plot could arise. In a fiction show, as opposed to a faction show which is what I'm deeming this, you could envision all kinds of story coming from sisters at odds with each other in an unbalanced power dynamic. But there's no hope of that here. Which isn't to say I won't keep watching, though I make no one any promises that this won't be downgraded to background noise or, perhaps, DNFed at some point though I will assuredly let y'all know.
Vigil (Season 1):
So up until the final episode my review of this mystery/thriller series would've been something along the lines of "this show is entertaining enough (barely) if you don't think about it too much" but the final episode, combined with the fact that there's so little content that the final 3 episodes were like 50% boring character backstory (I’d like to take a hot second to reemphasize the “boring” part here) flashback, compels me to push this into a skip it. This is a 6-part British miniseries about a police investigator - female I'm noting as gender is important for why I got so annoyed in the final episode - sent aboard a nuclear sub to investigate the death of a crewman. There's a whole thing - we're getting into the "don't think about it too much" part - where she’s assigned to be stationed on the sub but where information can only be sent to but not from the sub and all of it will be filtered through the Navy thus the detective chooses her ex-girlfriend, also a cop, to be her land-based investigative partner as, even though they're broken up, she'll be able to use their knowledge of each other to send coded messages only the investigator will understand. The investigation is very involved and, in its mind, twisty though really it's one of those bureaucracies-butting-up-against-each-other things, in this case cops and Navy, that creates issues from each side withholding info from the other rather than actual twists. I mean, yeah, there are some twists later as the case deepens but I'm just sayin': even before the irritating final episode, it was still pretty weak as a mystery though not DNFably so. Additionally, without spoilering, the show relies on everyone on the boat being an idiot as opposed to, you know, trained in combat. So the plot more or less cuts back and forth between the boat and land with a whole buncha boring backstory - as mentioned but worth mentioning again - thrown in there and while in the first few episodes the backstory was of some vague interest, as it progressed it just became more and more filler about a bland relationship with things like one of the characters writing "I love you" with her finger on the other's back and asking the other character what she wrote and the other character getting as far as "I" before trailing off and then the other one saying something a la, "You can't even say the word when you're just repeating what I said" - it's like 20 hours of stuff like that. Also the investigation in the sub is incredibly dumb because it's not like the cop can actually do anything since she has no gun, no handcuffs, and is literally incapable of doing anything other than saying, "I'm placing you under arrest" which she says several times and is able to back up with nothing because she’s, ya know, stuck on sub alone where she can’t communicate with anyone on land. The rest of the plot involving what everyone's hiding and what's really happening on the sub is dumb but not egregious.
Until the final episode where our highly trained female cop becomes, basically and without spoilering, Nell tied to the train track, i.e. a poor lady screaming and weak and incapable of fighting off the baddie and unable to do anything other than cry and go limp and wait for the men to save the day. Really, it was so insulting to everyone involved I'm kind of surprised the actor playing the investigator didn't say anything like, I don't know, wouldn't a trained police officer have some skill set beyond weeping and losing hope and - no spoiler here I promise - waiting for some men to step in so she can run away? Look, I get it; the writers wanted to put the lead in jeopardy but they did so in a way that left her completely helpless and reliant on males and does that sound like a fun place for a lead character to wind up? If that kind of thing won't bother you, then this might marginally hold your attention; if it will, then I'd say skip this idiocy because the stuff that comes prior is so dumb that it's not worth it. Though I hear there's a season 2 in the works - how is beyond me since the whole thing is wrapped up in this season - and I may find it impossible to resist seeing if it gets even dumber and more misogynistic.
Movies:
Inside - So this is a 90 minute comedy (I guess (and yep there's the review right there)) which is essentially the meandering thoughts, most of them in song form, of a comedian named Bo Burnham which he shot entirely by himself during the early chunk of COVID lockdown, thus the title. Much of one's appreciation - or lack thereof - for this film will depend on the extent to which you find his observational-in-song-form humor (like a song about the annoyances of Facetiming with his mom) to be entertaining combined with a recapitulation of the trapped sense much of the world had in that first phase of COVID where we were all disinfecting everything that another person had even glanced at and leaving our homes only out of absolute necessity and completely coated in hand sanitizer. Look, I think if you watched this film back then, maybe it would've been hilarious because it would've captured so much of your own sense of being locked alone in your head and dealing with this new isolated world with not much to do and whatnot. But watching it now, it's just boring. There's no narrative or progression, just a jump from thought to thought though in fairness forcing myself to sit through what felt to me like an endless 90 minutes did, in fact, capture a feeling similar to that of being in lockdown though I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intention. I'm not commenting on his comedy because it's so subjective and, again, very particular to a time period and, in his case, a frenetic sense of being trapped in his own thoughts with little means of keeping himself stable during his isolation - basically he made the movie to occupy himself and his brain and it feels that way, just a bunch of random internalizations clipped together. I guess the critique is that this movie doesn't hold up though I'm guessing if you watched it during 2020, you probably had quite a different experience of it. But IJHO you can skip it and even for people who clicked with it in 2020 I'm really not sure how it would hold up on a rewatch or, really, do any of us need a 90 minute reminder of what all that felt like? Mmmm.