Books:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
I'd say this book serves as an excellent affirmation that quote unquote literary sci-fi is published by and for people who don't like or read sci-fi likely because they feel they're above it (ooh, shade!) so need it to have the trappings of Important Literature (with an ostensible sci-fi hook, in this case a post-apocalyptic book where a teenager starts a religion). The problem with books like this and - yeah, whatever, scream away at how I'm wrong, haters, but I'm actually 100% right - that atrociously boring SO DNF'ed Emily St. John Mandel book and later series-about-a-pandemic-during-the-pandemic-so-no-thanks Station Eleven - is that they use (arguably abuse) genre to generate a multi-hundred page boring philosophical spluge without actually having to, you know, come up with a plot. Unlike actual sci-fi. And just to note about this book: I didn't mind the writing even though it's somewhat flat and, while I'm also aware that the author is Black and female (with a Black female lead character) and writing in a genre typically written in by White males and was groundbreaking in the real world, none of that is relevant to this review as I read books for entertainment and/or edification (maybe even both at once!) and judge them based on my experience of what's on the page and nothing else. And I note this because the author’s race and gender were mentioned frequently in other reviews plus this book came out in the ‘90s and it somewhat feels as if current reviews are reviewing the person and her impact on the genre more than the book itself. And another note (I’m loving notes right now clearly): I was never a fan of classic sci-fi - Heinlein, Asimov, etc. - because they were using notions about the future in order to espouse ideas and I found the ideas themselves to be dull perhaps, in fairness, because by the time I got around to reading them they were well into their "classics" phase meaning maybe the ideas had been retread elsewhere by the time I read them. But, and this is key, they were also stories. They had actual plots. This book is all the dull parts with none of the plotting to keep it going. Which isn't to say this book couldn't have had a plot; it pointedly doesn't.
The entire thing is told from the POV of a teenager living in this walled town well after some undiscussed apocalyptic event - climate change maybe? - that has to an extent undone society as we know it, e.g. you have to pay for the police to investigate a crime, there's societal breakdown, cities selling themselves to corporations, etc. and lots of impoverished people wandering around and trying to steal from/murder the slightly less impoverished. The bulk of the story (apparently there's a sequel) is the lead's journey after the walls of her town are broken down and she's forced out more or less on her own. I made it to around 50% before realizing that this book was never going to be anything more than the day to day recitation of whatever was happening around the lead (the book is in diary form) and an enormous amount of awful religio-spew and that was it. Ignoring the ideas part for a moment, the problem with the book - barring the last 50% being drastically different than the first 50% - is that it's all world-building but with nothing happening in the built-world. We get a lot of events-as-descriptions - "someone broke in today" as a means of talking about poor people breaking into towns to steal things, "we walked down the freeway" as a means of telling us all about the other people walking and why they were walking and what the landscape was like, etc. etc. - but none of that is ACTION. Perhaps that's enough for you. There are certainly many non-Janices for whom that was the case. But honestly if I want speculative fiction about societal breakdown due to some unnamed event I'd rather watch that last Mad Max movie (awesome) or the zombie apocalypse show Black Summer (better than I thought - meh S1 followed by a much better S2) or, even though I thought it was blah it was still better, Hunger Games, which covered similar ground in a different way and at least had a plot. So, well, there you go. If you're into a lot of ideas around how badly people treat each other - or how unexpectedly nice they can sometimes be if given a chance via a vision of the future - and want that in post-apocalyptic form, here you go.
