Books:
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
I didn't realize this was a novella when I started reading and probably wouldn’t have started at all if I’d noticed since novellas are not my favorite form as, for me, getting into a book is usually the hardest part and so once I'm in I want to stay in. That being said, I’m glad I didn’t notice because I kind of couldn't put this book down and thought it was ultimately the perfect length; the author had a story she wanted to tell and a very specific way she wanted to tell it driving to an ending she wanted to get to and when she was done, she was done. The book is a deeply strange and very particularly written piece of fiction about - I'm about to be vague because the book can definitely be spoilered by going into too many plot details - a woman dealing with a specific incident over a short (few days) timespan. Did I deliver on my promise of vague? While the story is interesting, what really makes the book work is the way it's told which is, as per the title, like a fever dream. You're trapped inside the head of the narrator who's trying to remember the details of the event and (again, trying to avoid spoilering) the manner of address is highly confusing until you begin to understand what's going on. To the author's credit, she managed to create narrative drive partly through the story itself (it’s not a mystery but you, the reader, know something happened though not what or how and that all gets unpacked as the book progresses) and partly through the narrative device she chose which, again, I won't spoiler but which was tightly integrated with the story she was telling. Look, if this book had been novel-length, I think it would've been difficult because of all the obtuseness but at novella length, where the author meted out just enough information after just the right amount of confusion, I thought it was just really interesting and, though somewhat difficult initially, worth the effort.
Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2) by Rachel Caine
This is the second in the Stillhouse Lake series about a woman and her kids on the run from her ex plus the all the people he’s enlisted to help him (for reasons I won’t spoiler). I really loved the first book because it was pure beach read action page-turning fun and this sequel was as good as the first. I’m definitely not going to discuss the plot - I guess that’s a trend for today’s Media Report - because there’s no way to discuss it without spoilering what happened in the first book. I’ll just say that this book picks up directly after the first one and was totally page-turny with a good, driving plot, well-enough written that you’re not thrown by the atrocious prose typical of this genre, and a solidly good ending. What the author does really well is go in whole-hog with using modern social media stuff in extremely menacing and threatening ways. She shows in somewhat frightening specifics how you really don’t need to be a hacker or even particularly computer-savvy to be an internet threat and manages to create a lot of tension from how people manipulate information for their own ends. Also, unlike with others in the thriller/mystery genre, her characters behave like normal people; I mean they're not superheroes, just driven and to an extent trained as a result of what happened in their pasts but they’re still just people trying to make it through a terrible situation and behaving in ways that make sense. I flew through this book and, given the ending, I'm not 100% sure where the third book in the series is going (the author wrote five before she died the other year) but I'm into it. If you're looking for a popcorn thriller, this series certainly hits on all counts so far.
TV/Streaming:
White Lotus (Season 1):
This is the Mike White show about rich people on vacation in Hawaii and that logline is about as deep as this show gets. On the one hand, I found it to be totally watchable as in I watched the whole thing; on the other, it's about absolutely nothing. NOTHING! It's so weird. It felt like someone hired a bunch of really good actors to play some loosely connected witty dialogue scenes and, yeah, that's it. On a scene by scene basis, there's some fun to be had for that reason. But beyond that, there's zero. Like there's a whole thing involving Jennifer Coolidge and neediness and spa treatments and her mother's ashes and those things were certainly addressed, sometimes amusingly, and beyond that… I don’t know. There's a whole significantly less successful and more meaningless and ill-thought-out-than-the-rest-of-the-storylines plot involving newlyweds but in a really stupid way, like he's an oblivious selfish dick and she's, well I have no idea, none nor do I know what any of it meant at the end. There's another plot involving a rich White family and a non-White friend of the daughter (and are we to assume because she’s non-White she’s also non-rich? no idea) and a lot of amusingly written stuff about current cultural issues that, once again, goes absolutely nowhere, in part because "closeup on non-White person's face looking cryptically unhappy or another indiscernible something" doesn't really tell me anything about, you know, anything including why the non-White person plus another non-White person (avoiding spoilering here) did something together nor why they did what they did after doing the something. Meaninglessness dressed up in implied meaning via cryptic looks is still meaningless. What is just flat-out bad and tells you Mike White had no clue what he was doing with this show was the final 20 minutes which contains several events - for those who’ve seen: the bathtub, the teenage son, the newlyweds wrapup - I won't spoil but which were just so stupid and desperate in a way because no one who truly understood their own creation would've kept in story contrivances that dumb and unrealistic even in a show that pressed the bounds of reality (for commentary I think not for style). And even weirder, and I'm hard-pressed to think if I've seen this in a show before, almost any episode could've been the first episode, not because there weren't story linkages between them but because so little happened that what came before didn't matter - you could've inferred everything you needed without ever having seen any prior episode. Literally, the show could just as easily have started with episode 6 and gone on from there; they almost could've aired in any order. Unfortunately for the viewer, referencing what happened in the previous week's episode isn't the same as plot progression. So, there you go. If don't find the acting and Mike White's dialogue enough to carry you along, you will likely hate/be bored out of your mind by this show and resent sitting through something that adds up to nothing. If instead you like watching some good actors do quippy scenework plus Molly Shannon at her best and with zero expectations of it cohering into anything, then maybe.
