Books:
The Poison Song (The Winnowing Flame #3) by Jen Williams
This third and final book in a fantasy series about an ancient menace returning to wipe out a planet with the defenders mostly wiped out themselves is a total waahwaah ender. In the second book, I wasn't entirely sure where the author was going which kept it more interesting but the answer is here now: nowhere. Aside from the unbelievable amount of verbiage about absolutely nothing - I mean we're in the final book of a fantasy trilogy here yet at 80% there are pages devoted to characters flirting while having a picnic then at 90% the book stops all plot action so those characters can go have sex for seemingly endless pages - really the cardinal sin of this book is its waahwaahness, by which I mean and without spoilering: book 2 set up a mystery quest to explore the origins of some bit of magic which ends in a total waahwaah, a nothing, a bit of factoid that, yeah, I guess resolves the mystery but in the most boring possible way with no implications for what came before nor do any of the discoveries go anywhere i.e. total and abject waahwaah. Or a huge chunk of this book is devoted to one of the characters exploring powers (vague to avoid spoilering) and, yeah, complete and utter waahwaah in that we spend pages and pages all of which add up to zero and have zero impact on the plot. In fact, that's kind of the definition of a waahwaah, like if you removed all the stuff that led up to the dull payoff would the present-tense plot be affected? In these books, no. I mean if you're sending characters on quests and whatnot to explore what’s really the only magic in the entire series, surely they should discover something on those quests that will be of use in the major plots or drive them in an unexpected direction or reveal something deeper or literally anything other than the author completely wasting the reader's time by doing the equivalent of publishing the Wikipedia of her fantasy world and writing an entry on "the origins of [insert anything here]" and, yeah, that's it. It was all so boring that I found myself skimming in the hopes of finding some plot, some action, some anything other than people doing and thinking in book 3 the exact same things they were doing/thinking in book 1. There was no progression here, just repetition interrupted by page-wasting quests that went absolutely nowhere. The book is filled with repetition as in we watch a scene from one character's POV then later listen to them retell it to others, the whole thing, not just skip to the part where the characters react to the story or we go with one character and see something then pages later watch another character make the exact same discovery. It felt, at a certain point, that the author was writing just to fill pages but had no grip whatsoever on her story because she had no story. This entire book - and it was long - could easily have been, like a novella; honestly I would be probably be less critical if the series had been a duology because even though the problems with it, the waahwaahness, would still have been present, at least it wouldn't have wasted as much of my time. Additionally the antagonists in this series make no sense. There's more than one but neither of them behaves in a comprehensible way making all the scenes with them incredibly tedious. The author set up a lopsided war, fine that's a common fantasy trope where the baddies have more power than the goodies. But the author failed to set up any plausible way for the goodies to win other than random luck and equally set up a situation where the baddies were fragmented so it became unclear why at least one of them was fighting at all and, honestly, the other one's motives didn't make much sense either. Again vague to avoid spoilering - though you really don't need the details - you have motiveless antagonists and protagonists who can't do all that much and whose quests, which really should've brought them power or clarity or ideas, simply brought waahwaah instead. While I liked the first two, I honestly wish I hadn't bothered to start this series as the author, rather than paying off and building on what she setup, just lets it dribble away for pages on end. Waahwaah.