TV/Streaming:
Only Murders in the Building (Season 2):
This ostensible comedy about Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez podcasting(ish)/investigating murders in an old-school high-end NYC apartment building was as not-good as season 1. My central problem with this show is that the jokes are weak, like dull '80s sitcom weak - as in this show makes ‘80s-weak-sitcom-ultima Charles in Charge look like Oscar Wilde - and it's absurd which would be totally fine if there weren't a supposed mystery element driving the series because it's trapped in this world between OTT characters being completely unrealistic and then scenes of a killer plus an investigation that the writers seem to want us to take seriously or at least find mysterious as opposed to finding just boring a la moi. Look it's watchable or at least I've watched two seasons of it and will likely watch a third if there is one (and the final episode seems to be setting that up) but it's... boring. Here: Martin Short's character only eats dips. HILARIOUS QUIRK! Okay, yeah it's dumb but it's also referenced nonstop and goes absolutely nowhere like this dip-eating habit is some wacky bit of humor that we all want to see played out in various forms and called-back and whatnot but it's just dull. Or there's Tina Fey's character, a successful true-crime podcaster who's glomming onto the others and outdoing them, and she's mean and self-oblivious and whatever but repetitively so and with no real jokes, like snapping at her assistant to get her a salad or something. The crime writing isn't even as functional as that of the '80s series it seems to be referencing - Remington Steele, Hart to Hart maybe - where there was some goofy blend of character and crime. There's no effort to make the crime make even a modicum of sense which I guess would be fine if this were some hilarious wall-to-wall laughs comedy - which maybe it is for some people and if so great enjoy - but in other words it doesn't have the joke chops to hardly mention joke modernity to keep it zipping along nor does it have a mystery element you can remotely invest in because it's pure air. So if you're not laughing (check) and not curious (check) then you're just kind of watching celebrities do a thing, a gentle unchallenging thing which sure could fine in some circumstances, and like I said that may be sit-through-able (maybe, kind of) but also, as I said, boring. It looks good, there's lots of expensive clothes, and I'd like to say it's fluff but honestly it doesn't even rise to that level unless you're thinking dust bunnies under your couch in which case yeah. I haven't discussed plot because why bother I mean the writers didn't. And it's not even a hate-watch because it's not trying to be anything let alone something you could sink your teeth into and hate. Well I've sure just written a whole bunch about a show I found to be dull but watched anyway and not in the background though I can't say I had a problem turning it off mid-episode and coming back to it at some later point and I guess if that's what you're looking for - and, me to mirror, I guess that was me - then this show certainly exists.
Under the Banner of Heaven:
Why? By which I mean why did all the non-Janices go nuts for this mini/limited series, a true story about murders in a small Utah town with a Mormon cop and Mormon suspects, and not point out the crazy amount of BLOAT that sucked the life out of what otherwise could've been an interesting take on a true crime story. To flesh out the plot a bit (and without spoilering though you have a sense of whodunit almost instantly so not much spoilering to be done): a young mother and child are found butchered in a small Mormon community that typically doesn't deal with this kind of thing; the husband, of course, is an immediate suspect but, as the investigation continues, suspicion begins to widen out to the husband's family and a fringe fundamentalist Mormon group intersecting with the Mormon church which, looking to avoid scandal, starts applying pressure to the lead Mormon cop leaving him in a position where he finds his secular police work butting up against his religious institution's desire for a cover-up. This was based on a Jon Krakauer book I never read and I wasn't familiar with the case and thus the conflicts and the why and the divide between religion and Church policy and stuff like that seemed interesting. But here's the thing: each episode - there were 7 - was a full 60 minutes with the final episode being 90 and this was, at best, a 5 hour series, maybe more realistically 4 but I could've lived with 5. It is so. Friggin'. DRAGGY. Which is a bummer because the underlying story was interesting but the amount the bloat in literally every scene was so in your face that, really, spoiler alert: I and the group I watched with viewed the final episode while FF'ing and pausing and frankly I think if we'd started FF’ing at episode 1 this would've been a better review. It's embarrassing what the filmmakers did in order to drag the time out for I assume business reasons - maybe the network told them they had to have 60 minutes per episode? - but I really have no idea. It certainly wasn't for story reasons. It's not merely that the show had scenes that went nowhere or a lot of repetition but things like a scene where a kid is scared of his dad and hiding behind a tree and then the dad spots him, comes over, talks, and then leaves. Okay so that scene should be, I don't know, under a minute right? Kid shaking, dad scanning room and sees kids, kid sees dad seeing him, dad comes over to tense music, kid looks scared, dad does something gentle and says a few lines of dialogue, dad leaves. I mean really how long do you need to watch that? 3-5 minutes according to these filmmakers. That's what I mean by bloat. It's not that there was story fat; it's that the creators were dragging out the time in the editing and it showed. And where were the non-Janices saying this because that's how I found out about this show and all they talked about was how amazing it was BUT NOT HOW INSANELY SLOW IT WAS! No joke, something like a third of this series is devoted to flashbacks of early Mormon history. Talk about true crime - how about the one committed against my mortality! If you also read non-Janice reviews and were hoping for an engaging slow-burn true crime story about a mashup of culture, religion, police, fundamentalism, and church politics, I’mma here to tell you that sitting on your couch and thinking about all that for 7.5 hours would be a more entertaining way to spend your time.
