Books:
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
So I actually read this locked-room mystery prior to the author’s previous (first I think) locked-room mystery then went back and read that first one, reviewed it, referenced this one, then realized, in all the excitement, that I hadn’t reviewed this one. Well no longer. So this book. This book is a locked-room mystery set at a wedding on an island off the coast of Ireland that goes back and forth between a crime in the present tense and four characters narrating from the 24 hours leading up to it. If you'd asked me at 20% in, I'd have said this was a character narrative with a vague mystery as the backdrop to give it drive. But that turned out to be incorrect because the author made what I initially thought was a cheap device - withholding the specific nature of the crime as well as the victim - into something kind of genius because as the backstories unfolded, I began to realize that actually anyone would've had a valid motive for doing anything to anyone else, meaning not knowing what had happened to whom made all the backstories a kind of big red herring because you weren’t sure which person’s story was the one providing the clues because you didn’t know what had ultimately happened. As with everything in the mystery genre, it can’t really be 100% about the mystery because, of course, you might see right through the author’s obfuscation efforts and I’d say even if you do, the book is still fun because there’s all kinds of relationship drama around the wedding itself that makes for a breezy read even if you nail the mystery off the bat. I enjoyed the writing; it had some plot twists I didn't see coming and, heck, if you're looking for something more in a contemporary Agatha Christie vein, you could do significantly worse than this book (like this for example or its even more atrocious sequel). The Hunting Party was this author’s first book (but my second of hers) and, now that you’ve read this review, it may be worth clicking through to it as, well, you’ll see why when you read it (I know, I’m such a tease)!
TV/Streaming:
The Indian Doctor (Seasons 1-3):
I'll say upfront that you really really need to be in the right mood for this show, a gentle moderately goofy moderately dramatic British series about an Indian doctor and his wife who move to a small mining town in Wales in the 1960s. Because if you're in the wrong mood, you'll be asleep in five seconds flat as the plots are predictable, the pace is slow, and, as it has that good-folks-at-heart-even-if-they're-mean-and-judgy-on-the-surface thing of many shows of this ilk, you really know where everything's going to wind up from the second it all begins. None of that really detracted from my watching all three seasons as I was in the right mood, and sometimes these sorts of British dramas - of which there are slews - hit that spot in that, because they're plotty enough to keep things moving while also not being particularly demanding, you can kind of just zone out the way one does while, say, on a hayride through Amish country for a few hours which could equally be either pleasurably soothing or mind-numbingly dull depending on your mood. The way this show plays out is that the main characters recur across the three five-episode seasons but with a different villain each time generating the plot. In the first season, it's the coal-mine manager up to no good with the miners; in the second, there's a preacher and a smallpox outbreak; in the third, it's bad rich people deceiving the townfolk for money. None of these are spoilers because it's not really that kind of show. You know in one hot second who the bad guys are and, mere moments later, where it's all going to go. The pleasure (or boredom depending) is in the unfolding, in, for example, the first season where you see the doctor and his wife dealing with and then, through force of kindness, pushing past exactly the kind of racism you're probably imagining right now playing out with characters you can equally already imagine - the snooty one, the curious one, the non-racist one, etc. - without even knowing much of anything about it. There are always subplots in there with some goofy characters, and, in the second season, a weird glimpse at our own recent COVID world as it deals with a smallpox outbreak and, despite this show being made well pre-COVID had amazingly identical notes to what everyone on the planet went through including all the social stuff around vaccines etc. that, because I'm assuming the writers pulled the story threads from historical data, shows how really nothing has changed which is sort of interesting in its way. I enjoyed it all despite also recognizing it was dull and predictable and it feels very old-school BBC, i.e. somewhat simple, ultimately kind, pretty G-rated, but entertaining enough and creating enough of a particular mood that can sometimes be just what you're looking for in that moment. If you're into this kind of thing and haven't seen this one, you'll probably be happy to tack it onto your list.
