Books:
Lords of Easy Money by Christopher Leonard
While the first 25% of this nonfiction book about the seemingly most boring topic of all time (the Fed) was just okay, once it got past that part, it became really pretty interesting and easily understood even by someone a la moi who enters a fugue state within moments of someone mentioning "interest rates" or even just mistakenly having a passing glance at stock prices. However, this book actually managed to convey the necessary stuff to show what's really interesting which is, in that banality of evil (well not evil in fairness just devotion to useless dogma, in this case a kinda sorta version of the long-disproven-but-still-somehow-beloved trickle-down theory) way, the department of the government that controls all the money has, through developing an insanely boring way of talking about things - quantitative easing anyone? - essentially managed a governmental coup which continues to this day. I have absolutely no means whatsoever of assessing whether the author's POV is accurate or not as, as noted, economics talk is my Ambien. But the basic takeaway of the book is that the Fed, far from managing the too-big-to-fail crises of the recent era, actually created them and, along the way, created the economic inequality that's more or less the state of modern America. The details of how that happened and, to an extent, why is actually pretty interesting. The nutshell on it is this: if interest rates on safe bets, i.e. US Treasury bills, are highish, then no sane investment bank or hedge fund would invest in anything else - they'd just park their money, earn 4% or whatever, and that's the end. With 0% interest on safe bets, those companies have no choice whatsoever other than to take risks and invest in businesses. And - trickle-down - Wall Street will somehow magically feed Main Street despite literally all evidence to the contrary for the past X hundred years which is that Wall Street feeds Wall Street at the EXPENSE of Main Street. How all this happened, the terrible choices (or I guess great ones depending on your lens and, as noted, while this book is clearly well-researched, I can't say whether the author's conclusions are correct or not simply that he makes logical sense) the Fed made, and the structure of the Fed where its linguistic obtuseness, its secrecy, and its protection from Congressional oversight has given it crazy power to make the rich richer at everyone else's expense and completely disconnect the Wall Street economy from the rest of America while at the same time creating a circumstance where Wall Street needs to be constantly bailed out of its risky bets because the failure of those bets can drag down everyone. Isn't that a great situation? Not only is the 1% getting everything but, because of the system crafted by the Fed and to an extent Congress, the 99% will always be on the hook for the 1%'s failures meaning they win no matter what, which is GREAT if you are one, but uh, yeah, not so much for everyone else. As you can probably tell, I was into this book and somewhat enraged by it. The first 25% or so feels kind of a like a biography of the lone Fed dissenter and I thought that's what the whole book was going to be but it isn't - that guy is really just the entry point to understand how the Fed works via his dissension. I note that because at some point the book stops focusing on him and focuses more on current events, like from the 2008 bailout through to COVID and I found it all to be really interesting. So, yeah, if you're looking to understand a bit more about how the financial sausage is made (somewhat literally actually!), I think this book is well worth a read and, once it gets past the bio stuff, becomes really compelling.
TV/Streaming:
Legendary (Season 2):
I'm just gonna say it: if you love a competition reality series, drop everything you're doing and go watch this right now! Really, this ballroom - as in Paris Is Burning not waltzes - dance/presentation series was so frigging crazy entertaining in season 1 and remains that way in season 2 with everything amped up a little, like the costumes, the makeup, and the choreography. I need to pause a moment here because, for those who don't know - which included me before watching this show - ballroom started as a gay-male/trans competition, not that it's in any way excluding any sexuality or gender but rather it's a subculture of acceptance within that community where people, often rejected in life or family of birth, find and create a highly-stylized dance family with each other. And, really no sarcasm, it's actually genuinely moving to hear these people's stories and see how they've powered through a lot of trauma to make something of their lives. But here's the thing that really kind of blows me away beneath all the glitz and makeup and drag humor and backstories: these people are all athletes! I mean no joke. It's somewhat easy to dismiss the choreography as just pose-y, vogue-y, death-drop-y, goofy fun but having watched two seasons of this show so far (TG there's a third and knock wood they just keep coming (spoiler alert: it was cancelled in the HBO/Warners tax writedown purge and like I can’t even)), I am kind of blown away by how difficult the routines are and let's not forget EVERYONE'S WEARING STILETTOS! I think part of the reason it was difficult for me to track this initially, I mean aside from the sheer ridiculous entertainment of the routines themselves, is that the competitors in this show encompass a wide range of body shapes not typically seen in dance. But what that tells you is that a person, even if they're larger than the norm, has something deep inside them that body-shape be damned they simply have to get out there and express in heels and blow people's minds with their performance and honestly they do. Really once you get past its surface entertainment which btw never stops being entertaining, you realize that what you're really looking at is an elite group of people doing things you (me) could never do and it's so amazing that I have to put yet one more exclamation point here! And the judges are great too because they're either as blown away as I am or deeply critical in a way that, upon hearing it, is like yeah compared to everyone else, I can totally see that. If a reality group dance competition is your thing and it is 100% mine, this show is your heaven.
