Books:
Shogun by James Clavell
Yes, that Shogun, the one you saw sitting around on your grand/parent’s bookshelf growing up perhaps next to Rabbit Run, The Thorn Birds, and some Irving Shaw novels. Well having finally read it I can see why this was a bajillion copy bestseller: it’s super fun! For what it is - an action-y character-driven book about a European who washes up on the shores of 1600s Japan and immediately gets enmeshed in the intrigue surrounding an impending civil war - it's pretty well-written. I guess I thought this was going to be a James Michener sort of research dump in the guise of a story, but, when I eventually Wikipediaed James Clavell, I saw he made a living as a screenwriter so it’s no surprise that plot and character are completely what drive this novel. And the other thing in the back of my mind prior to reading was that this was going to be some kind of Asians-as-mystical-idealized-objects-of-the-Orient novel (it was written in the ‘70s after all) but to me what made it work was that while the White guy was our entry point, he was only one of three or four equally developed leads in a story told from multiple POVs and call me either a radical or a fuddy-duddy but I don’t care about an author’s skin tone, proclivities, background, or country-of-origin, or the historical accuracy/inaccuracy/one-sidedness/[insert race]splaining of a piece of fiction, just the content of the book, and this content was really entertaining. It's a big ol’ sprawling doorstopper - I think the print version is 1000 pages - but I was never bored and will be reading his entire “Asian Saga” as it's called (the books are all standalone and are set in various different time periods in different countries). If you're looking for some engaging swashbucklingish fun, something in the category of classy airplane/beach read, I'd say give this a try.
The Push by Ashley Audrain
Why? By which I mean, “Why, me, did I ONCE AGAIN fall into the trap of reading some highly lauded genre book?” because they all turn out to be the same: honking pieces of plotless shiite (see previous Media Reports for my seemingly nonstop railing that the publishing industry has abandoned story, plot, and character in favor of “voice”), and this one was no exception. For the first third I thought maybe I’d gotten the genre wrong because there was zero mystery to speak of, just the story of some woman with a tough childhood who marries her college sweetheart. And then it became The Bad Seed which is ridiculous in and of itself - that movie’s considered camp for a reason just sayin’ - but what made it so completely unbearable that I had to DNF at 50% is that (a) despite its 2020 publication date, the book seems to exist in a world that has never heard of school/church/Walmart/pick-your-public-place shooters as the entire plot hinges on the narrator being the only one who believes her daughter is evil despite the nonstop bullying the daughter engages in at school. Hang on I need to pause my (a)/(b) here a sec. Forget about school shooters; we live in a world where Stanford momentarily withheld a student’s law degree weeks before graduation because of a satirical email that student had sent to some friends a few months prior. So how is anyone supposed to invest in a plot where an elementary school student beats, punches, bites, and mocks her fellow classmates and not only does nothing happen at school - like, say, expulsion due to the zero tolerance bullying policy in place, oh, everywhere - but the narrator’s husband and his parents all think it’s in the mother’s head and that the daughter is a complete angel? Forget the publishing industry; did this author literally not have a single friend to read an early draft and point out to her that her novel’s set in the present day and not the prior millennium or the one before that? Now where was I? Oh yeah (b) ugh. Once again, baffled by the non-Janice reviews and really baffled that this thing was even released.
TV/Streaming:
The Other One (Season 1):
This is a British show about two women in their late 20s who only find out they're half-sisters when their father dies and one discovers he's had a whole other family her entire life. It's a comedy and, while I admit it's incredibly stupid (I mean really stupid in parts), I cannot lie and equally must admit I also GOL’ed, ChOL’ed, and occasionally even LOL’ed through much of it. The characters are ridiculous but the actors are pretty funny and the writing is surprisingly not-dumb for something I just called incredibly stupid. For example, the show really doesn't explain the situation in the first episode and just sort of trusts you, the audience, to figure it out for yourself and later gives more backstory in a way that's organic to the present tense story, a writing choice I really appreciated because it made me more interested in the character stuff behind the joke-a-minute dialogue. It's six 30 minute episodes and I found it to be amusing enough that I hope there’s a season 2.
