Books:
The Last Tourist (Tourist Series #4) by Olen Steinhauer
Well yay me for continuing to read this spy series despite the atrociousness of the prior book because this one turned out to spectacularly great. Basically (and without spoilering) a tourist is a kind of combo CIA uber-analyst/assassin, i.e. a killer who can also unwrap the larger complexities of a case and act on those leaps of logic. This book is a continuation of the series with the same characters and building off of the story that was setup in the first one and I will avoid discussing the plot for spoiler reasons other than to say that the book tracks modern spying from the POV of a smallish cast of characters mostly in Europe, China, and the US and while I know that’s not much, in a way it’s all you need since they’re all action/spy genre novels with attendant twists, double-crosses, etc. What made this one so good was the way it integrated spycraft into extremely modern political issues around corporations, specifically multinationals and what, in the context of a border-spanning gargantuan company, "international" really means, especially when it comes to underhanded means of reaching specific ends. Put another way, when companies are as big as nations and have interests that operate counter to nations or counter to some but not others or counter in just particular ways of their business but not all, how do various countries make decisions? We see this mostly play out in terms of the tax code, but this book moves it to a different level and plays out some of those issues but on people in a very real way (vague I know but avoiding spoilering!), and admittedly I’m somewhat obsessed with corporations and how group-aggregates are used to dissipate personal responsibility. In any event, this book is a big action-y spy novel unwrapping layers of conspiracy within conspiracy across multiple people and continents and whatever went wrong with the author in the prior book has somehow vanished and to me this is by far the strongest in the series. Like the first two were fun fluff spy books of the sort you've read before, but this one really tackled current issues in a way I haven't seen and packaged them in the form of a page-turner. I'd also say while, sure, the books are better for having read them in order, it's really only the character stories that are continuous as far as this book is concerned meaning you could read it without having read the others then, if you liked it, read those to fill in character backstory. BTW this isn't true for books 1 & 2 (and, to a much lesser extent, book 3) as 1 & 2 are more or less one continuous story broken up into two books whereas with this one the main plot meat is a story in its own right. A definite recommend if you like spy novels.
TV/Streaming:
Hanna (Seasons 1-3):
This is the series based on the movie of the same name about an escaped genetically modified superteen and a larger plot involving the efforts of the company that made her to get her back and her efforts to bring them down. My hazy memory of the movie was that it was all right, and the first season of this series is basically an extended version of that. It involves Hanna being raised by her father off-the-grid in order to keep the baddies from finding her as well as giving her unconventional training in defending herself and killing so she can protect herself when she's inevitably found. The subsequent two seasons - I think the show has been cancelled - are somewhat flaccid and draggily plotted thangs. Basically the agency that made her also made a bunch of other superteens they're busily brainwashing into becoming government assassins and they want Hanna back and she wants to be with her own kind but then not and Mireille Enos gets involved for some snooziness (though she was less snoozy as the series continued in fairness) and it all kind of goes to some middling plot about bringing down the agency that created her (or not). In case you can't tell, I felt pretty meh about this show. It takes itself very seriously and its plotting is not good - things happen for reasons of total convenience yet are presented as if they're logical; people behave, again lethally seriously, in completely absurd manners and while there's a lot of sneaking around and beating people up and shooting them, it's all very unclear exactly what anyone's powers are or why anyone's doing what they're doing. Like okay everyone working for the company is either brainwashed or, I don't know, following government orders or something but like why? One of assassination targets in season 3 is a 20-something French rabble rouser who seems to do no rabble-rousing other than posting an occasional Youtube video, yet we're supposed to believe that this person poses such a potential future threat that he needs to be taken out by a squad of superassassins and, I don't know, don't you think someone might object to that? Why is everyone just blindly following orders? And while there are all of these genetically modified young adults (new adults?), they don't seem to have any noticeable skills - everyone kickboxes and shoots everyone else so what's the power here? Ugh, this is dumb. It's background noise. It makes little sense and is, in its mind, very important and dramatic. All those insults being said, I didn't DNF. That may not qualify as a rave but it's arguably better than the writing deserves. I stuck with it because there was just barely enough there plotwise and actionwise to offer a soothing modicum of entertainment while simultaneously furiously comparison shopping in an effort to outwit the current supply-chain madness so if you need something to distract you while doing a deep shopping dive - by which I mean clicking to page two, or even three (!!) on Google - there’s this.
