Books:
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
This novel, which I thought was going to be kind of like a narrowcast retelling of a sliver of the Iliad but if only, and I don't even like Greek mythology stuff but really to repeat if only! So I guess a more accurate way of describing this book is that based on (a) title, (b) blurb, and (c) a few non-Janice reviews is that it sells itself as being about the battle of Troy told from the POV of Achilles and his lover/bf/hubby Patroclus. And for the first, say 10ish%, I was really into this book and was thinking I was in for a good one because, while the writing was just okay, I liked how the author told the story the way it might have been told back in the day i.e. as if the Greek Gods were real. Achilles' mother is a God, for example, and there's a whole little side story about how Achilles' father managed to nab her and then later she shows up in the story. In that sense, it had the same Greek campfire story feel as the (limited) Homer that I've read (skimmed). There were two overwhelming problems, however, that transformed this book from "hey I think I like this one" to 35%-in irritated DNF. First, nothing happens and the reason nothing happens is that this book is not, in fact, the story of a battle or war or anything, but is rather about a spindly twink swooning for an equally hairless non-spindly muscle dolphin. And... that's it. There are endless pages with Patroclus describing his love and attraction to Achilles and really unless those romantic descriptions are in text form with a few inadvertently hilarious autocorrects - “I love everything about you, especially your nipples. // Not nipples, NIPPLES! // NIPPLES! // DIMPLES!” - I have zero interest in reading about someone doing nothing more than describing their feelings especially because... second, there's zero character ANYWHERE in this book. The entire book is written in first-person Patroclus and the problem with that and I'd say many many many many many first-person books is that, because the narrator is spending so much time describing other people, external situations, the environment, etc. the narrator can begin to feel like a cipher, like they're simply an authorial mouthpiece with a lot of "I" and "me" tossed in to make it first person but with zero character. Examples of what I mean: Why is Patroclus into Achilles other than that he's hot? Dunno. What does Patroclus want in life other than Achilles? Dunno. Patroclus is sent to be fostered with Achilles’ family because he accidentally killed someone. How does Patroclus feel about being a murderer? Being tossed out of his family? Dunno dunno. There are a ton of other boys his age being fostered as well yet he makes friends with none of them. Why? Dunno. I mean I could keep going, in fact I would kind of love it, but for the sake of everyone else I’ll stop. What you have in this book is a narrator with zero character swooning over another non-character - Achilles is painted as basically perfect and exceedingly dull - so, like, why am I reading this I wondered until I decided I wasn't? If this lack of character wasn't bad enough, what tipped it all over the edge was that, in addition to absolutely no plot whatsoever occurring (unless you consider going up a mountain to live with a centaur for a few years to be plot), there's an entire contrived and deeply bizarre thing where Achilles' god (goddess? do we still genderize gods?) mother for no discernible reason completely detests Patroclus - honestly I don't blame her though because he's so boring - and threatens him and whatnot and why? Another dunno. Here's what I mean by lack of plot: At some point Helen (as in Helen of Troy) is kidnapped and Achilles has to decide whether or not he's going to fight in the war - it's his decision - when his mother whisks him off to some island in the middle of the night, followed up by a whole thing with Patroclus going to look for him (because Achilles couldn't just return on his own? no idea), and the reason, Patroclus discovers, Achilles was brought to the island - and I refuse to call a plot point from a story written multiple millennia ago a spoiler - is because his mom wanted to keep him from having to fight the war. Only the author told us multiple times that it was Achilles' choice to fight or not so why was this happening? Whatever. This book sucked and I'm guessing it's on someone's list out there in the wilds of Media Report subscribers, and my advice to you, unless you like swoony overblown purple prose wrapped up in plotlessness, is avoid.
TV/Streaming:
Five Bedrooms (Seasons 1-2):
There's no question this Australian dramedy about five friends who buy a house together is not good - I mean really stupidly not good - yet somehow I've watched two seasons of it without DNF'ing so does that count for something? The basic premise sort of tells you about all the issues that will arise - squabbles, romances, exes reappearing, problems at work, etc. - and it more or less meets and never exceeds those expectations. It's done in an Australian style I've seen multiple times meaning I guess it's a cultural thing which is that the characters aren't even remotely grounded in reality; they go into super OTT places, kind of French farce level, and I guess Australians must love it because that tone infuses all the shows of this ilk - comedrams as I’ve dubbed them - that I've seen. Maybe Gilmore Girls or Grey's Anatomy fall into this same category though relative to this show those two are tonally Jacobean tragedies. The plotlines are completely not worth discussing primarily because they're dumb and predictable but also because the characters aren't etched beyond stereotype enough for them to really sink in as meaningful. Also, Australia feels like it's culturally I don't know 20 years behind America (which I feel is 20 years behind in general) in that the show tackles issues like coming out (is that still a multi-season dramatic issue anymore?), women dealing with conflicts between working and motherhood, men facing issues around traditional masculinity roles, and cougars. I'm aware this review sounds like a closet hate-watch but it really wasn't. It was stupid background noise with okay-enough looking people and plots I could tune in and out of; I certainly wouldn't recommend it for more than that but it's a perfectly fine show to have on while one is, say, simultaneously writing a review about it.
