Books:
Parasites by Scott Lyell Gardner, Judy Diamond, & Gabor R. Rcz
This was a somewhat interesting overview of, well, parasites as in worms and their weird strategies for infecting hosts and what a huge part of the ecosystem they make up. By a certain logic, everything's a parasite, like really what's the difference between a tapeworm and, I don't know, agriculture? It's just, of course, that we don't think of our bodies as "environments" and obviously parasites - as with us, monoculture farming, and "drugs" like Roundup - can cause problems within the body though then again it's in a parasite's interest to be somewhat unobtrusive since the less noticeable it is, the less the body will do about it. And, with some parasites, there becomes a strange relationship, neither mutual where both benefit nor commensal where one benefits and one isn't harmed, but one where we're feeding it and it sucks for us but it's also killing harmful bacteria on its own behalf that benefits us and, perhaps, across eons, it may sort of become us like kind of eventually not just become a mutual relationship but become part of our bodies. Strange isn't it but - and this wasn't really central to the book - this happens all the time, as in apparently our mitochondria used to be an independent bacteria that got roped into some kind of parasitic relationship which eventually became the motor of basically all animal life. Same with chlorophyll, which was at one point a something - bacteria? - that got pulled in by a nascent plant feeding off of it and eventually became all plant life. So for me this book, which is really an overview of gross worms and how they jump from intermediate hosts to final hosts (like with malaria and mosquitoes), instigated some thoughts more than was actually about those thoughts. And as an overview, it was fine and informative, but definitely more in the category of a broad list of parasites and how they operate while touching on some underlying evolutionary relationships rather than being about those relationships. And this isn't a criticism as the book never claimed to be a theoretical examination of parasites, evolution, and what constitutes a "body" and whether today's parasites will be tomorrow's cells but it made me wonder about that and was relatively short and if you like this kind of thing, it's worth adding to your shelf.
TV/Streaming:
Better Things (Season 1):
So this is one of those shows I started multiple times because I’d heard it was good but just couldn't vibe with it and is now also one of those shows that, after restarting years later once again, I vibed withish (see Succession S1, Spiral, and who knows how many others for prior examples of this exact same riveting phenomenon), at least enough to appreciate what it's offering and to continue for another season. For those who don't know, this is a series about a former child actress now single mom raising her three children in LA. She is, like so many Angelenos, in the biz, working and making a living without being particularly famous or successful, i.e. the type of familiar actor who winds up as a corpse or killer on an episode of NCIS. While the Hollywood stuff, which has a nice feel of reality primarily due to everyone's blaseness about all the Hollywood stuff (it's a business, this is the way it works, it's not that exciting or worth getting upset about, i.e. something everyone who stays in Hollywood eventually figures out (or, alternatively, never figures out and winds up utterly miserable 24/7 as a result)), is present, the main focus is family and the hassles that come from raising some very mouthy kids. Her wacky/drunk mom lives across the street and there are some vaguely romantic relationships as well but mostly the series is a dry comedic slice-of-life show set in a very specific environment. As with all comedy, humor is subjective, but I'd say this is more on the amused-dry-occasional-chuckle side of comedy than anything else. Some situations push the bounds of absurdity and, despite what I said about the Hollywood stuff above, LA and Hollywood both in spirit as well as with things like traffic issues, infuse the entire series. What the show definitely has - and I hope I end up being right about this - is a lot of potential meaning it feels like the kind of thing that could improve leaps and bounds each season. There's clearly talent there and, while I can't say the tone worked for me across the board (some plot stuff was just too silly and contrived for moi), I can say there's a sharpness to the observations and the writing that feels like it could coalesce into something really great down the road. Even if that doesn't turn out to be the case, though, there's still enough here that I'll watch the subsequent seasons and will surely report back on how that all goes.