Ozark (Seasons 1-4):
Well I've totally enjoyed all prior seasons of this show and even though the fourth season got a little wobbly (more on that in a minute), it was wobbly in a way that all the prior ones were meaning it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of it. Though to be clear: this show survives entirely on the strength of its cast because a lesser cast with the don't-think-about-this-too-much-please and somewhat draggy plotting would relegate this series to, well, most things on Apple (like, oh, this or this or I could keep going but won’t) level. For those who haven't seen: the basic setup is Jason Bateman gets trapped in a money-laundering scheme for a drug cartel and the show tracks his and his family's efforts to squirm their way out. It’s more than that - there's plenty of character stuff especially with Laura Linney who IJHO is great in this show - but that's more or less the underlying plot of the four seasons. The wobbly part which was always there and is way more pronounced in the final season is that there are a number of moving parts which generate motives and actions all of which I'm totally sure made complete sense when the writers were sitting in the room explaining everything - "Well see P thinks X did Y but doesn't know that Z is happening and in the meantime A is out to screw over B which overlaps with Z and so X ends up D'ing instead of Y'ing and that's how K ends up J - get it?" - but, for moi at least, always generated a lot of wait, why is blah blah blah happening and why does blah blah blah want blah blah blah? It doesn't interfere with the show but it's definitely there the entire time. It makes the motives, already kinda hazy, even more so which is fine in some ways because the characters are at odds with each other and want different things yet it's often incredibly unclear why people are doing what they're doing plotwise. So if the weak point of this show is that the plot is based on complex and shifting motives that really aren't apparent even after one - me - has watched the whole thing, the strength is that it's really fun! The characters are fun and sharply written and as mentioned really well-acted; there's a lot of underlying character humor, and the writers manage to generate tension from, for the most part, people driving places and talking to each other, which is actually pretty impressive. I mean in many ways the season plots are incredibly simple but the obstacles are complicated because the obstacles are primarily other people and it's really pleasurable to watch everyone - Laura Linney especially but Julia Garner as well in a different way - manipulating everyone else. And for me the show completely paid itself off. I mean, sure, I can understand how people would want things to end differently (vagueness to avoid spoilering) but the final episode was very much in keeping with what came before and therefore if you enjoy the show enough to make it to the final season you can go in knowing the outcomes as written also completely cap off the show, i.e. you personally may want something different for some of the characters but you'll also recognize the writers didn't let you down at all. All wobbliness aside this show was totally entertaining and consistent from beginning to end so if you haven't seen it and enjoy the first few episodes, you'll probably enjoy the whole thing just like I did.
Movies:
Spider-Man: Far From Home (Marvel Universe #23) - Just to be clear “far from home” means “Europe” not “outer space,” “another dimension,” or “the future” or any of a million other things that might actually qualify as “far from home” as opposed to merely “not home” or maybe more accurately "Spider-Man: You Can Be Home Later Today If You Go To The Airport Right Now” and the fact that White Europe serves as the height of exoticism tells you everything you need to know about the Marvel Universe’s almost pathological grip on 1950s values and thought processes. I'm not gonna go into a racism/sexism rant like usual (well maybe, we'll see what happens later in the review) but this commitment to a version of America that certainly doesn't exist today, one in which people are somehow isolated from the world at large - as if there’s no such thing as a “phone” or “internet” - and where the world seems just so darn big, is really weird! Not least because Spidey's been to other planets to hardly mention time traveled so like how far away are we supposed to believe Europe is given it's in the same time period on the same planet?
Regardless, onto the plot which I understood a bit more of maybe than usual which I'm viewing as progress. It's equally possible, though, that the final half of the movie was all one plot and I figured it out and if so I'm very proud of me. The first 200,000,000 hours of this movie, as with so many of them, was crazy boring but it eventually became entertaining so there’s a good argument to be made for starting the movie in the middle, though that argument could also be made for the prior 22 Marvel movies I’ve seen so there’s that.