RuPaul’s Drag Race (Season 13):
If you've see one Drag Race, you've seen them all, meaning they are highly highly contestant-dependent, and this season was meh in that regard. For the four of you who haven’t seen or heard of this show: this is a competition reality series for drag queens (though they’ve de-gendered it in certain ways recently) where the competition is more or less doing skits or other constructed airquotes comic bits, dressing up, and being judged for all that with the bottom two having to battle it out (“lip sync for your life”) in order to stay in. Essentially it’s a personality competition and, in early seasons, more Project Runway-ish as the contestants had to craft a lot of their clothes. But, over time, the show has become more and more of a fashion show (I guess) which I find super fucking boring because you're just watching people wear things they've bought and how is that any different than being at Walgreens? Really, the last half of each episode is just people wearing clothes for the theme of that week and being sniped at by the judges who are very predictable and repetitive. The challenges - that would be the airquoted comic bits above - are generally dumb and, when scripted, which is most of the time, horribly written. One would think at this point in the show’s success, they would be able to afford actual writers, but it seems not (or maybe they actually think it’s funny? I mean they can’t can they?) because it’s all just the most boringly obvious old-school campy nonsense over and over and over, like how many hours of Dallas/Dynasty, Baby Jane etc. references and sexualized versions of [insert classic film/musical here] is one Janice meant to put up with for Cher’s sake? All of which means if the contestants aren’t quick-witted/clever or completely insane - and trust me, there’s plenty of that - the show just sinks. I don't really know who's casting this, but they've definitely ceased casting for wit in these later seasons which, for me, has meant Drag Race has gone from prime entertainment to background noise. It’s just become all so predictable and in a show where the only differentiator is personality, well the casting just needs to be at a completely different level than it is. It feels like its been coasting on its success for the past few years, and this season was a slight improvement over the last couple because there were at least some funny people in it. But I don't know - if you're new to this show or just grazing, I'd say pick an earlier season like season 5. I like to believe at some point I’ll stop watching because it’s beginning to feel kind of homeworky but even as I’m typing that, my brain is going, “Well who knows maybe things will pick up next season” so who am I fooling - I guess I’m going to keep watching followed by coming here to complain which actually sounds just fine.
Movies:
Clue - Remember the movie version of the game Clue? Its gimmick was you pick your own ending (or, no, is that right (too lazy to Google!))? Maybe it was that there were 3 endings and you'd have to pay to watch the movie 3 times to see them all? Some brilliant marketing ploy along those lines. It had one of those all non-stars casts, i.e. one headlined by Tim Curry, and my hazy memory from having seen at some point was that it was a crazy dull Murder by Death wannabe about a bunch of barely recognizable celebrities in period costume, all being blackmailed by a mysterious someone, a death, the Clue board made real, and an enormous amount of talking at high speed in what I believe was meant to be comedic banter. It was, deservedly, a widely panned bomb. But then apparently something happened to it over the eons since its original release which is that it became this kind of Rocky Horror-ish (Tim Curry again!) cult classic thing where people were rediscovering it as being so bad it was good or, alternatively, genuinely good but misunderstood, like the writers had out-clevered all of humanity into making everyone think the movie was terrible but we all just needed the passage of time to catch up with its genius, which to me sounded a lot like my original assessment of its awfulness was correct but, I thought, can it really be worse than watching Swing Shift twice though I admit that's a fairly low bar? Oh and there were all these magazine articles paying lavish homage to the whole thing and people having Clue watching parties and I was like WTF and then I was like well am I gonna succumb to media peer pressure and then I was like I guess I am because I’m watching it and then I was like... whaaaa? I mean, okay, it's this dumb campy-ish kinda very PG mystery in which all the rooms and weapons on the Clue board are referenced multiple times. And yeah. There ya go. It’s exactly as boring as I remember and not in a campy way but in an "ooooh I hope for Madeline Kahn's sake this wasn't her last film" kind of way. I don't even know if I can criticize it - I mean of COURSE I can but it’s just so boring that it’s putting me asleep just thinking about it. The film feels like it's literally the first and only draft when Hasbro or whoever coughed up the cash to make a movie out of Clue (unless GF some studio actually licensed the rights (more Googling laziness!)). So if this is on your OMG I heard it's hilarious must watch list, I suggest you move it to your OMGzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz list instead.