Pennyworth (Season 2):
This is the Batman butler backstory series set in a mod ‘60s Gothamized London that is surprisingly good even for those of us with zero interest in Batman. I thought season 1 was really strong, as, rather than being a superhero show, it’s more of a stylized criminals-fighting-fascists show. The basic gist of the setup is Alfred, future butler and former British Special Services ex-WWII hero, sets up a security agency where he, along with some of his somewhat damaged war buddies, takes on difficult and low-level criminalish security jobs along and ultimately gets reluctantly drawn into aiding CIAer Bruce Wayne as a fascist regime sweeps into Britain. It’s really more than that and is barely about the Alfred/Bruce Wayne relationship - they have their own separate plotlines though cross paths - but rather looking, in an often pretty funny (snappy quippy funny I mean) way at fighting off impending political nationalism. The lens of the show also encompasses insiders in the fascist group and these two horrendous sisters - great acting here with one of them - as they claw their way through the world and mess up other plots left and right. I’m not going into exact plot details for spoiler reasons, but this season picks up both plot and characterwise right from the end of last season. There’s a ton of action, lots of scheming, and some very amusing banter throughout all of it. The world is definitely heightened - for example, there’s a whole subplot involving Alastair Crowley and satanic worship - but the whole thing feels of a piece and is grounded in pretty human motiviations. I wouldn’t say I thought the show would be this good when I first started it, but once I kind of got into the world and the tone of it, it became totally great and this season continued that. The characters are strong; the writing is strong; some of the acting is awesome - the women especially - and it managed to build on last season, grow it, then set up next season. What more could one ask of a show?!?
RuPauls Drag Race All Stars (Season 6):
No, I'm done. I mean I was almost done with the last season of regular Drag Race, but I am 100% done with All Stars. By season 6 in which the producers pull contestants from prior seasons to compete, you are no longer in a world of talented people who missed their opportunity but rather people who were eliminated for a reason, the reason being that they were boring. Every contestant has been processed and homogenized into some median-level cliche drag queen and listening to the endless shrill stream of "Oh, honey" and "girrrrl" is the compeition reality show equivalent of spending weeks trapped on one of those tiny rock islands where millions of birds gather in the middle of nowhere to spawn millions more baby birds and hearing all those millions upon millions of birds at once all screaming and squawking and crying nonstop for food only with some side-eye and finger snaps is at this completely unbearable level hour after hour and get me off the island pleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaase! Everyone on this show is now the same. They talk the same, there's that same drag queen, I don't know, accent, the same phrases, the same mannerisms. This show, which is basically a personality competition, has people with the same personality meaning zero personality. The fashion competition of the show has gotten out of control bad. Initially, the point of the fashion stuff - the runway strut at the end - was to get a sense of the personalities of the various performers, though really it was the "drag" part of drag queen, i.e. seeing men (these days trans or otherwise) in women's clothing. But, in episode 2 of this season for example, it's 3 looks per queen, meaning 36 runway looks. So what am I watching? It's the same cliche model strut done by people with clothes they bought and maybe one thing they had to make as part of a challenge. But what's the competition? Perhaps in some ways the problem is that the show has achieved a fairly impressive cultural objective, which is that it's normalized drag and made it acceptable in parts of the country where it was previously underground and marginalized. Which is amazing and hats (wigs) off. But which doesn't make for great TV. What made it good before was that, to do drag in a time when it was underground, disrespected, and frankly physically dangerous in many parts of the country, drag queens truly had to have something inside of them driving them to express themselves in this particular way, i.e. personality, something that made them unique. Now it's just a performance business like any other; you put on your drag drag, meaning your accent, your catchphrases, your look, your looks, your walk, your outfits, and try to make a go of it careerwise. How is that any different than anyone else on TikTok or Insta or wherever trying to get followers in order to translate those followers into cash? It isn't, which makes for an unbelievably boring show. The edge - meaning the social edge - has, in the best societal way, been removed from drag. I'm not saying there aren't parts of the country where people aren't gay-bashed or, for perhaps all of the country/world, where coming to terms with one's sexuality/gender still isn't a struggle but rather, via this show, that struggle has been somewhat normalized and given a general shape and a voice which is all a good thing because giving a struggle shape and voice is the first step on the road to societal normalizing. But it's now boring TV/Streaming. Thus I DNF'ed this season out of sheer sleepiness and irritation at the drag bird squawks and will likely try one more regular season and see how that goes but gotta say, yay for you RuPaul for turning the cultural dial, but I'm now bored.