Survivor (Season 41):
I think reality shows, more so than fiction shows, can struggle with determining whether the show is getting tired and thus losing audience and needs to change things up vs. the writers/producer getting bored and inadvertantly losing audience by changing things up that no one watching wanted changed. This show - for those who for whatever reason haven't had this permeate their neural net in its two decades of existence: this is a competition reality series where people play physical but mostly manipulative social games to avoid getting voted out all in an effort to win $1 million - has managed to figure out a way to keep itself vibrant by hewing to its central character while still trying out new things, i.e. it feels as if the producers understand the central reason the audience tunes in and keeps that the same every season while testing new ideas on the periphery that might, at worst, annoy some viewers but won't drive them away. This season is I think a really good example of that. We all know the drill - a bunch of strangers are split into groups and forced to work together to overcome challenges and, if they lose, betray each other while still allowing the group to re-form for the next challenge or until the various groups merge. This season the producers decided to mess with some things to make the game more interesting and, overall, I'd say many of them were successful or at any rate weren't notably worse than what was there before. The main issue, to me, is that the producers still haven't found a way to solve the central problem of this show which is that it's in the contestants' interests to get rid of the best social game players which is decidedly not in the viewer's interest since, while sure getting rid of the snaky people that everyone likes is a smart strategy, it leads to a really boring finale because all the interesting and fun players are gone. The show is very cast dependent and the reason people watch is seeing whether, say, a manipulative backstabber will make it through or get caught and voted out. That's basically all gone by the end and a few years ago the producers introduced something truly awful to try to leave some chance element to the final three (making fire) which is unfortunately also just really boring to watch, like why do I, the viewing audience, care if a good fire-maker is the final 3 when what I really want are the three best social game players who also made it through the challenges? Frankly, I think what the producers should do - and feel free anyone out there to pass this along if you know them! - is come up with a points system like perhaps the jury awards points for gameplay and each point a person earns nullifies a vote against them or somesuch. In other words, something to fight off just having total bores in the finale as well as encourage people to make moves because it means playing to the jury from the minute the jury appears and getting a final 3 that the jurors themselves admire for their gameplay would also mean a less predictable winner.
Yeah, I guess I really just wrote all that about Survivor so take that as the review - not every season is good and the show has some problems, but it's more entertaining than a lot of what's out there and can suck you in in a very short timespan plus the production is interested in keeping it fresh so if you haven't watched and have been vaguely curious, you can pick a random season and, if you like social manipulation, you'll probably like every season.
Departure (Season 1):
Look, there's no question this British conspiracy thriller about an investigation into a plane crash while others are trying to cover it up is dumb dumb dumb. There's equally no question that I'll be watching season 2. It's 6 episodes of idiocy, and not particularly well-shot idiocy I might add - it looks like it was lit with one of those LED strings people put around the edges of their laptops to make them look less washed-out on Zoom - but just entertaining enough to serve when you're in the mood for something plotty and not too demanding, like the TV viewing equivalent of being wildly curious about something and desperately needing to Wikipedia it only your devices are aaaaaallll the way at the other end of your couch and you’d have to like lean over and stretch your arm and maybe even have to shove over a little bit to reach your tablet or whatever and it all just seems like too much and then somehere in there you realize you forgot what you were going to Wikipedia anyway and oh well. The basic plot is that Archie Panjabi is a crash investigator who's been out of the game due to personal issues and is brought back in by Christopher Plummer to investigate a crash by the airline behind Britain's first foray into building aircraft, meaning there's a whole slew of political reasons for the investigation to result in a specific outcome (one that doesn't affect Britain's chance at becoming a player in airline manufacturing) and a resultant set of absurd contrivances to interfere with the investigation. There are lots of red herrings and misdirections, most completely ridiculous, the worst of which involves a whole completely moronic plot with Archie Panjabi's stepson which I will not even go into because it was so nonsensical. But let's be clear here: just like sometimes we're in the mood for trash reads or eating cereal dry and right out of the box for dinner, so sometimes we're in the mood for a trash series perhaps with said dry cereal, especially when they’re short like this one. If you want some silly entertainment with enough plot to keep you watching even while knowing how outlandish all of it is (I'd say it's an airplane watch but it's about a plane crash so...), this one's perfectly fine and I will be watching season 2 when in the mood for something dramatic and dumb.
