Books:
Age of Assassins by RJ Barker
This first book in a fantasy trilogy made me angry for multiple reasons, not least of which was that I was looking for something distracting, something plotty and amusing enough that I'd get lost in it but with fairly low expectations as to writing quality. This book failed my expectations with regard to the former and exceeded them with regard to the latter. The basic plot is an assassin and her apprentice are (kinda) blackmailed into finding out who put a hit out on the prince of the kingdom by infiltrating the nobility. This sounded suitably action-y and dumb to me and the writing was, also suitably I guess, pretty bad. The world-building was non-existent other than references to some past event that wiped the fertility out of the land (and people are still living there with bajillions of warriors why and how exactly?). The characters were equally awful, nothing more than plot ciphers really, the lens through which we could view the world and that's about it. Fine, annoying, but I expected as much. What was unacceptable and what made me DNF at 25% was the complete and total lack of plot. Nothing happened! NOTHING! Plot entails, generally (or at least in fantasy), people trying to get things and other people getting in the way and not, say, no one doing either of those things. "Attending a ball and interpreting someone's dance" doesn't, to I, constitute plot. In any event, if you're a fantasy reader and this series wound up on your radar, now you know.
TV/Streaming:
Making the Cut (Season 2):
So this is the Project Runway/Amazon/Tim-Heidi ripoffy thing. I was meh on Season 1 of this show because watching people design is kind of boring the way watching someone ponder what they’re going to have for dinner for 8 episodes is boring. The showrunners obviously noticed this and, for this season, they made it more sew-y in that they would show us the designers sewing things in addition to a whole drama where items would be sent off to… well they called them seamstresses but do we really mean seamspeople? who seemed to do little to nothing. As with the first season, it's really bizarre to watch these clothing items get sent offscreen with the tension around whether or not the offscreen seamstheys will finish what needs to be finished the way it was meant to be finished. "Offscreen" - just FYI producers out there who are brilliant enough to view Media Report as basically their production and development bible - is patently so not anything remotely interesting for a TV/Streaming competition show. Also in the finale the seamsthems appear onscreen which just begs the question why they weren't there the whole time. I'm focused on this point because it's more or less the main differentiator between this show and Project Runway. And sadly for this show, differentiating from Project Runway just for the sake of differentiating but without actually improving a design competition in any way just pointed up the flaws of this one. The other diffentiator is that the designers are supposed to create the "next global brand" but for Amazon meaning it was instantly apparent who was going to win because Amazon is mass market, i.e. Amazon=99-cent store so everything design-wise needed to fit Amazon’s quote unquote brand which is (actual quote from me) “cheap poorly-constructed knockoff shit that I may or may not be too lazy to return once I have it in my paws and discover how truly crappy it is.”
And sidebar: I find it gross that a mega-profitable retailer like Amazon decided, when having its own in-house brands, to go for the worst, the cheapest, the most bottom-scraping products possible (really, go look at the ingredients in Amazon not-so-Fresh brand products and all the reviews of Amazon Basics electronics stuff exploding and you'll see what I mean). The reason it's gross is what Amazon COULD have done is transform high-quality, sustainable, eco-friendly, local-if-possible, renewably-shipped, recyclably-packaged, traceable, etc. etc. etc. i.e. all the stuff that's destructive about mass retail and needs to change, into something affordable. Not the cheapest necessarily - there are an endless of stream of random junk Chinese companies on Amazon for that it seems - but rather try to make an actual difference the way, like, even Walmart and McDonalds are trying to make a difference in terms of organic food and sustainability. Instead Amazon treats its own brands as repulsively as it treats its warehouse workers; I mean you're turning a bajillion dollar profit and you can't pay people okay wages, give them healthcare, and not have your AI monitoring system view them as discardable slaves? Really? Because I think I speak for many Amazon shoppers when I say the disgusting nature of Amazon itself as a company is kinda making me almost a little bit consider dumping Prime (OMG did I say that out loud? I think I just spoke truth to myself!). To hardly mention their abominable search engine that shows the item you searched for then some random item like this search I just did one second ago for popsicles, and I'm showing you a screenshot of the first page because have I ever looked at page 2 of a search?:
Back to this show. It's fine. If you like Project Runway, it's a weak version of that but with a bigger budget and unfortunately no make-a-gown-out-of-the-random-items-that-show-up-in-your-Amazon-search challenges - and who doesn’t want to watch the episode where designers are tasked with making resort wear out of only chandeliers and popsicles? I don't know if it was COVID or a production decision but they got rid of the horrific Tim/Heidi mini-movies that littered the first season and they added some stuff with the designers sewing. I don't know. It was okay as a tide me over until Project Runway so if you're looking for that there's this.