Reasonable Doubt (Season 1):
This is a background noise (for moi) legal series about a high-end defense attorney and her love/family life. There are several things that relegate it to background noise but also a few things (or maybe one thing?) that keep it from being a total DNF. The thing that keeps it out of DNF is that the lead character - Jax - is kinda a selfish pig, I mean not 100% and frankly she's surrounded by a lot of other self-absorbed people, and while it made everyone pretty unappealing that also made it (vaguely) watchable. I mean this wasn't your standard do-gooder criminal defense attorney (though there was some backstory in that regard) but rather a rich asshole having marital problems with another rich asshole and a friend group that, regardless of financial status, were also kind of assholes. She has kids and they were assholes (well the older one; the function of the 10 year old was to have her get her period at some point because I guess the writers wanted to discuss children hitting puberty early so they did that and then that was that with that character). In fact I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone in this show, even tangential or side characters, who wasn't a total selfish dick. All this is what kept it from being a DNF because, hey, at least it's kind of different to have really no obvious protagonists in a show but instead a series where any empathy we're giving to our asshole lead is simply because her backstory was handed more time thus making her assholery comprehensible (kind of) though not her total failure to be in therapy and deal with her issues. So that's why I left it unDNFed - a legal show populated entirely by assholes, huh sorta interesting. It became background noise for two central reasons. One, the plotting was bad to nonexistent. Let me put it this way and without spoilering: there's a central murder case Jax is on for the whole season and, at the end of the penultimate episode, she simply announces, based on absolutely nothing whatsoever that we've seen to date, that she knows whodunit, and the final episode opens with a whodunit backstory that would've been impossible for anyone, no matter how much of a brilliant rich legal asshole they were, to infer in any form whatsoever. It's so lazy and dumb and this show's lack of plot wizardry was apparent from the first episode so I guess in that sense it paid off.
The second reason, which I'm hoping doesn't turn this review into a rant, but which very well may and which I've mentioned before (like here and here) is: cut it with the friggin’ sex scenes not because I’m a prude but because THEY'RE SO BORING! Really, so so so so boring. And, since no one's even naked anymore (which is fine, these are actors not porn stars) as in everyone's wearing T-shirts during sex or maybe there's some guy-butt or lady curve, what are we even looking at? And I'm not talking about, you know, people making out, ripping clothes off, and falling into bed as that tells us something about character and feelings and, sometimes, plot. I'm talking about like 3 minutes of people rolling around in bed avec T-shirts as noted with sexy Barry-White-ish music playing. OMG what am I watching?!? Sure, I like a hot body as much as the next Janice, but I'm also mortal and these episodes are pushing an hour each and, again, what am I watching? Really. Look, back in the TV non-streaming heyday, cable was a good source of porny stuff, not porn outright but much more extreme than anything on networks, which, understandably, was part of its marketing, right? HBO et. al. did full frontal and whoopie! But we're long past that now. We can see anything anywhere to any specification at any time so the SAG/AFTRA Intimacy Coordinated not-even soft-core camera-gliding-up-lady-leg-in-glossy-lighting is serving what purpose now? Like sex scenes frankly never had story purpose, but back in the day, before everything was everywhere, they served a titillating marketing purpose as in the audience (cough, me sometimes) showed up in part because they'd heard there were some good sex scenes with hot famous actors and so watching those long scenes was part of why the audience was showing up at all. It's what the audience wanted, and Hollywood gave it to them/us. But now? What are we getting? Every show is so bloated and long and who cares about these stupid sex scenes as what am I, the viewer, supposed to be doing while watching them? Getting turned on and all revved up myself? I mean, we can have any porn we want tailored to our specific tastes, so, yeah, I guess if T-shirted ladies and bare-butt dudes lying on their stomachs rolling in satin sheets under the light of a (very bright) moon coming in through a nearby window is your bag, then oh the thrills that await. But if not, what are the rest of us getting out of the scenes, and as you can tell from this rant (I guess it did become a rant oh well), my answer is "boredom" followed rapidly by "fast forwarding." Really, writers, if your sex scene has nothing to tell us about character or plot, CUT AWAY and move on because the world has changed and what was once a thrill is now a nap.
Movies:
The Outlaws - This is a Korean cop/gangster movie based, though I'm not sure to what extent, around true events that happened in Seoul in the early 2000s when Chinese gangsters came over and disturbed the gang v. gang peace stasis held in place by the local cops which resulted in a mega gang war. Conceptually, that sounded entertaining to me - and I guess enough people found it to be so because there's apparently a sequel of sorts - but it ended up being just okay for several reasons. First, and I'm assuming this is true but I have zero idea, no one in Korea either cop or gangster uses guns. It's all knives and bats and punching and I gotta say, despite it being a relatively modern film, it all read very West Side Story to me, like seeing groups of people slapping bats against their palms as they face another group twirling knives was so bizarrely Sharks v. Jets that it just took me totally out of the movie. The cops were played as more martial artists with a kind of position-shield in that they could walk into a group fight and slap people and no one would really touch them, which most brought to mind a story I heard years ago about a friend of a friend visiting Martha Stewart and how the friend had brought her dog and how that dog and Martha's chow chow started attacking each other and apparently Martha, without ceasing the conversation with the friend, simply picked up a nearby spray bottle, stepped into the dogfight, and spritzed water in both their eyes at which point the dogs scampered off and Martha continued talking like nothing had happened. That's these cops. Look maybe that's the way it was with police and gangs back then, I really have no idea, like the police tolerated stuff such as protection rackets as long as there was no real violence or something and everyone knew that cops were untouchable. But it played weird which leads to the second issue I had with this movie, which was tone. The tone was kind of OTT, like the lead cop seemed unconcerned for his safety, that strange overconfidence that infused 1970s martial arts movies combined with a I guess comedic goofiness with some more bumbling side characters. I'm not going into plot not really for spoiler reasons since in many ways it's unspoilerable since you more or less see every beat coming but because the plot isn't the thing that will turn you off this movie or not, but rather the tonal issues I mentioned. My guess - and maybe this helps most in clarifying the tone - is if this movie were to get an American remake, the lead cop would be The Rock and he'd probably have an estranged teen child from a divorce either working at one of the stores in the central gang area or that child would be in their early 20s and would've just joined the police force and there'd be some child/parent C-story running through the whole thing. If that your bag, this movie will no doubt be more enjoyable to you than it was to me but even to me it's not like it was awful or anything and I watched without DNFing but honestly I did get kind of bored in parts because of what I felt was a lack of tension combined with all the weird fighting.