Movies:
Ant-Man (Marvel Universe #12) - Oh, Marvel, you were doing such a wonderful job of moving your creations out of 1980s-level implicit racist/sexist America into maybe even the late '90s what with your upgrading a Black person to, if not superhero status exactly, at least a suit-wearer (not as good as White lead Iron Man's suit of course, but still) and everything (then again, wasn't Mr. T on The A-Team in the '80s? Hmmm). Plus you allowed a woman - a White one granted but still female - to have superpowers plus not dress in tight leather, which was a huge step forward for you. But I guess all that felt must’ve felt too radical and you panicked because this movie is as white as the proverbial lily, as a polar bear eating the proverbial lily, as a polar bear eating the proverbial lily while threatening if things don’t change in this country it’s moving to Canada, white as a wedding dress worn by a marshmallow, white like the movie was shot under some kind of soundstage-spanning UV bleaching treatment, so white that it could perhaps, in a pinch, fill in some denuded spots in the Antarctic in an effort to stave off even more global warming, a glorious endless sea of welcoming all skin tones in lead roles as long as they're White. Sure, that one Black guy shows up (face partially covered unlike all the White people though perhaps as protection against all the glare), but as, I don't know, some combination of comic relief and a vague linkage to a prior film but assuredly not in the lead.
The plot - and I am convinced no one is reading these scripts not that I blame anyone because if they can make so much money in this state why bother? - is that in 1989 (this is very relevant to everything that happened in my brain after seeing that date as you’ll soon see!) Michael Douglas invented a megasuit that shrinks people. Yet somehow it never occurred to him that anyone might want to weaponize that and, when it does because they do, he storms off in a huff, has his digital age-removal removed and it's 25ish years later in the present where - and this, as with so so so much in the Marvel Universe movies, is very confusing - his daughter and his protege (I think) have somehow taken over the company and developed the mini-suit tech into the very weapon he feared it would be.
Let’s pause a moment for my confusion. The movie goes out of its way to tell us Michael Douglas invented the tech in 1989; the movie was released in 2015 so let's call that the present day of the film even though it was probably shot in 2013/2014 but whevs. Okay so that's 26 years, which means that in a realistic youngest-case scenario, the protege and his daughter would have be, what, at least 45-50, right? I mean just to have an engineering tech protege, that person would’ve had to be at a minimum of 22 in 1989. And, according to my highly complicated Excel formula, 22+26=48 and a more realistic tech protege who, say, went to grad school would’ve been more like 25 in 1989 thus - hang on let me open up Excel again - more like 51 in the present and given that his daughter is within a few years of the protege’s age, that’s where we get my 45-50 years old for both of them. Yet they hired actors who clearly look like they're in their middish 30s so I'd say for maybe a quarter of the movie I couldn't quite figure out who anyone was and was very surprised to learn that the actress whom I thought was just the mid-level company executive turned out to be Michael Douglas’ spawn. Once I understood that, I could not stop thinking about why the writers had gone out of their way to specify a year that was physically impossible. Why?!? They slapped the year on in post anyway so they knew who the actors were and how old they looked so why didn't they just change it?!?! Why didn't they just make the year 2000 and call it a day and whhhhhhhhyyyy? Okay fine I'll stop. In one second because I thought about it for like 80% of the movie. I mean not to nitpick this (I'm nitpicking it), but with the opening set in 1989, the daughter and protege would basically have needed to start at the company at age 10 which all right I totally buy.