The Great (Season 1):
This is the Elle Fanning Catherine the Great series and about 10 minutes in I was sitting there thinking that it reminded me of something else I hated and was trying to figure out what that thing was then remembered it was the movie The Favorite at which point I googled and discovered this was written by the same guy (at least I’m consistent!). Thus what I’m about to state is neither a judgement nor my personal opinion, but that writer’s a total hack who seems to have confused anachronistic nonstop swearing for plot and character. A little demo of what you’re in for in case you make the terrible choice to ignore my complete rightness and watch this pizoop anyway: “What I’m about to state is neither a fucking judgement nor my fucking personal opinion, but that writer’s a total fucking hack who seems to have confused fucking anachronistic nonstop fucking swearing with fucking plot and character.” While I’m not too proud to admit that it sure felt satisfying to type that, is it anything you’d want to sit through for 10 petticoated, bewigged, gloved, and beauty-spotted hours? That aside, it results in a cardinal writing sin (and this is the reason for the “hack” appellation btw and not the swearing - okay fine one of the many many reasons): all the characters sound the same and blend directly into each other. Even worse an additional hack reason is that of course the swearing makes you question the entire world since isn’t the idea of that world - to hardly mention its reality - an almost pathological politeness and how that politeness, manners, customs, miniscule hair or wardrobe choices, etc. were both the weapons and prisons of that time? And hey Mr. Hackonteur, isn’t self-repression, rather than its sloppy and ultimately dull fuck-filled expression, a character driver in that it’s characters trying to achieve what they want while being bound by societal constraints - including the constraints on self-expression - that makes for an interesting period drama, i.e. people make bad choices because they can’t do what they want or say what they want or express themselves the way they want and that’s… fucking drama. I think I made it through around 5 episodes before DNF’ing meaning, well, I’m amazing!
The Magicians (Season 1 (redux)):
So in some prior Media Report I mentioned that I watched like half of season 1 of this show when it first came out and hated it because I didn't understand why everyone's attitude was so blase and just so OVER magic and basically how no one seemed to care about anything. Plus the lead's hair and acting bugged me so I was out. Then at some later point I decided to give the book a shot and ended up loving it as noted in that prior MR so decided to try the series again because I understood better how the tone was meant to function. Also the book helped me understand the mistake the TV writers had made which was that they hewed too close to the book and, while the book has that same blase tone, it's just the surface over a roiling mess of emotions which the book allowed you to see and the series didn't bother with. So fine, I figured fuck it, who am I to judge other than someone who judges nonstop, maybe I should try again. And frankly for like the first 6 or 7 episodes, I had the same reaction as the first time I watched - the tone and behavior were just so weird and unearned and off-putting. But then... it turned. The characters morphed into a Scooby Doo-ish gang and what had just seemed like pointless attitude for attitude’s sake turned into a kind of banter among people who were intertwined with each other, i.e. the tone finally made sense within the show as opposed to being lifted from the book and imposed on the show. And then I got totally into it. Like I kind of love it now and I’ve learned to live with that lead actor’s hair and the only thing that stopped me from rushing into season 2 is that I know there are only five 13-episode seasons total so I want to mete them a bit. It’s straight-up popcorn and if you’ve been iffy on the show a la moi, I’d say power through those early episodes because it gets pretty fun.
Movies:
Primer - This is a time travel movie made over a decade ago that is both insane and actually a testament to being able to hold interest with something approaching zero budget. I’d like to give you a plot summary, I really would, but I have no idea what was going on. I mean there’s this box and some time traveling and then some larger boxes and more time traveling and everything gets more and more urgent to everyone, and, yeah, that’s all I got. My understanding is that this film was made for $7k and then they ran out of money and stopped shooting, meaning they had to rely completely on what they could cut together with the footage they already had, and while I can't say the movie hangs together, it held my interest the whole time and there were all those boxes so the filmmakers have to get credit for that right?
Incendies - This movie came out a few years ago and is about a brother and sister tracking down the mystery of what happened to their family in war-torn Morocco. At first I wasn't so sure about it because it started out like every other movie of this ilk I've seen - kinda slow, lots of interfamily drama, some backstory, and nothing that makes you think it’s going to be any more than all of that repeated for the next two hours. But that turned out to be wrong, because, as it went on, it got more and more intense, like stressful in a way I didn’t anticipate, eventually reaching a point where the movie just 100% balls-out goes for it in terms of plot twists leading up to an ending which… well… you'll either admire for where it decided to go - like bold choice, Incendies, you go grrrl! - or perhaps thoroughly HAAAAAAATE or, like me, a bit of both at once. In any event, there’s clearly filmmaking craft on display in the way the filmmaker shows a world then builds the story of that world and takes the viewer to a coherent ending regardless of how that viewer may feel about where it all winds up and all that was enough for me to enjoy this film in the aggregate.