The Sinner (Seasons 1-4):
This is a lethally serious deadly dumb but still entertaining mystery series in which Bill Pullman's cop character investigates a different twisty mystery each 8 episode season. It's definitely positioning itself as a high-end cable offering - there's usually at least one known respected actor in one of the lead roles - but really it's pure trash, and this is not an insult. It's my kind of high-end cable trash, something you can either let yourself get sucked into or, if you're me, put on in the background and enjoy. The plots are all kind of small-town based (mostly upstate NY in the first few seasons) where there's a murder or the like which seems to point to only one possible killer when Bill Pullman arrives and starts teasing out a whole buncha backstory which results in a whole buncha additional suspects with all sorts of plot twists, turns, etc. along the way. I'm not giving a more detailed plot description for two reasons. First, the plots are different every season - Bill Pullman is the only character who appears in every season - meaning if you like season 1 you'll like them all because the quality for better or worse is exactly the same. Second, do you really think I can remember the plot of this idiocy which I only finished last night btw?! No I cannot! This final season involved Maine, lobster boating, a death, Frances Fisher, family, and all kinds of layers peeled back and I guess if I were pressed, I could kind of maybe remember what happened (ish) and I think I know who/whydunit but... not 100%. I definitely remember that the backstory reveals went on basically up until the final five minutes and beyond that nothing more. Which is precisely why I like this show; it would be perfect for a cross-country flight because it's involving enough to lose track of time but, because the plot hits then immediately bounces off the surface of your brain, nothing that would interfere with a nap. For a fun "classy" silly mystery, you could do a lot worse.
Movies:
Zola - This is a movie based on a series of Tweets (and a later Reddit rebuttal) from a few years back about a stripper who decides to accompany another stripper she just met to a supposed stripping gig in Florida and the sequence of things that go wrong. Look, I'm sure when the Tweets were tweeted (I think there were 143 of them) telling the whole story, it must've felt crazy and OMG-ish if you were a follower of hers, but as far as a film goes, well, what do you think happened? A stripper, her boyfriend, and her pimp have moneymaking plans out of state to which they invite a second stripper who knows none of them and nothing about the plans. Since that second stripper - the eponymous Zola - tweeted everything, you know there's no murder involved. I won't spoiler, but there's also kind of nothing to spoiler because you already more or less know everything that happened and it wasn't a crazy OMG narrative but rather just kind of expected and sad. I'm sure if we were reading the tweets in real time and then later the Reddited rebuttal from the first stripper, it would've been totally riveting. And while the movie itself wasn't terrible, the filmmakers kept putting this intrusive overlay onto it - some fourth-wall breaking, some weird fantasy sequences - that only served to emphasize how little story there was and how much of that story was exactly what you'd expect. As a piece of film, it's really not saying much that, say, The Florida Project didn't say in a much more compelling way and not merely because they’re both set in the same state (well actually maybe). The movie is a series of factual tweets stretched out to 90 minutes with really no perspective on any of it (unless the fourth-wall-breaking/fantasy sequences were meant to be "perspective") and, while I finished it, frankly I'd rather have just spent 15 minutes reading the tweets and Reddit and watched something else instead.
Dashcam - First off, just to clear something up: there are, unfortunately if you want to watch this film, two movies called Dashcam both released in 2021. This review is NOT of the horror film but rather of the - OMG why couldn't someone change the title?!?! - thriller/mystery one directed by someone named Christian Nilsson which I'm noting in case you're interested in seeing this - which you might be! - but want to make sure you're watching the one I'm reviewing and not the other one. Okay so that aside, this is a low-budget COVID-shot movie about an editor for a local news program who accidentally gets sent confidential police footage from an incident that resulted in a killing during a traffic stop and what happens as he begins to suspect there may be a larger coverup conspiracy. The entire film rarely (maybe never) has more than one person in the shot and the bulk of it takes place in the editor's apartment in front of his computer monitor as he uses his editing skills to slow down frames and enhance audio and the like to try to make sense of the footage he has. There are other relationships in the movie, all on Facetime, but mostly it's him sorting through the footage. Look it's not perfect and he definitely makes at least two bad plot-convenient decisions which were irritating, but I have to hand it to the filmmakers - and the lead actor as well - as they managed to generate a fair amount of tension from basically looking at a screen. I wouldn't say it exactly dragged in spots, but you're essentially spending long stretches watching film editing and, in some other movie, there would've been dialogue to help us understand better what he was seeing and looking for and, while I understood it (and later there are Facetime convos that make it clear), I found my attention drifting a bit. But not in a way that made me want to stop watching; it was just a limitation of the way they made the film. If you've seen the Tom Hardy movie Locke - and if you haven't, you might want to! - you'll know that, when done well, one person sitting in a contained environment talking to other people can really be pretty engrossing, and this film for the most part managed to be exactly that. It's around like 85 minutes and plays mostly (well kind of), a la Coppola's The Conversation, as a paranoia thriller about whether the lead is seeing something real or just reading into it. It's pretty fun, manages to ramp up tension with very little going on, and overall as far as indie popcorn movies go, I thought it was pretty decent and I could totally imagine this movie sucking away a shortish plane ride i.e. it has its flaws but nothing so egregious that it stops being entertaining and I give it props for that.