Books:
March Violets (Bernie Gunther #1) by Phillip Kerr
This is a well-written noir set in 1930s pre-war Berlin which I'm somewhat on the fence about. The basic plot: a grizzled PI, a rich guy, murders, theft, police, politics, Gestapo. It's not that the plot is mundane really; it's that the distinguishing features of this book are the setting and the writing and your enjoyment of it will be based on whether you find those plus a very cliche noir lead (and I can't tell if that was deliberate like was it an homage to the style?) to be engaging. I did and didn't. On the one hand the Berlin pre-war stuff was somewhat interesting though had also been covered in my media brain by Babylon Berlin which is very similar in terms of plotting and time period; on the other, the book didn't really make use of any of it - I mean you could've plugged in "local cops" for "Gestapo" at any point and not noticed - until the end and that felt jammed in, weird, and contrived to me with a total deus ex machina resolution that, as with all deus ex machina endings, only served to detract from the lead character rather than add since if he needed blind luck to succeed then why am I bothering to follow him? The writing is definitely snazzy and in that dry, gallows-humor noir style and that worked for me the whole time but what really didn't work was the lead who, also in that noir style, is beaten-up nonstop, a womanizer, a drinker, never seems to have any money, etc. etc. It all felt very imposed, like the author was ticking off genre boxes and, yep, got 'em all without really adding a spin or having a modern take on it in any way. Like you knew any time a woman showed up that there was going to a lot of writing about the ogling of her ass and her breasts all in that Sam Spade style but still it just got tiresome and, at a basic level, told me nothing about character. In other words, "this is how men of the time behaved" really isn't enough for a first-person lead because I want to know why this particular man is behaving this way. Is he lonely? Running from something? Depressed? Empty? Afraid of connection? i.e. the underlying character meat that allows you, the reader, to engage with someone who, through modern eyes, is basically a total pig. I'm good with a total pig and sexism and people being of their time but all of that absent the character work to craft a real person - again, this is a first-person novel so we're in the lead's head the entire time - becomes boring after a while because you don't understand the character's motivations or why he's doing what he's doing. Like at some point he tells us - I promise, not a spoiler - that he's "in love" with one of the women I thought he was just casually banging and, yeah, that statement really isn't enough. Look, the writing is good and if you like noirs in general and find the setting appealing you'll probably like this book no matter what because it's your thing, but I need more from a lead, regardless of what style the author is trying to capture, and this book just didn't have that. This is the first in a series and it's difficult to imagine, based on this one, picking up any more of them as an in-the-style-of, Berlin-based, fast-talking, and womanizing gumshoe really just isn't enough.
The Secret Speech (Leo Demidov #2) by Tom Rob Smith
Ugh. I didn't have that reaction at first to this second in a mystery/crime series set in post-Stalinist Russia - foreign-set mysteries apparently being a theme in this week’s Media Report I’m discovering - about a former KGB (well MGB but close enough) agent who starts the country's first homicide division. The first book was decent enough, even if the mystery itself (a serial killer on the loose in a country that denies the possibility that comrades can murder) wasn't great, because the setting was interesting and the author showed how the Russian state compelled people to behave in ways that impacted every relationship they had and the lead's - Leo's - halting efforts to make things different despite the dire consequences for speaking up. I anticipated more of the same with this book but in a new era, i.e. now the possibility of crime is out in the open and Russia is changing in other ways and there'd be a new crime and a deepening of the relationships/family stuff that was in the first book (being vague to avoid spoilering). And, with the relationship stuff at least, that was more or less the case. The problem with this book and the reason I ughed and the meaning behind the ugh is that the mystery component was such a trainwreck and so completely impossibly absurd that I ended up DNFing 80% in. I mean that's how bad the book was by that point, that despite only having 20% to go, I couldn't bear having my time wasted for one second longer. When I say "absurd" I mean our lead, who's nothing, a zero, no one special, no particular skills or training, just some guy who tortured people in the first book and tried to investigate a serial killer, and yet somehow he's now an action-movie level superhero, surviving impossible events, breaking in and out of gulags, being beaten to within an inch of his life yet somehow winning the day anyway, that kind of thing. And not just him, his entire family really. It was unbearable over time because the main thing - setting up the first homicide division in Russia - was utterly ignored. He didn't investigate a single murder, nothing, nothing about an interaction with the state, nothing other than this not-particularly-fit schlub tossing himself into an impossible circumstance for plot reasons and overcoming planes, bullets, thugs, starvation, cold, storms, and shipwreck, and, along with his schoolteacher wife, outwitting literally everyone, criminal or otherwise, and winning. I couldn't handle it. What I liked about the first book was the particular specific lens on a specific historical time. This was just, after the first say 1/3rd, absurd and, yeah, it took me a while to realize that the absurdity was in fact the meat of the book and not just a passing sequence and I just couldn't handle it anymore. I like the author's writing - his book The Farm was much more interesting to me - but I'm done with this series.
