Media Report
In which Janice discovers there's something worse than Ryan Murphy (that would be George Lucas) and more!
Books:
Normal People by Sally Rooney
This is a novel by a millennial writer whose first novel was the object of a massive publishing bidding war and, later, a storm of non-Janice-reviewer praise. I avoided it because, given my history with “voice” and contemporary fiction, I just assumed that’s what it was and I’d hate it and why knowingly torture myself? But when this book came out to similar accolades, I figured maybe I should give the author a shot and ignore all the shrill hullabaloo and just pretend I’d stumbled on it magically on my own. The story is essentially about type-and-class-crossed lovers/students - rich weirdo and poor jock - and the track of their relationship as they break, make, and grow up from high school through college. The underlying idea of the novel is taking a simple story and finding specificity in the details of the people and how it unfolds. And in that sense, it worked as the author can clearly write. For me, the problem was that structurally the book is broken up into various time periods in the relationship and there was just no way around feeling that construct as the novel progressed. While the details changed, each section unfolded in the exact same way, and it just all began to feel really forced and repetitive, i.e. we’re at this point in the relationship and we know where it’s gonna go; now we’re at this point and we equally know where it’s gonna go; now here, same thing. This structure of predictable endings to each of the sections sapped it of drive over time, and it began to feel as if the author had pre-determined that this was how she was going to write this book and nothing, not even discovering something new in the writing itself and changing course as a result, was going to stop her from executing her pre-planned conceit. Additionally, I’d like to take a moment to propose a law enjoining all authors in their 20s from writing about BDSM because it's always, to them, a seemingly edgy substitute to writing actual character - “boy oh boy readers, things must be getting really bad for our lead because look she’s into bondage now!” And unfortunately the book kind of dribbled off into that and just began to seem pointless. This isn’t a critique of the author’s writing as, as noted, she can totally write. But is she a novelist? I don’t know. I’ll probably try her next book to see where she goes but this one, meh.
Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland #1) by Anthony Horowitz
I’ve noticed a trend of these types of mysteries written in the Agatha Christie style, i.e. small villages, a murder, a Poirot-type investigator, deliberately dated mores, etc. and, while I haven’t read Agatha Christie since I was, like, 10, I thought the conceit of this type of novel sounded kind of fun. Unfortunately this particular one didn’t come close to my memory of Dame Ag because, I think, she was actually writing the way she wrote as opposed to observing the way someone else wrote then trying to contort her style into that. That’s what this book is plus some meta-ness tossed in: in addition to the Christie homage, there’s a present-day book editor who represents an author who writes in the Christie tradition and that author died - suicide? murder? - before submitting the final chapter of his new book and the solution to the mystery of what happened to him lies in that final chapter and in the linkages between the present-day investigation and the Poirot-y investigation with the Christie knock-off. The novel is broken into a huge chunk of the present day book editor trying to hunt down the final chapter then is basically the entire novel-within-a-novel for the next chunk then returns to the present tense to wrap up the crime. In addition to being weighed down by characterless, leaden writing, this book is written in such a way that you can almost see the author’s notecards pinned to some enormous corkboard as he methodically takes you through the plot, red herrings, linkages between the present-day section and the book-within-the-book et. al. Look, a structural feat (and this really doesn’t qualify but I’ll toss it in because I’m super friggin’ amazing) isn’t enough; you actually have to write a book with characters and an engaging story if you want a Janice’s experience to be other than, say, reading someone’s homework. Then again, I finished so my review is if you’re looking to read a series of notecards formatted as a mystery with just barely enough there to keep a Janice from DNF’ing, there’s this.
TV/Streaming:
Years and Years:
This is a slightly Black Mirror-ish series with Emma Thompson that looks at the slow erosion of the world we know as we give in to more and more authoritarian-type politics. I really wasn’t so sure about this show when I first started - Black Mirror ripoff (which, in an arguably Black Mirror way became, by season 3 or so, its own Black Mirror ripoff) plus political lecture? no thanks - but I have to say I’m glad I watched because this show really got to me by the end. I mean I wouldn’t call it a pleasure exactly because I found it to be really stressful and even more so in the later episodes, but it’s intense and ultimately moving. The plot is that it tracks various members of a family as politics and power slowly shift around them and the world becomes ever more slightly Nazi-like with laws that are just this side of being unfollowable and how the family members try to adapt and hang on to what they have. The title refers to the fact that episodes jump ahead in time, not like in a sci-fi way really but rather so you can pick up the story of the characters as the world gets more and more dark. It's only around 5 episodes and while I found it tough to watch at points, I’m really glad I did and think it’s an overall worthwhile couple of hours.