Movies:
Pig - This was a kind of strange but ultimately not-bad drama about recluse Nick Cage as a scruffy, woodsy, never-showers-the-entire-movie-or-maybe-ever truffle hunter whose truffle pig gets stolen which in turn compels him to head back to the city - and therefore face issues in his past which he's been avoiding - in order to get it back. There is just no getting around how bad Nick Cage smelled - despite being shielded from it via my OLED screen - to the point of somewhat idle yet nonstop distraction as he sat in cars, diners, fancy restaurants with people sitting next to him, walking past him, hugging him and NO ONE SAYING A SINGLE THING! I challenge you to watch the movie, which takes place over the course of a few days, without asking yourself why no one made him take a shower, wash his face, or change clothes. Gauntlet thrown! That aside, I was fairly entertained by the movie - it's only around 90 minutes which helped - as in some ways it plays like an opposites buddy-comedy with a reticent, wounded, unwashed Nick Cage enlisting the help of a young yellow-Camaro-driving truffle seller in his quest to find his pig and the sort of bond they form. The movie isn't exactly that as I wouldn't say the backstories make a ton of sense - without spoilering, Nick Cage used to be somebody big in Portland then something happened and he fled to the hills which makes movie sense, i.e. enough to setup the character issues but really not enough to explain any of his behavior throughout the movie. Same thing with the younger one who is rich and has daddy issues but again they aren't really fleshed out much in terms of why he does what he does. I'm noting this because, well, the thin explanation of "this one left everything in order to isolate and that one is kind of trying to make dad notice him but not really" didn't actually suffice as it turns out as there was a lot of behavior that I really couldn't track. Like there's an entire sequence where Nick Cage, in order to get a lead on where his pig is, goes to some strange underground fancy club where people place money - bets I think? - and he agrees to get beaten in the face for a minute or so in exchange for information re: pig. Umm... But in some ways I didn't mind because the movie itself was so strange. I mean literally all that happens is Nick Cage, looking like the world's scruffiest, filthiest, and bleedingest homeless person, goes to various places around Portland - the restaurant scene specifically - asking about his pig to various people from his past who elliptically reference that past when presumably he smelled better then some scenes with the Camaro kid talking vaguely about his parental issues then a quasi confrontation once Nick Cage finds out where the pig is then the end. The movie also had 3 chapter breaks with titles as if from a menu and, while I got the food/restaurant reference, I didn't understand why they were there at all as they added zero to the movie and maybe actively detracted from it but this was all of a piece with the film. It felt like someone had a logline - truffle-hunting recluse forced back into the world confronts his past - but didn't really have a grip on much else and then somehow found financing. So I can't say that part of why I wasn't bored was that I was trying to parse what movie the filmmaker thought he was making vs the one he actually made, which was a movie that had the trappings of making character sense without, in fact, making a lick of sense and I think that combo was enough to sustain me for 90 minutes and if you think it will do the same for you, you may want to give this a go.