Books:
The Magicians (Magicians Series #1) by Lev Grossman
So I watched the first season of the series based on this book - millennial magicians in college getting swept up into a much larger plot - and hated it. I couldn’t understand why the characters were so blase and really grew to the loathe the tone where everyone was bored by and just so OVER magic - I mean, as a general statement, if the characters don’t care about the central plot driver then why should I? I made it through season 1 and that was that. But then… I began to think that maybe I shouldn’t judge a book by its TV iteration and decided to try the original and (drumroll) loved it! The book has the same blase tone only, because it’s a book, it rapidly becomes clear that that tone is mere cover for much more complicated emotions and character motivations. The writing is super fun and outright pretty funny in parts and I found myself getting totally inhaled. I will definitely read the sequels and maaaaaaaaaaaaayybe give the series another shot since I have a better understanding of the thing that turned me off initially.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
The author won both the Nobel Prize in Literature and also the Media Report PriZZZZZZZZZe for Sleep Induction and, in addition to deserving the latter, only served to reaffirm my opinion of the former which is that Nobel Prize judges award authors based on a combo of “we haven’t given anything to anyone from this country in a while so maybe Literature?” and “capital A Art needs to induce capital Z Zs.” So boring, billed as a mystery but isn't remotely - in fact, I'm pretty sure the author detests the genre because it reads as if her publisher told her she needed to do something commercial and she was like, “Well just tell everyone it’s a mystery and leave me alone to my WORDS!” The plot is about an unreliable astrology-obsessed narrator who becomes convinced that hunted/poorly treated animals are getting their revenge by murdering their hunters/mistreaters and keeps trying to get the cops involved to investigate. To the core of my being, I cannot see anything in this book worthy of adulation let alone the $1 mil Nobel Prize scrilla. Bearing in mind that all criticism (other than mine clearly!) is subjective: I can understand how someone’s work can be important even if that work is objectively (i.e. Janicely) mediocre; I can understand how someone can push an art form forward without necessarily being to everyone’s taste - Naked Lunch or Thomas Pynchon come to mind for example; I can understand awarding a person because you’re really awarding a concept, like giving Obama a Nobel Peace Prize which was really less about awarding him (because he’d done nothing at that point) and more about acknowledging the importance of the step forward his election represented. But I can’t understand someone being singled and adulated specifically for a particular talent, like writing, and then finding zero evidence of it in the very book all the non-Janices are drooling over. Janice. Doesn’t. GET IT! Good title though.
TV/Streaming:
Top Chef All Stars:
My Top Chef history is I watched it for years then got super bored with it at some point and stopped because it felt like the same beats every season. Plus, unlike with visual or audio reality competition series where, no matter what one may think of the production or the (often annoying) judges, in the end, there’s a garment, a song, a floral arrangement, a rearranged tiny space, a dance, a self-portrait made entirely from cold cuts, etc. for you to judge; cooking competition shows though, for the obvious reason that you can’t taste anything, effectively are really more menu writing & reciting competition shows and I guess at a certain point I got bored hearing people describe ingredients then watching them prepare those ingredients then getting a food porn shot of the final product before witnessing other people eat it. Sidebar - here’s a locally sourced, prancing, exuberant, <quick look this way!>, sliced, pounded, smoked, crusted, stacked, color-blocked, garnished, and Paleo tidbit: all cooking show food is served ice cold as it goes to camera first before the judges and the judgments are based on sampling the food while it’s being cooked and not the final product, which undermines literally the entire purpose of the competition but oh well! So for whatever reason - um, maybe being stuck at home for a year for example? - I decided to dive back in last season and you know what? It's pretty good! I forgot how well-produced this show is and how it gives just enough personality to get invested in certain contestants while still keeping the bulk of it on the cooking. To note though: there was literally not a single dish I had any interest in eating in the entire series; I mean, this is some super effete cooking which in a way is what makes it interesting because it doesn’t feel so much like you’re watching a piece of food entertainment but rather like you’re in the observation room witnessing the cooking equivalent of CERN physicists test an edge hypothesis in string theory.
Dark:
I tried. Twice. Really I did. I watched season 1 when it came out and thought it was meh at best with some of the most godawful non-eye-candy actors a Janice has ever seen outside of BBC shows - and yeah I’m shallow, I get it, but is it really too much to ask for eye-candy in addition to one’s time travel? Especially as we’re forced to see the same person both old and young so, like COME ON! But then I decided that maybe I was just being too judgy (NEVER!) and that I should try again. Well, I’ve said it before and it bears repeating: Janice is always right because this show IS an atrocious bore where literally nothing happens except (a) time travel, (b) talking about (a), or (c) explaining the plot vagaries and “physics” of (a) during (b). There are no character stories, no other plots, no romance, no nothing for this Janice except schlafen and a personal commitment never to get suckered in by high Metacritic ratings ever again!
Hanna (Seasons 1 & 2):
This is the series based on the movie about, more or less, an army of genetically superpowered spies, one of whose - the titular Hanna’s - father has been squirreling her away in the woods and what happens when the baddies hunting for her find out where she is. It suffered from what basically every premium streaming show suffers from: a lack of an empowered someone saying things like “you need more plot” or “where is this going?” or “episodes 2 through 5 inclusive are exactly the same” then repeating all that on a consistent basis. Or firing the showrunner! It's bad. I mean really bad. For the first season, the writers had the movie as a template which they managed (unsuccessfully) to drag out over 8 episodes. And clearly no one involved in the process thought about what would happen if the series was renewed, because they had absolutely zero for season 2. Nada! Like once you give your lead character what they want in season 1... well I guess you spend season 2 pretending they never really wanted that after all and then invent a whole bunch of plot nonsense and shove Mireille Enos in there for a good dose of Canadian Content. All that being said, I did background-watch both seasons, and background noise while playing on one’s tablet or making dinner or pondering the state of the universe is the closest one should allow this jizunk to come to one’s consciousness without risking deep resentment and subsequent DNFing.
Movies:
Brightburn - some Janice recommended this and I think the Janice’s exact phrase was, "if you're desperate, bored, and there's nothing else on” and, on one desperate, bored, and nothing-else-on eve, I'd say it lived up to its recommendation. Conceptually it wasn’t bad - it’s basically an anti-Superman story, i.e. what if the powerful kid who crash landed on Earth was totally evil - but there was no commensurate anti-Lex Luthor in film, meaning there was no one either clever or powerful enough to fight back, a plot hole which sucked it of drama for the last half. Remember that thing we learned in 8th grade that drama is conflict as opposed to drama is people running from conflict? Yeah, that. But perhaps it’s just soothing to know that if things get really dire, you’ll always have Brightburn.
The Kid Detective - ok look, I know this is a pretty mediocre movie about a kid who found success as a local detective when he was in middle school and the utter failure his life has become in his early 30s - played by Seth from The O.C. - and how he keeps trying to get back to that moment when he was actually something; the film plays out as a redemption story set against a present-tense murder investigation. That being said… the tone was pretty light and amusing and, while the story is nothing you haven't seen before, I gotta say I kinda liked the movie overall. It had enough depth to be involving, solid enough acting and writing to be watchable, and a polite 90 minute running time all of which combined to make it enjoyable to sit through.