Books:
American Character by Colin Woodard
This is a nonfiction book that looks at the quintessential American conflict of individual-over-group vs group-over-individual and how that ongoing cultural clash - which we see playing out nonstop in Red/Blue State political issues - is actually the very thing that makes American democracy totally unique in the world. I’ve read other books by this author and I’d say this one is pretty friggin’ great (along with his other genius book that some Janice rec’ed to me years ago, American Nations). This is not a politics book at all; rather it’s a history book that looks at how this individual/group yo-yo was embedded in our Constitution and how zig-zagging back and forth between these extremes, e.g. Tammany Hall/Standard Oil zig to New Deal zag to whatever zig we’re in now which will (knock wood or not depending on your politics) lead to a future zag, is part of our essential nature. I found it fascinating - and in some ways soothing - to see the underlying historical context for our conservative vs. progressive perspective and how frequently all this has been repeated before and was therefore kind of glued to every page of this book as a result.
Charlie M by Brian Freemantle
This is a spy book from the '70s and you know what? It's really difficult to read things like this post-woke! Bearing in mind that, as a Janice, I was basically born woke, this book isn't a look back at a sexist/racist time like, say, the TV show Mad Men and its spawn, but was rather written in a James Bond-y time where women exist solely to disrobe for men 20 years older - you know the type, they’re 21 and acting all cool about having casz sex with their 40 year old married CIA operative lover but underneath, because they’re women and women are incapable of having sex without emotions DUH, they’re really all pine-y and in love but don’t express it because they know they’ll be dumped because men hate emotions - it’s all so difficult being ‘70s arm candy! So there’s that. Plus the writing sucked. I guess if you’re a cis-male straightriarch who’s enamored of women’s bodies, highly focused on how what other men think of the women you date reflects back on you, and also happen to love mediocre spy books, this one might be your winner.
TV/Streaming:
Gangs of London (Season 1):
This is a British crime show, in English, and I remember noticing it when it came out because there were so many articles written about how no one watching it England could understand anything anyone said without subtitles because the accents were so thick. That and a bunch of lukewarm non-Janice reviews was enough for me! So let’s just get the main problem out of the way first: the writers of this series were clearly tackling story and issues way beyond their collective skill level. The plot is basically about what happens when a high-end criminal enterprise starts crumbling and scrambles to sustain itself while figuring out what went wrong even as other criminals are moving in, and the whole thing is duct-taped together with a wobbly mix of Justice-League-villain self-declaratory speeches - “You dared try to cross me, ME?!?” shouts gang leader to a squirming pleading someone he’s dangling off a roof by one ankle before dropping said someone - a lot of confusing word salad about how everything’s interconnected while actually not really connecting much of anything (or the flip: making simple things - this group hates that group - insanely and inexplicably confusing), and gaping plot holes patched over with operatic fight sequences and a hot lead - which admittedly served as a highly functional patch for this Janice because I actually made it through the whole thing. And actually, story and character stuff aside, the show was watchable because (a) let me repeat: hot lead and (b) the action sequences were so grandiosely and cartoonishly over the top that I kind of loved them and found myself looking forward to them. I mean there’s one episode midway through the season that is just a nonstop balls-to-the-wall crazy-ass hour-long gunfight that I thought was thoroughly entertaining even if it was total nonsense. Look, some episodes are kinda draggy, especially early on, and I wouldn’t exactly say the story is the most original thing on Earth, but if you like some non-’70s-eye-candy kicking people in the face and diving balletically behind objects to avoid a hail of bullets well I’ll just say I watched every episode and will be watching season 2 when it comes out.
Betty (Season 1):
This is a comedy about - I’m nervous to put a gender here but I’m doing it! - female skateboarders that was much more entertaining than I thought it would be based on the first episode, which was pretty muddled with not much story and characters who were so low-key I found them tough to connect with because I couldn’t figure out why they were doing the little they were doing. But somehow in the second episode, that started working for whatever reason and the show grew on me. It's shot verite and sometimes borders on meandering, but the characters are pretty funny and the world is definitely something I haven't seen before. This is more a show about tone and character than plot (I mean, the plots are things like “I lost my backpack and there was weed in it.”). But the 6 or so episodes end up being very amusing and I found myself clicking with the characters. And let us not discount one other key thing, which is that this show, no matter what the characters are undergoing, maintains a very bright and positive energy about it and that combined with a 23 minute runtime made it all pleasureable enough for me.