The Big Brunch (Season 1):
This is a deeply mediocre yet still watchable(ish) cooking competition reality series about, you guessed it, brunch but... brunch? And that's the first problem with this show - not a showkiller by any stretch (or at least I watched the whole thing) - but like what exactly is brunch because it can kind of be anything meaning what really is the competition? In my head, brunch is nothing more than eating around 11am at a restaurant that doesn't cut off the breakfast menu until 3pm; arguably, 24 hour diners are nonstop brunch. As far as I could tell, in this show it meant that people could serve sweet or savory (though there was only one baker in the bunch so it was primarily savory) and otherwise it was just watching people cook any food they felt comfortable with and justifying it later in terms of the challenge. The second problem with this show is that there kind of is no show by which I mean there were two challenges per episode, one a "starter" (and WTF is a brunch starter?) and a "main" - all of which sure sounds like dinner to me - and they were both cooked in around the same timeframe, like 60/90 minutes so yeah, it's "you have one hour to cook X and then you have one hour to cook Y" and that was it every episode. And the final episode kind of threw all that out and became about the fact that the show was awarding the winner $300k and therefore the finalists had to present business plans for how they'd spend the money, something that had never been present at all during the show. So why, you're dying to know, did I watch? Well, it was amiable, as in the judges were kinda amusingish and the contestants all had decent backstories, oh and to give you a sense of the thinness of the competition, there was a LOT of time each episode devoted to the backstories, those pre-shoots where they visit a hometown and people discuss their struggles? Yeah those. Only, because the contestants kind of had the struggles most people had (restaurants closing during COVID, some family issues, some gender/sexuality issues, some "my parents wanted me to be a doctor" issues, etc.) there really wasn't a ton to talk about in them yet they were present in repetitive form almost every episode. Really it was the combo of, as noted, amiability and I guess the normal thing of nonstop interest in what everyone else is eating that kept me watching but you can absolutely 100% skip this show. I mean I'll probably watch season 2 if there is one but if you're not like me, this isn't even worth a minute of your time I guess unless you’re a total brunch obsessive and honestly even then.
Movies:
Tar - While I absolutely unconditionally cannot recommend that anyone watch this non-Janice worshiped arthouse character study of a symphony conductor played by Cate Blanchett, I also sat through its entire 150 minuteish length, often bored, always confused as to why I was even bothering, and constantly amazed at how insanely slow and meaningless it was, yet, despite all that, didn't DNF. The basic plot is non-existent. Cate Blanchett is a pompous conductor who lectures seemingly nonstop about her achievements and the history of conducting and why this symphony should be that way and her perspective on all that and we even get a scroll down her character's Wikipedia page, the camera moving luxuriantly past all the fake history like a hand intimately but clandestinely stroking a lover's back at an otherwise staid office party. When I say the nonstop bit, I'm not really exaggerating. The movie opens with her being interviewed by the New Yorker for like 15 minutes followed by a lecture she gives at Julliard for, oh, another 20 minutes, with a lunch with a random person talking about conducting for, say, 10 minutes. Really. Nothing happens. Nothing. And if you're hoping that somehow the magic of laying eyes on Cate Blanchett will be mesmerizing enough to hold your attention through all the diatribes about music and tone and whatever well unfortunately this, IJHO, is not Cate's best work. It felt like she got caught up in some mannerism instead of a character, like she chose a tone of voice and a posture and that was as far as it got. I don't normally critique actors in this way because there's so much else going on in a movie that it can be difficult to single out what was the actor and what was, I don't know, the director telling the actor to do something and the actor doing that and it sucked - is that bad acting or bad directing? And what if the script is terrible, like good luck to any lauded actor with soap opera scripts. But this was different because there was absolutely nothing whatsover to do other than watch Cate deliver lines because the lines themselves were either music gibberish or dull or any of a number of non-character in non-situation words so you are, really, just being lectured at and thus judging the lecturer (since, as you can tell, the lecture was always judged as “boring.”)
Anyway, at some point, we meet Cate's wife where there doesn't seem to be a great relationship there, see Cate conduct, see Cate be mean to her assistant, hear random things about Cate being accused of something and subsequently being cancelled, see Cate not handling that well but in an obtuse way or a dream way or a the-writer-just-wrote-shit-and-had-no-idea-but-he-thought-it-seemed-cool way and then the end. That last bit about the writer is really the entire movie; it felt like the writer immersed himself in whatever masturbatory notion he had at any given moment, filmed it, and called it a movie. For example, there's a scene where Cate goes into a basement to return a teddy bear to a cellist she's been flirting with (don't ask) where she wanders there for a while and we later see her with a black eye and the implication is she's been attacked, but she brushes it off publicly as having bumped into a lamppost or something. So, yeah. This sort of thing is the entire movie. Something happens offscreen - or maybe in her head I don't know - and then there's some talking and then there's something else. Every time there was a hint that any drama might erupt, it was rapidly squashed. But I watched, and, while I'm sure there were some people who were genuinely affected by this film, I feel like this is also the problem with non-Janice film critics: they love all aspects of film, like the nuance of camera or whatever, so are far more immersed in the exploration of subtleties and craftspersonship even if all that comes at the expense of story. So I guess if you're into film as art like where you're into trying to be in the head of a director or parse out meaning from micro-moments or lighting or sound design or similar (which is what I think most non-Janice film critics are as in they became film critics because they love film theory and stuff like that) then perhaps you'll think this film is amazing. If you're just looking for a story told well, uh, look elsewhere. Otherwise you’ll wind up either DNFing or sitting through it and wondering why you didn’t.