Books:
Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
This is one of those highly-lauded-by-non-Janices-and-now-the-dude’s-running-for-Congress memoirs about someone who grew up White and poor in the hillbilly part of Ohio, and then he… nope, nothin’, nothing happens after that. There’s a lot of family history and, yes, poverty and whatnot but, to pick another book in a similar vein as a comparison, one that was equally lauded and about which I was moderately less equally uncrazy (though I don’t think there’s been any Congressional run to date) Tara Westover’s Educated. If you haven’t read it: Educated is a memoir about growing up in a poor White family in hillbilly Idaho as opposed to hillbilly Ohio and with anti-government survivalist crazies rather than drunk crazies, though both overlapped in having family weapons-toters. They cover similar ground (thus the comparison), but, unlike with this book, at least the second half of Educated actually went somewhere. (The first half of Educated is detail after detail of the author’s crazy life; the second half is the author’s shock at trying to adapt to the rest of the world when she eventually gets away from that crazy life.) Hillbilly Elegy, by contrast, is just the first half meaning it’s all anecdote with no cohesive theme. IJHO, the mere fact that something happened doesn’t make it Art, memoirists/biographers; there needs to be a journey of some kind as opposed to, say, a several hundred page fact-barf a la this book. Memoir needs to unravel like a story the same way fiction does (not that it actually does these days (see prior Media Reports for my nonstop rants on the publishing industry’s swoony love affair with “voice” as opposed to story)). All of which is to say that this book is ultimately a boring life boringly told that tells you nothing you don't already know or couldn't infer about people growing up White and poor (as opposed to Black and poor, the main distinction it's making I guess); there’s no coherent narrative struggle - he was poor, had family support, and things worked out okay for him. Does that sound like a riveting read? Yeah, my thought exactly. I F’ed, but there may have been some skimming involved.
Lexicon by Max Barry
This is a decently fun book about a kind of undercover CIA group that's figured out how to weaponize words and what happens when the group splinters. I’m not exactly sure of the genre; it reads like a thriller with a bit of a comic edge and, despite having that SF/fantasy word-weaponization element, it doesn’t read like either of those genres, in the same way Stephen King’s Firestarter was neither of those genres (cue Drew Barrymore, wind blowing flame-lit hair as she presses her index fingers against her temples and stares at us intently). The people with this power are a group who, by personality traits alone, should absolutely not have access to it yet do - some sociopaths, some loners, some super-fearful people, etc. - along with an uber plot-within-a-plot that ramps up the story as you begin to understand it. I’m trying to avoid spoilering here, but it’s told in two parallel stories that ultimately link and what made it enjoyable for me was in part trying to figure out what was going on and also seeing how operatives with varying degrees of skill level, pathology, and agenda go at each other, kinda like back in the ancient days of Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. The writing is good enough (given that it’s about words and is titled Lexicon, one would hope so), the characters are perfectly fine, the way the plot unfolds - one character a newcomer so learning as he goes and the other involved in the uber-plot which ultimately intersects - keeps it moving along, and I’d say this is a cut-above-average beach/airplane read.
TV/Streaming:
Black Monday (Season 1):
Well didn't this turn out to be a shockingly entertaining surprise! I'll admit: I can get a little pre-judgy occasionally (cough) and not only did the topic of this show sound dreadful - a comedy about the Wall Street crash of 1987 OMG - but it was released around the same time as Billions, a series I DNF'ed out of boredom after a few episodes. Plus I've noticed Showtime does this thing where they seem to produce shows in theme clusters, like here’s the drama version of a show then here’s the comedy version e.g. I’m Dying Up Here/Kidding, Billions/this show, Homeland/um Nurse Jackie? Okay we’ll put a pin in my theory for now but in any event I kind of lumped this one into some Showtime finance sequence that had already bored me with Billions and prophylactically nixed it. Well I'm delighted that, in addition to being pre-judgy, I'm also re-judgy because I decided to give this one a shot after all and fuckin' A was that the right decision. The conceit is that Don Cheadle is a scummy coke-consuming brokerage owner who, in some way, caused the stock market to crash - the show sets this up in the first few minutes then goes back a year and the season is about how it all got there. The comedy is nonstop puns and the joke-misses are irrelevant because when stick they're pretty funny. The cast is great and, most surprising to me, the plotting is really good as well, which I didn't anticipate from the quip-a-second dialogue. The episodes are only about 30 minutes each; the season zips along with fun crosses and double crosses; it's cartoony and ridiculous but smart enough under it all to kind of earn the right to be that way. Super fun and there are 3 or 4 seasons at this point and looking forward to watching and will, natch, report back.
Elite (Seasons 1-4):
This is a Spanish teen crime soap where every season starts with someone dead (or are they?) only we don't know who and the season is basically a flashback leading up to the murder. It’s set in a rich-kid private school which, in the first season, brings in three poor-kid teens and there’s initially a lot of class war stuff but that kind of vanishes a few seasons in and, in the latest season, while there are still flashbacks, the production changed it up a bit and added some new cast members and didn’t start with a murder this time (I mean how many corpses can one rich private school generate annually really). It's still basically the exact same idiotic show as previous seasons, said idiocy, as always, somewhat mitigated by the relentless hotness of the leads and their seemingly nonstop insistence on having sex with any and all genders in their quest to either cover up their crimes, set up a future crime, distract someone so someone else can commit a crime, send their current partner into a jealous rage, find solace because their partner sent them into a jealous rage, or just 'cause it's 3:30, i.e. the perfect thing to have on in the background while stuck on hold with Verizon. It's really dumb and not even good dumb but the actors are truly committed to the gym and their hair which, while that doesn’t exactly neutralize how bad the show is, at least gives you something else to ponder while watching it.
Movies:
Tenet - The team here at Gummy Reviews watched all 2.5 hours of this movie and, while said team understood absolutely nothing that was happening at any point in the movie - literally as in multiple times throughout the film the Gummy Review squad asked itself, "What's going on right now?" followed up by "Why is this happening?" with a few "How does this relate to what went before?", "What's the underlying logic of the time-thing again?", and "Would I understand this not-gummied?" for good measure - I, on behalf of the Gummy Review squad, am going to do my absolute best to give you a completely accurate plot summary: there was an opera and these guys with masks and guns and then there was a guy tied to a chair near a train track and maybe some kind of pill? and then there was some time travel; there was something about a reverse bullet then I ate Funyuns then there were people lounging on very nice yachts and something with a painting and then a really horrible moment where we were forced to see Kenneth Branagh’s fat white hairless belly; eventually there were more soldiers, shooting, arms dealers, Sour Patch Kids, time travel, and a bomb. At some point somewhere in there, the movie ended. At least I wasn’t bored. And I’m choosing to stand firm in the belief that every single person who watched the film would summarize it the exact same way I did with an equal if not greater inability to explain to anything that was going on, gummied or no!