Hollywood:
I’ve been suckered into the Ryan Murphy sinkhole several times before and each time has ended the same way: with me fucking hating him and feeling really bad that I’m such a forgiving and delightful human being that I give him chance after chance despite his only proving to be a total disappointment every single time and, like, is there a support group for this? So this miniseries is yet another Ryan Murphy abomination though one that thoroughly exceeded my expectations in that I didn’t think it was possible to take everything that’s going in the world right now re: BLM and social acceptance and ratchet it up to a level of cringeworthiness normally exclusive to one’s own humiliations like, say, that thing where you’re with some close friends and you tell them you’ve set up a separate ringtone solely to identify when your close friends call and one of them holds their phone under the table and clandestinely calls you right that second and your phone rings and everyone learns, without anyone saying a word, that that person’s not on that list. Cough. Anyway, Ryan Murphy’s cardinal sin and the reason for all my fully-earned resentment is that he’s pretty good at setting things up and getting a Janice engaged in a show and has absolutely zero clue how to pay anything off. He pays off NOTHING. EVER! It almost feels deliberate at this point though I know it’s actually just a total lack of talent. He’s shown this over and over. Every single thing he writes degenerates into a complete waste of time because he’s taking you absolutely nowhere. Remember those early episodes of Glee? And how great they were? And how much they established characters and situations that looked really fun to invest in for years? And then remember how all those early episodes and all that setup got erased somehow and the show just became one long repetitive polemic about some social issue being spouted by caricatures who changed week to week as needed to do whatever Ryan Murphy needed them to do for an episode because he couldn’t figure out how to just tell a sustaining story? Remember all that? And how about American Horror Story, the series where he establishes a story and then just throws in a bunch of side characters and tone for 11 episodes instead of, you know, paying off anything he set up? Yeah, that thing. Anyway, this show is basically that plus a heaping side of cringe. The show is set in the late ‘30s and is, I think, supposed to be in the spirit of one of those “barn and an attic full of costumes” movies where a team of creatives overcomes all the obstacles to make their amazing movie and wins Oscars despite those odds. The problem beyond the usual Ryan Murphy problems of cartoon characters in plots that go nowhere is that, tacked on to all this is an embarrassingly revisionist version of Hollywood in which it all it takes is gumption plus a commitment to one’s art to overcome systemic racism, sexism, and sexuality-ism (?), like if you just believe in yourself enough the world will believe in you too! Really? Tell that to George Floyd, you fucking tool! I rage-watched to the end and if you’re into that, well here you go.
Movies:
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - I watched this a few weeks ago and have absolutely no memory of the plot or anything that happened in it. I think I liked it though. Does that qualify as a review? Hang on, let me turn the crank attached to the side of my head and put the meat computer on manual and see if I can’t pull out more. Tom Cruise… other actors I’d seen before (was Emily Blunt-or-Mortimer in it? No, that was the one with the swipe-y air screens that irritatingly still don’t exist)… what was the Ghost Protocol again? Something about a mission ordered by the President that would later be disavowed - and just a total sidebar while I scramble to remember the rest of what happened: if an assassination of a billionaire, the blowing-up of some foreign military site, or the hacking of some Chinese nuclear power plant occurred, is there anyone in existence who would actually go, “Well the President said it wasn’t us, so I guess the assassins must’ve just been a bunch of private citizen rogue vigilantes after all” I mean why does plot trope even exist I’m saying. Okay, enough stalling. Well I can’t remember much more but I think Tom Cruise has a wife/girlfriend at this point in the series whom he’s trying to protect; I’m fairly certain he escaped from somewhere - Moscow? - with a lot of mask-peeling-off involved as with all of these movies; there were definitely explosions, huge insane action sequences on motorized vehicles with hair blowing gloriously in the wind, and, well, isn’t that all enough for a Mission Impossible movie? I’m just gonna go on faith here and say it was for me.
The Farewell - This is a highly-lauded-by-non-Janices movie about a Chinese-American twadult who goes back to China to say goodbye to her dying grandmother where there’s all kinds of heritage-reconnecting, familial secrets, and wacky demands around the funeral in what I think was supposed to be a feel-good family movie but was essentially just another repackaging of My Big Fat [insert country] [insert event]. Those types of movies are… fine. I guess. And this was a perfectly mediocre version of the genre which follows the same template: Person X, who grew up embarrassed and stifled by their foreign (or, if American, generally either Southern or hillbilly though occasionally lower-middle-class Boston is involved) upbringing which Person X has since put entirely behind them in their escape to a big urban environment where they’ve been freed from the shackles of [insert parent culture] traditionalism - usually demonstrated by having a gay friend - before being forced to return to said upbringing for said event where everyone is highly culture-bound, looks askance at anything outside of cultural norms, and are just so quirky, especially uncles though also Lithuanian-disco-garbed male cousins, plus there’s usually some resentful hidebound sibling who never escaped hanging around to cause present-tense problems for Person X and, after much hijinks around the concealment of Person X’s current life - though sometimes gay friend is compelled to show up for an emotional or hair emergency which results in all kinds sexuality hiding/shaming - discovers that everyone’s less judgy than Person X thought they’d be ending with Person X heading back to the big city but with a new appreciation for the past they’d spent so much of their life trying to run from. If the mood for that template ever strikes you, this movie is a perfectly fine recapitulation of it.