Ziwe (Season 1):
Oh did I have high hopes for this interview show and oh did it turn out to be such a DNF'ed disappointment. The show is a something of a cross between The Daily Show and John Oliver in that it combines a topic with interviews by the eponymous Ziwe, a Black, female, Millennial/Gen-Z cusper who (I think) rose to whatever qualifies as fame on TikTok doing these sorts of interviews before landing this series on Showtime. So I was looking forward to a fearless but funny interviewer with a perspective I hadn't seen before giving me, John Oliver-like, incisive and entertaining food for thought. What I got instead was a themed though actually themeless mess with like 4 seconds of a non-incisive interview about absolutely nothing - and often just publicity for whatever the guest was shilling - intercut with skits, songs - like 3 full minutes of a song - random cuts back to another interview and absolutely nothing whatsoever being said about anything. Given that the opening sequence gives Ziwe credit for literally everything, I can state I definitively know where the problem lies. What this show actually needed was a firm creative hand, something Hollywood has entirely divested itself of, though in fairness not just Hollywood as Broadway has lost its dramaturgs and publishing its editors (in this sense at least) and I can assure you there isn’t an artist on the planet whose work doesn’t benefit from a smart creative someone pushing and providing feedback - not final decisions as those should remain with the artist - but smart notes to help that person get where they want to go. Unfortunately for Ziwe, this show didn’t have that (or perhaps it did and she ignored it - same result though). It felt like Ziwe threw out every idea she had and, maybe because her TikTok videos were short and this show is 30 minutes, she panicked about all that time with just her sitting there and interviewing people so threw in piles of meaningless crap to fill the void. It bummed me out actually because her personality seems good and, the once or twice that the show sat in an actual question (as opposed to cracking a joke of some kind then cutting away), you could see what this show could actually be as opposed to what it turned out to be - an unwatchable DNFable waste of time for all involved.
Movies:
The Star Wars Hendecagon - At some point I decided, for reasons that remain unclear to me now more than ever, that I was going to try to make it through the entire Star Wars series in chronological (rather than release) order. There’s absolutely no good reason for this because, while I, like all pre-teens, went bananas for the original Star Wars - sorry, “A New Hope” - even young-I thought Empire Strikes Back was kinda boring and thoroughly detested the one with the Ewoks. However, I guess not having learned from when I did THE EXACT SAME THING with the Harry Potter series (oh, world, save me!), I decided that something this popular across so many films had to be at least marginally entertaining, right? That combined with remembering back when a friend of mine slept on the sidewalk in front of Mann’s Chinese (as it was called then) for a week in order to get a ticket for opening day of Phantom Menace and having fondish memories of occasionally dropping by with food and to make sure sleeping on the street in a refrigerator box wasn’t the preface to a more permanent condition, I figured why not.
The Phantom Menace/Attack of the Clones/Revenge of the Sith - Well I’m going to give you a very good reason why not: THEY’RE FUCKING AWFUL! These first 3 are truly awful and insanely sexist and not from a post-#MeToo perspective but from, like, a post-1620s perspective in that apparently humanity’s future involves a lot of tall/wide-haired ladies being shuttled off to the side to be protected, ignored, or moms. When you step away from it (by which I mean after something approaching hour 7 with oh so many left to go), it’s just straight-up lazy - women are and will forever be nothing more than objects of a male gaze? That, imperialism, and Jar Jar Binks as a rasta Bea Arthur, is the most creative you can get in terms of speciesanity’s future since your gendered aliens seem to suffer from the same sexism, George? Also, um, Jedi? Yeah, sure, I liked my plastic light saber as much as the next pre-pubescent Janice, but after watching these first 3 for seeming eons, one’s mind begins to wonder what’s up with fighting laser beams and bullets with what are basically skinny little swords? Like why dont the enemies just launch a grenade at a Jedi and be done with it? And why, in the future, is there hand-to-hand combat at all since the future has all those robots? And how come Jedis don’t wear armor? You know what? I just lost all interest in my own questions.
Solo/Rogue One/A New Hope/The Empire Strikes Back/Return of the Jedi - While my actual age may have only advanced by hours, I feel like my DNA is screaming for release from this seemingly eternal nightmare by attempting to throw itself off the mitochondrial equivalent of a tall building. Was I always watching Star Wars or was there a before? The ones from the ‘70s/’80s are exactly as bad as I remembered. It’s all so painfully dichotomously good/evil, man/woman, black/white, thing-with-long-nose/thing-bouncing-around-everywhere - my kingdom for subtext! And why didn’t George Lucas tell Carrie Fisher to stop closing her eyes every time she shot a gun? Rogue One, the backstory of how they got the plans to destroy the Death Star in A New Hope, was slightly less sexist in that women did things, had dirt on their faces, and kept their eyes open while killing - does that qualify as a step up over the others? And remind me again what happened in Solo other than it being about the origin story of Han Solo which I only remembered just now by staring at the title?
The Force Awakens/The Last Jedi - OHMIGOD even the JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson ones which I hoped would be better are still so insanely fucking BORING - who knew watching a billion-dollar movie franchise could make me yearn for the thrill being empanelled for jury duty? Everything’s all so static and simplistic - “her good”, “him bad” - and for all the real world building those props and set people had to do there’s actually no world building whatsover within the films themselves. I mean why is anything the way it is? Why empire rather than some other political system? How’d everyone agree to band together and to what end? Is it possible to enjoy these movies if you have enough language skills to ask questions? Mark Hamill’s now basically a retired EST instructor and how exactly is the Emperor controlling 5,000,000,000,000,000 beings scattered across 10 quadzillion light years? Because hate to break this to the endless stream of writers and Lucasfilm execs, but “the Dark Force” doesn’t really suffice as an explanation for that 10 movies later! Oh also, Rebels? Just a thing to think about: if no one’s rebelling or shows any remote interest in rebelling other than the tiny group of you… maybe everyone likes the current system and YOU’RE the problem.
The Rise of Skywalker - This one was my absolute favorite. I LOVED this one. LOVED. Because less than 10 minutes into it I announced to myself and now the world that I’M DONE! I did it. I watched, or at least pressed “play” on, all 11 Star Wars movies.
I can’t feel my feet anymore!