TV/Streaming:
Glow Up (Season 3):
Look I know this competition reality show in which makeup artists - that would be MUAs in the lingo apparently - battle it out with foundation and eyeliner for the big prize is really not well done and often boring and, in prior seasons, downright depressing due to the contestants clearly being in over their heads (which is normally totally fun to watch but not when they’re eighteen or so with no experience like many of the contestants in this series - then again, I don’t like any kid competition reality shows because somehow watching children fail just doesn’t do it for me), yet somehow I background-noise-kinda-enjoyedish-it this season though don’t get me wrong, it remains pretty low-rent. The setup is young MUAs, some working makeup counters, some in school, all with Insta are tasked with a professional-type challenge (like doing period makeup judged by the head MUA on The Crown) followed by a theme-based longer challenge where the two losers of the previous challenge get 15 minutes knocked off their time and the two losers of the main challenge go head-to-head in doing a timed challenge - "symmetrical gradient eyes" for example - with the loser of that going home. It's one of those shows where the judges have their shtick, like one has a look I'd call kinda Tinky Winky via Charlie Brown but with bleached eyebrows and handlebar mustache and the other has her catchphrase (that would be "ding dong" as a compliment not an insult/snack item) and examines the contestants' work through a Sherlock Holmesian elephant-head-sized magnifying glass, and where a lot of it is really pretty dull and yet... see the thing about makeup, especially in the big conceptual challenges, is that it's not at all clear at the beginning how it's going to wind up. And I guess that served as (barely) enough interest plus after watching for a while it becomes really strange to think about being that obsessed with makeup. Like it's such a particular art form (I guess) of putting stuff on face to make face seem like some other form of face because face left to its own devices isn't optimally delivering the proper message for a particular circumstance, i.e. face needs bigger eyelashes, more contouring, and orange eyelids to deliver "fierce" and, well I mean.. isn't it kind of weird that we think that way? Will face one day evolve into being able to colorize and reshape itself on its own like the way squids can recolorize their skin (or whatever it's called)? Will we one day be able think ourselves into glitter lips? Oh, what the future holds! For a glimpse of it (maybe, if you're me) there's this show (kinda).
Schitt's Creek (Seasons 1-2):
This series, a sitcom about an oblivious super rich family that loses all their money and is forced to move to a podunk town they bought at some point and live in a motel there, was one of those wildly popular underground discoveries from a few years ago during which I watched season 1 and thought "meh" then stopped. I mean it was fine, amusing in spots, but really repetitive with the rich people not understanding basic stuff (like laundry or whatever) and the townspeople portrayed somewhat as eye-rolling (or not) doofus hillbillies. It was okay but nothing I was particularly interested in continuing as it seemed like I'd be getting the same thing nonstop for 6 seasons and one felt like enough. But whevs, I decided to give a re-go by starting up with season 2 and, as it turns out, as a background noise comedy, it's perfectly entertaining and I'll likely finish the whole thing. I believe my initial mistake was giving it undivided attention when really, for me at least, this show was most entertaining while doing something else. I'll admit it, despite the deliberately OTT characters and simplistic nature of the comedy setup - things like "the rich son gets a retail job" - it kinda grew on me. And oh WHATEVER I realize it grew on like 50 billion people long before it grew on me but there you have it, it managed to charm my cold heart in the end. Yeah, there's no real story to focus on, just broad plot setup, so each episode is basically all about quips and delivery, but they're only 20 minutes each and have either gotten better with time or, alternatively, I've become less critical with time (maaaaaaaaaaaybe?) but in any event if you're looking for a gentle silly fluff sitcom, this one's pretty entertaining.
Movies:
Eternals (Marvel Universe #26) - This film is the absolute 100%-by-a-mile winner of the Most Insanely Boring Action Film To Not Be DNF'ed Out Of Sheer Stubbornness Re: Writing These Marvel Reviews and I'm hoping this reward is literally never given out again. Look, sure, let's not pigeonhole anyone (like I'm about to) but - and I'm sure Marvel thought it was being cool and edgy here - maybe Marvel should think about hiring directors who can, you know, direct action and who like, you know, action rather than people in various rooms conversating with each other for 96% of the movie and, yeah, maybe the person who directs films in the range of, on one end, crazy boring to, on the other, slow-but-I-liked-it-anyway - like, say, the director of the very slow The Rider or the so-slow-I-couldn't-imagine-watching-it Frances McDormand Oscar winner Nomadland (those Oscar voters do love their slow films) - shouldn't get the job. But that's who did get the job and I'll tell you this movie was so boring that not only did it take me about a month to finish it because, did I mention, IT WAS SO FUCKING BORING but I found myself squeaking out enraged mental NOs every time I pressed play. I can't promise my review will be more entertaining than the film, but I can guarantee it will be shorter and certainly much more resentfully written.
For once I can summarize the plot but that's only because (a) there was so little of it and (b) it's now firmly entrenched in Marvel's lazy writer trend of simply using the plot twist of the past 5 or so movies - and not even a reimagined version but literally the exact same thing - and doing it again - it's so much faster to write a movie that way! You know, without having to think of anything original. I noticed this before and so I'm not counting the "plot twist" Marvel's been using nonstop as a spoiler meaning this movie is yet another one where OMFG the leads discover they're actually working for the bad guy.