TV/Streaming:
Umbrella Academy (Season 3):
Well as with prior seasons (which I guess I forgot to write about - oops) I thoroughly enjoyed this season of a series about disinterested superheroes in a sort-of family who are forced, with more and more resentment, to keep saving the world over and over primarily by destroying parts of it. I mean that's not it 100% but it's kind of the gist and forms the thematic backbone of most of this season, like if you just want to live your life but, for world-saving time-travelly reasons, your siblings-by-circumstance destroy it well, yeah you'd understand why and you've even probably done the exact same thing but that doesn't change the fact that these people took everything you cared about from you and left you bereft. That's kind of what this season is about along with a whole other huge plot or two but it's what makes the show something other than just a goofy spectacle. In some ways maybe it leaned too much into its character theme this season but for the most part I thought it added some heft. This is a show more in the Doom Patrol vein (though less goofy (though there are a few goofy or at least comic relief characters in this show)) in that there's a lot of angst and family drama played out against a backdrop of huge battles. I won't spoiler anything but there's some backstory reveals that add drive as does some stuff around a sort of rivalry. But mostly this season is about the characters being exhausted with their task of constantly saving the world from total destruction and the price that wreaks. That's been more or less the series from the start but it's really driven home this season. There's a lot going on in the show, and the effects are fun, but it's this kind of sour tone the leads have about their lives that makes this different from other superhero shows. We are deep in the antiherosuperhero era where it's regular totally messed-up people dealing, often badly, with their lives and their powers but what I think makes this show a bit better than others (like The Boys) is that it has a pretty good blend of angsty character stuff, deception, bigass FX sequences, and plots that interweave enough by the end that it feels like each season is a well-designed whole, something I did feel with season 1 of Doom Patrol and definitely not with season 3 of The Boys. In other words, if you like your superhero shows with character drama, action, and some bleak humor and you haven't seen this one, well I think it's been consistently entertaining for three seasons, and I certainly hope they're making a fourth.
Unstable (Season 1):
This is a barely-okay very networky even though it's on Netflix sitcom about Rob Lowe as the head of a tech company reconnecting with his son. It's definitely not good in that it's super broad and none of the characters seem remotely credible - they're basically there for the quips - but perhaps knowing the actor who plays the son is Rob Lowe's actual son gave it just enough vague interest to make it watchable. Setting aside that humor is really subjective, there were definitely a few quips each episode that were amusing; Fred Armisen is in it and does his thing and there's a British actor who plays the CFO who I thought was pretty funny. But the plots are so bad that it makes it difficult to invest in this series in any meaningful way. As in: Fred Armisen plays a therapist hired by the company board to keep a/n (stated though never really actually shown) erratic Rob Lowe in check and Rob Lowe... kidnaps Fred Armisen and keeps him in a basement and then they become roommates and then that idiotic plot becomes the basis for the big board showdown in the final episode. It felt like the writers were devoted to making this show wacky on wacky and really it needed at a least a vaguely reasonable plot underlying it because otherwise it feels not only really contrived but just difficult to invest in. And it was asking you to invest because the episodes aren't one-offs like an actual network sitcom but rather hazy season-long relationships/conflicts that were meant to build week to week but really just didn't because the writers weren't able to do that thing where you combine total absurdity with underlying character realness - Veep is a show that did that pretty well I'd say, like for the most part that series was ridiculous but when the characters had issues, they were written in such a way that you bought it within the context of all the quips. This show didn't have that. I think it's more in the Ted Lasso (season one since the other seasons were so awful vein in that there's a gentleness around it and you know nothing's really going to go wrong so I'd say check out an episode and see how the humor works for you. All my panning aside, I watched the whole thing and will likely watch season 2 if there is one, though I can't say I didn't get bored at points because of the draggy character stuff, but that's what a tablet's sitting next to me for, so I can't 100% complain though I have a feeling I just did.