Movies:
Avengers: Age of Ultron (Marvel Universe #11) - So this second Avengers movie reunites our band - Scarjo and the White Dudes - this time to solve a problem of their own making and spend an enormous amount of time talking about it but with the added bonus of adding another (White) female superhero (plus another White dude I guess to ensure the balance remains soothingly male) so there's that. Onto the plot.
There's someone doing something with Loki's large scepter, the one so admired by Jeremy Renner in the first Avengers, which essentially results in the creation (birth?) of a set of superhero twins, one who's super speedy and the other who's, I don't know really, I think mind-fucky maybe? It's really unclear because for the first chunk of the movie she's messing with people's heads by giving them horrible visions of their futures and then later she's killing people with red beams so, well whatever she has going on, it's a LOT. In any event the Avengers manage to get the scepter only to discover there's an AI in the center of it, hopefully not the AI giving my Youtube recommendations and if anyone at Google is reading this I am NOT INTERESTED in hours of relaxation music videos over images of capybaras!
Unfortunately for everyone on the planet, I guess Iron Man never saw Captain MAGA: The Winter Soldier because he decides to use the scepter AI to make a kind of global defense system exactly the same way the bad guys did in the other movie and see how how that turned out because I guess planetwide-global-defense-gone-bad as a plot point never gets old? Anyway, as with everything where Iron Man is involved, we get into some extremely grey areas in that "global defense system" sure sounds a lot like "autocracy enforced by overwhelming firepower" to this Janice depending on which side of Iron Man’s current mood you’re on. Unfortunately for the planet, the AI is running on I think Windows because, after endless nagging about installing updates and rebooting, something goes really wrong and the newly rebooted AI decides that the only way to save Earth is to wipe out all the humans and honestly I can't really say that logic is so flawed.
After what feels like 10 hours of the Avengers hanging out and gabbing with Ultron - the AI in robot form - about all kinds of philosophical musings, he apparently got as sick of it as I did, tried to kill them all, and fled to go hook up with the Wondertwins - "Form of a log jam!" "Shape of an ice floe!" (wait wrong superhero twins) - who mess with everyone's collective heads after which they resort to the sole idea Joss Whedon seems to have for destroying the Avengers: trying to make the Hulk go crazy and kill them which was the exact same dumb plan that didn’t work in the prior movie and, as the second recycled idea in this film, I am not feeling super hopeful about plot originality in the 11 or so Marvels I still have to get through.
The "messing with everyone's heads" thing was deeply confusing and, no, not for my usual reason of forgetting to hit pause while going off to get a snack, but because the idea is that the lady Wondertwin gives everyone hallucinations about the future which (a) whaaa? and (b) wait whaaaa??!? Is she a prophet giving them actual visions or is she just planting shit in their heads somehow? Because the movie seemed to act like kinda both. And maybe that was the case? In any event, Scarjo resumes her primary role once again as Hulk-tamer while everyone else goes out to save the planet, only it doesn’t work and the Hulk goes nuts and wreaks havoc on a city while Ultron reproduces into a bunch of mini-Ultrons in order to execute his plan of destroying everything in sight as well as Joss Whedon's plan of not having to think up a new plot.
In addition to the usual slaughter and planetary destruction anytime the Avengers get involved with anything, the whole thing degenerates into a PR nightmare, which is just one more thing to deal with given that an entire city was ripped out off the planet’s surface to float in the sky for reasons related to Ultron, and the Avengers are forced to save everyone there as well on top of everything else. Then, apparently not having learned the lesson about the downside of uploading AIs into indestructible suits, they upload the AI from Iron Man's suit into another suit and then there's something with a gemstone that I'd seen in a previous movie I'm pretty sure but I remain clueless as to the why/what/how as per usual, and the AI/suit - named Vision, apparently - is like a new sweet, universe-destroying baby who happens to be on the side of the Avengers and who, just like the bad guy in Thor, has red skin. If it helps: I'd like to notify the team at Marvel that there are colors available other than red and green because this Janice at least was highly confused when the red-skinned robot showed up yet somehow that red-skin was different than the red skin Hugo Weaving had way back in Thor. I need my heroes and villains to be color-coded please!
Eventually the Wondertwins join the Avengers band, all the people in the city are saved and, after a gigaton of VFX, all is well, though I would just like to point out that the entire reason any of this happened - a city torn from the Earth causing no doubt the planet's biggest earthquake, trillions of dollars in damage, thousands dead, me sitting through seemingly endless hours of the Avengers talking to each other and Ultron, buildings destroyed, to hardly mention the worldwide permanent trauma that any of this could happen at all - is 100% entirely BECAUSE OF THE AVENGERS! Well I guess that’s one idea of a superhero, i.e. someone who creates a problem then destroys everything in their path trying to fix it, though, given that that sounds mostly like a 5-year-old trying to “help” in the kitchen, I’m not sure that all is the best place to turn to for planetary defense.