Let me delineate all the ways this movie was boring which, as far as I'm concerned, is going to serve as both plot summary and review. So you have all of these Eternals - that would be these immortal beings sent to planets as both (kind of) evil-thing-battlers and midwives to planet-busting OH WHATEVER WHO CARES, they're immortal and there are like 10 of them and what atrocious writer and/or studio thought it was a good idea to introduce 10 brand new characters - who are exactly the same btw because that's what they were designed to be - in a movie... oh yeah, Marvel, right.
Here are the plots the Marvelous writers came up with for these thrilling new characters. You have your immortal-loving-a-mortal tired plot (a la Vampire Diaries or actually more or less any vampire movie made after the period Dracula transitioned from being pasty, fangy, and scary to pasty, broody, and hot (and fangy but only if you beg for it) ). You have your immortals-adoring-emotional-fragile-humanity but oh so saddened by our penchant to kill everyone LIKE THEY'RE DOING ANYTHING DIFFERENT BTW since killing things is their entire job. And, yeah, that’s it for plot. To give you a sense of how badly done everything in this movie is, that beat, the one where sad immortal gave tech to humans only to discover they/we used it to... [pearls clutched by an immortal Eternal]... kill, is revealed as follows:
Some of the 2000 new characters, trying to get the whole group together for the plot reason mentioned earlier the one Marvel used in the last five films, announce blah blah blah will never join us, at which point we cut to 1945 Hiroshima where a weepy blah blah blah "gives up on humans" because they/we misused the tech that blah blah blah gave us (which doesn't speak much to blah blah blah's observational skills over the eons I’d like to note) at which point we cut to the present day where blah blah blah is happily living with his (their? is blah blah blah a gender?) husband and son and the other Eternals show up and after like five seconds of acting like blah blah blah won't join them, he does and off he/they goes. Blah is right, i.e. so blah it doesn’t even merit the extra two blahs.
Additionally everyone in this movie has some real unaddressed mental health issues, which would be fine if they did something exciting with them like taking over the universe rather than just hanging around moping. I mean basically it's watching a 10some of eternal superpowered passive aggressive co-dependents who, despite having been on Earth for all of humanity, have clearly never been to therapy even though they watched humans invent therapy. The movie takes the characters places that are the really bad emotional spots of teens, one of which, sigh, ends in suicide (really, Marvel?). But they're boring teens - I mean at least Scarjo was a surly teen - with insanely generic and dull teen problems and I guess never outgrowing is a problem of being Eternal/immortal I guess? So the plot of this $3000000000000 movie is based on things like: I'm into you and you won't admit it! And: I'm small and not on the inside I mean I’m actually small boo hoo hoo! And: I said I don't WANT TO. And: I'm awesome, no really, I'm so cool, right? And: It never ends (that would be the "eternal" part), all these endless idiotic soap-opera secrets a la blahblahblahblahblahblah (no relation to blahblahblah btw) did something horrible and is keeping it from everyone oh dearie! And: unbelievably boring talking about nonstop about NOTHING which would be boring in any movie but feels like a cardinal sin in a superhero action movie if such movies can be guilty of sins cardinal or otherwise and theologians feel free to chime in.
What's shocking is that surely the people at Marvel who never read one single draft of this script understood that people go to these movies for action. Yes, the dialogue bloat is insane but, in my 26 or so film investment that's only for the first 50 million hours of the film and the second half is usually just wall to wall action sequences. Marvel understood that, as long as it all ended with a crazy spectacle, people might be willing to forgive the boredom that came before. Not here. Everyone talks, what little action there is was clearly crafted as the final for an undergrad film animation senior project (sadly said senior only got a C) and, let's face it, it's not like these are riveting characters in gripping situations that anyone gives a crap about. Instead it's cardboard characterizations talking about plot and really whatever.
This is unbearable to keep writing about though in fairness to all involved marginally less unbearable than actually sitting through it, which I’m thinking means the Oscar voters will love it.