Books:
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Diatribe Alert: Somehow contemporary fiction critics, perhaps due to the total skill failures of contemporary fiction authors, have decided that things like, ya know, plot and story are pleasant if plebeian add-ons for novels rather than necessary components of them. Well this Janice would like to make the revolutionary statement that narrative/story/plot is actually a sine qua non of good writing and your gorgeous sentence-level skills are irrelevant if I’ve fallen asleep from sheer unmitigated boredom and am thus DNF’ing you as a result. Sure, plenty of genre fiction is godawful too, but at least the writer wrote it because they got a plot idea and reverse engineered the book from there as opposed to idly dribbling paragraphs across a screen and calling that a novel.
All of which serves as preface to my boundless loathing for this book and all the people who gave it awards. It's completely and utterly everything I despise about modern fiction. Honestly, the paragraph above has more of a plot than this masturbatory honking piece of shiite. It's pure author spew and the fact that the fucking dingbats who awarded this thing view the shift in the mid part of the book as a "twist" tells you how plotless the fiction they read and, apparently, enjoy (or something - feel they need to pretend to enjoy?) truly is. If you got suckered in and have this sitting somewhere in your digital pile, I feel for you.
Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler
This is a deeply strange nonfiction, I don't know, essay? autobiographella? about a down-on-her-luck German author who takes a job packing boxes at Amazon. I thought it was going to be an insider account of working at Amazon. And it vaguely is but, it's... It reminded me of the first - and only - 5 pages I managed to get through of Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (a useless reference I know if you haven’t read/DNFed it but there you go!) in that what this book is purporting to be about isn't really what it's about while what it's actually about also somehow remains a total mystery at least to this Janice. I don't know. On the one hand I finished it; on the other it took me a month and was only like 150 snail-pages. I don't know if it's good or bad but the author is very committed to it whatever it is and I think that's what kept me going.
TV/Streaming:
Teenage Bounty Hunters:
This show got good reviews for, as per uzh to Janice, incomprehensible reasons. You know that thing where a writer, because they don’t otherwise have a plot, decides to just magically make their leads amazing at something (in this case: bounty hunting (even though the leads are pampered teens in some kind of private Bible-y school)) so they can then put their leads in situations that give drive (in the writer’s mind) to a story that is otherwise going nowhere? If so, then you’re probably also familiar with that thing where a viewer ceases watching.
America to Me:
This was a I’m-sure-to-someone perfectly fine and moving documentary about the rise of BLM in a mixed race Chicago public school but this particular someone was sa-NOOOZin’. The mere fact of something being important, meaningful, filled with people undergoing real struggles, and caught on camera for x period of time doesn’t de facto make it engaging. The trick of documentary, IJHO, is to figure out how to give narrative and thematic drive to Life which, not to get all ontological here, generally lacks both or at least diffuses both across a murky net of social interactions and internal experiences. Surely that trick should have been sorted out by episode 4 which is when this Janice DNF’ed.
Wynnona Earp:
This show is, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, the Canadian Buffy only it’s Wyatt Earp’s great granddaughter and demons and some of the most excruciatingly dull characters and plot plus - cardinal sin alert - no hot people and oooooooooooooohhhhhhhh GGGGGOODDDDDDDDDDDDdddd make it stop! (Which I did by deleting it.)
Movies:
Valerian and the Thousand Planets - In fairness to me, I DNF'ed this floater, not because it was completely insane (it was) and not because Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevigne are such dull and atrocious actors (they are) but rather because of a character choice which I despise so much that I couldn't continue watching which is: in order to indicate how amazingly competent a character is, the writer has the character do something suicidally stupid in a really blase way as in (in this case) - "I'm so certain of my skills in landing this supersonic space plane that I'm going to take my hands off the steering wheel until you, my passenger, apologize for the minor insult you just issued at which point you'll comment, with growing panic, about my hands being off the wheel, we'll go back and forth like that, you'll apologize, I'll give you a wry smile, then land the plane last minute maybe with a skid - THAT'S how competent I am!" The writer selling out the character in order to make a blunt and deeply stupid statement makes me lose all confidence in (t)h(is/er/eir) ability to take me to the end of the story and I'm out! Also, and equally importantly to all Janices, neither of those two actors are eye candy enough to keep moi engaged.
Green Room - this is a low-budget action movie about a rock band that plays at a white supremacist bar, witnesses a murder, gets trapped in the green room, and has to escape. It's nothing great and there are definitely some absurdities in there, but it was fun enough and, if you’re looking for a group-watch, i.e. entertaining enough to stay engaged but dumb enough to talk through, this one’s not bad.