Enough of that. So the plot is basically that Paul Rudd is a criminal, but the kind you'd want as a son-in-law, the kind who committed a very complex (and, if you're me, totally incomprehensible or, perhaps, never stated) crime of some sort but no doubt for all the right reasons - or for all the wrong reasons, but he's such a good guy! In any event, he's one of those top-notch thief/electronics wizards who's really a sweetheart and would never hurt a fly let alone an ant and who just intuitively knows how to kickbox the eff out of everyone and, after the kind of reluctance many a Janice has evinced when asked if they'd like a third margarita - "I really shouldn't, I have work tomorrow, [slurp]" - Paul Rudd seemingly mere seconds after getting out of the poky agrees to pull off a burglary at what turns out to be Michael Douglas' house in which he gets the Ant-Man suit, which, as far as I can tell, other than shrinking him, is exactly the same as every other suit in every other Marvel movie and the same basic color palette since Marvel like shiny red for suits and green for non-human skin and that’s it. But as it turns out, the burglary was all a big test by Michael Douglas to find the greatest thief of all time who could make it past his intricate security system and who would then, rather than, say, selling the suit he just stole to a foreign country for untold bajillions of dollars, go directly against his naturally thieving nature, the one that got him into jail initially and which was the basically first thing he did when he got out and which Michael Douglas was counting on, and, along with his ragtag bunch of ex-con friends, agree to break into Michael Douglas' old company and steal whatever tech the bad guy protege has developed (another suit) for absolutely no reason other than his high-minded non-financial-gain thieving morals.
The suit also gives Paul Rudd the power to transform ants into sweet puppies that rub one’s face affectionately as opposed to home invaders who will take over your entire kitchen. Oh wait, I totally forgot about an entire subplot involving Bobby Cannavale as a cop who abuses his authority because he's now with Paul Rudd's ex-wife and is, you know, all emotional about that and therefore feels perfectly fine about using the power of the state on behalf of his hurt feelings, perhaps, to be generous, serving as a prescient social statement about the police on the part of Marvel. For some reason, the protege keeps inviting Michael Douglas back to the company to, I think, rub the company’s success in Michael Douglas' face for some reason? Why precisely he hates/has turned on Michael Douglas since he was 10 years old and started working there isn't exactly clear - probably one of those unresolved boss-protege resentments that can arise with tweens running an engineering department - nor is it clear why Michael Douglas’ daughter also thinks it's a terrific idea to sell a micro-Iron-Man-suit to a bunch of terrorists, but that’s the way that is. At some point in all this, the daughter, after much thought and convincing, changes her mind about selling indestructible tech to fascist regimes and has some flirty banter with Paul Rudd instead which results in Paul Rudd needing to steal/borrow some device for an unclear reason from a warehouse where, we discover, masked Black superhero Falcon who has, unlike literally every other superhero we've seen, been unable to find to work anywhere else and is stuck taking a presumably low-paying job as a warehouse security guard. A very bizarre suit v. suit battle ensues between Paul Rudd and Falcon in which it's made completely apparent that the White guy has the better suit (Falcon also had to deal with secondhand suit issues back in Captain MAGA: Winter Soldier and hopefully the warehouse gig will pay for some upgrades).
This movie is sort of like if Ocean's Eleven were compressed into an episode of Scooby Doo and plotwise, after the setup, it's more or less exactly the same as Guardians of the Galaxy - it's hard coming up with new plots! (suit colors, skin tones, escape plans, etc.) - only it's a break-in rather than a breakout. At some point the protege gets in a suit of his own and, with some betrayal by Michael Douglas' daughter, winds up in a massive/shrunken mega/tiny battle that results in a lot of banter between Paul Rudd and the daughter plus a heartwarming resolution with Bobby Cannavale where he abuses his position of authority once again but this time in the service of good by preventing Paul Rudd from being arrested and thrown back in prison, though the logic of how exactly prison was going to work out what with Paul Rudd in a shrinking superpowered suit with all the planet’s ants at his commad was deeply unclear. Perhaps, as with the aging and actually all other logic in this film, it’s there somewhere but unseeable in the hazy fog of Whiteness.
Oh and just real quick: do we all need to take one more beat with the fact that the only work the only Black Marvel superhero can find is as a warehouse security guard?