The setup is that there's some big fire demon thing (or something like that) attacking… somewhere and Jake Gyllenhaal swoops in to save the day in the hopes of becoming an Avenger. So to note: (a) being an Avenger is a thing now, (b) there are enough mega-powered people out there for S.H.I.E.L.D. - that would be the Avenger coordinating agency headed by Sam Jackson who I think isn't an Avenger yet somehow survives everything so I'm not clear (maybe being head of something called S.H.I.E.L.D. is all it takes to be, in fact, shielded) - to pick and choose between them which (c) means the only way to audition future Avengers is through mega-monsters invading Earth and destroying things which (d) I guess is also a thing now and (e) isn’t Jake Gyllenhaal offer-only? Did I miss a beat here? I mean yes, for sure but beyond that - and I'm not going to go into great detail here (maybe) because it leads up to a major plot spoiler - I'll take it as a given that, like in Batman's Gotham (sacrilege I know to mention a D.C. comic city in a Marvel review PLEASE FORGIVE ME UNIVERSE MARVEL OR OTHERWISE), weird monsters now invade the planet. I can live with that. And thus the planet needs an agency of some kind - that would be S.H.I.E.L.D. which is so annoying to type with the all caps and periods after every letter that I'm going to refer to it as Mary for the rest of the review - to organize protection. Okay, sure makes sense. But why does anyone want to do that? I mean Spidey, who makes a great point of hiding his identity due, IJHO, to the frisson of excitement that hidden nature adds to his cosplay, is basically flying around constantly almost getting killed and for what? Well someone at some point in writing this movie must have realized that there wasn't much motivation here other than some kind of notional idea of hero-as-self-sacrificer thus they tossed in personal threat to Spidey’s friends fine. But I mean not just Spidey but all the Avengers. Why are they doing anything? And why does Jake Gyllenhaal want to be part of it? Or let me phrase this differently: if at some point down the road, megaheroes decide they don't want to risk their lives to save Earth, what's the plan then?
I mean, Mary entirely relies on the existence of a bunch of self-sacrificing heroes to step in and save us all the time oh and just fingers crossed the mega part of their heroness doesn't turn out to be megalomania which, given that that’s the central identity of all the baddies, is, um, not super unlikely. It seems to me that Mary and Earth would be better off NOT relying on the good and self-sacrificing nature of individuals but rather designing some other kind of system that didn't involve any of that at all and in fact would serve as a backstop in case the so-called heroes got angry or sad or, I don't know, developed a mental illness of some kind and turned on the planet because like what then, Mary?
In any event, Spidey and pals go to Venice for some kind of class trip where Sam Jackson hands him a pair of Iron Man's special glasses which gives him total control over Iron Man's AI and all Iron Man stuff or whatever out there. And we're now getting to the part where Mary should really have a rethink about relying on superheroes because Peter Parker, despite having saved the planet numerous times, has impostor syndrome - don’t feel bad, Oprah had it too! - which manifests as not only believing the world would be better served with Jake Gyllenhaal having the glasses but also with being incapable of asking Zendaya out for a date, i.e. he's the same sort of defanged non-toxic mmmmm yummy scrummy, edible and yet incredibly pasty White male of the type that made Leo a megastar back in the Titanic days and which, apparently given the boxoffice of the Spidey movies, is still a desired archetype a quarter-century or so later.
This unbelievable amount of gibberish basically results in two very exciting events which I can't even bear to call spoilers: (1) Zendaya will SO GO OUT with Spidey and (2) Zendaya knows he's Spidey and why is he still hiding it? Why is it still a thing? Hiding his identity at this point, i.e. the one where everyone of any meaning in his life knows who he is, has the same ring of false modesty of a karaoke-r who comes across a piano at a dinner party and is “forced” to play and sing their quote unquote unplugged rendition of Uptown Funk. Without going into the details of the why and how for spoiler reasons, the movie, after decades of dialogue during which no one seemed to age but me, eventually arrived at the part I liked which was basically a lot of explosions and that weird hand-to-hand combat thing these movies always seem to come down to no matter how many powers people have. And of course, because we're culturally stuck in the '50s, Zendaya is essentially reduced to a damsel in distress to be saved by heroic White male which feels like a step backwards, not just because it is, but because in the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon reference to Little Nell tied to the train tracks (the progenitor of all televised/streamed/filmed distressed damsels), at least a few non-Whites were involved in her rescue though admittedly one was a moose and the other a raccoon but still...
I will note (or re-note in a way (I think - I'm too lazy to read my own prior reviews)) that Spidey's powers, if they were anything other than totally generic beyond shooting webbing out of his wrists, are literally at this point completely interchangeable with, well pick anyone from the Marvel Universe - he’s suited, punch-y, and Parkouring all over the place just like the rest of them - and I will ask either for the first time or once again (see laziness above): what exactly is Spiderman or Spider-Man? By which I mean Iron Man has his, well vibranium fine, Ironish suit, and the rest of them just seem basically iterations of the same kind of suit and power, but with Spidey, there's a spider reference. Surely someone would think to make use of that beyond the iconic trapezey webbing, right? Why do all the superheroes do everything the exact same way but with different costumes and different White males? And how come Scarjo's Black Widow's not a spider?
Whatever, maybe I just need to go far from home (read: the other side of my couch) to find out.