Books:
The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz
This highly-lauded novel about triplets who hate each other was, for the drastic bulk of it, a verge-of-DNF due to unbelievable irritation (more on that in a moment) but was vaguely salvaged by the last 25% which - and this isn't a spoiler as it's stated or implied numerous times throughout the first 75% - more or less undid/redeemed what had come prior. The reason this book constantly veered towards DNF'ing was simple - and, if you think you'll be unbothered by what I’m about to say, you will likely have a much more positive response to this book than I did - which is that "triplets who hate each other" was as deep as the book got. What I mean is we're told numerous times that all three are the exact same in that they all hate each other from the minute they’re born and can't wait to get away from each other and hate their mother and their entire family. And we’re told this over and over and over and over and over without one single demonstration in any form whatsoever as to why. And if you think I'm nitpicking at a minor issue, unfortunately it's literally the point of the entire book and is in fact the setup for the final 25%; in other words, it's the whole thing. So let's start with obvious which is that newborns don't just naturally hate each other - btw the family's wealthy so there were no resource competition issues though, despite their living in a mansion, for absolutely no comprehensible reason the author chose to have to the two boys rooming together - and in fact we all know the world is filled with stories of twins, for example, who have their special twin language. But as you can see, the author was too lazy (or something) to actually craft character, story, and logic as to why these children grew to despise each other in ways that played out as adults and simply stated it as fact and then never went deeper. And their hatred of their mother - why? No idea, there's no reason given other than she wants them to be a family together and they're rich and do things like summer on Martha's Vineyard and they hate her and each other for it. Do you see the problem with this? There's nothing in the book other than the story of a splintered family but there's zero reason given for the splintering meaning there's no character and no redemption nor is there any logic to their behavior towards each other which I won't spoiler but it's incredibly BIZARRE and in fact actually needed - and the book certainly spent a ton of time in - the childhood and growing up and character interaction beats that would justify the behavior the characters engage in later. I found this book to be really strange for this reason. It was as if the author was 100% determined to never show an ongoing conflict, an exploration of 3 people trying to differentiate themselves (because they're all the same btw in that they all hate each other and their mother), any kind of juicy beats throughout their years of being schooled together where they develop the behaviors with each other such that, when the spoilerable stuff happens later in the book, makes total character sense. Instead it makes no sense whatsoever. It felt as if the author was engaged in some kind of experiment where she decided she was going to hypnotize her readers into thinking she'd written character/story merely by stating “these 3 hate each other and their family” over and over and over and over and over and therefore when they finally took some kind of plot action against each other later in the book, we'd all decide it made total sense. And, honestly, given the plaudits this book has received, I guess that experiment worked. I'm totally good with miserable people hating each other and a family that's disconnected; I'm totally not good with all that absent any behavior whatsoever that would explain it. Honestly there's not even a hazy notion of "triplet differentiation" or something where they're all dressed alike or whatnot as they're all very different and not identical so, really, why do they hate each other again? There you go. If you're okay with the mere statement of hatred and absolutely not a shred of justification and like stories about families, then you might very well like this book. If you're not and if you think you'll find yourself getting annoyed reading an entire book where the main character conflicts are based are nothing other than air meaning author plot contrivance, then skip.
TV/Streaming:
Guyane (Seasons 1-2):
This is a drama about a shady French geology grad student who goes to French Guyana and discovers a gold mine with all the violence, betrayals, culture clashes, and criminality that entails. This is one of those shows where there's an interesting world - I mean I certainly knew (and still know come to think of it) basically nothing about the relationship between France and French Guyana and between French Guyana and its relationship with neighboring Suriname and big bully Brazil to hardly mention anything about mining in the modern era and tribal issues with Guyanese natives - and an interesting criminal clash (more on that in a moment) but where there's a sagginess to the whole thing primarily due to editing, especially in the second season but present in the first. Put a different way: if this had been two 6 episode seasons instead of two 8 episode seasons, I'd probably be giving it a stronger recommendation. I mean what I liked about it was the way the grad student kind of immediately fell into some culture clash between Whites, who have a kind of ex-colonialist feel to them in that their skintone affords them a certain power, where some of the White people are there to exploit native resources and others are there to help (like one of the main characters is a White French doctor helping the jungle-dwelling natives) but in both cases there’s a certain condescension and really all of it is enabled by the inherent corruption, i.e. due to bribery and skimming, the White people are necessary partners in many endeavors because they provide a kind of skintone shield, like being on your own in a fruit export business means having Brazilian gangs co-opt your products to smuggle drugs or gold whereas having a White partner means a certain protection from that since the Brazilian gangs are more wary as a White person being killed would cause a huge hubbub when a local being killed wouldn't even merit an investigation. Plus there was some interesting stuff around the difficulties of finding gold at all compounded by the need to run a mine illegally since the minute you tried to go legal everyone would find out about it and come in for the literal kill. This meant, plotwise, the lead getting involved with a whole bunch of other criminals. And, because there was so much money, the cops as well. So even though shows of this ilk can sometimes drag even when they're at their best, you can see how this one had enough juice and interest to it to tell a reasonably compelling story. Unfortunately, as mentioned, the creatives pulled it into tedium by drawing out each episode, not with storytelling but with filler. As an example: natives are getting ready to go fight and they put on tribal makeup... for the duration of me sitting there watching them, getting bored, getting up to go hunt for a snack while leaving the show running, looking and then rejecting several snack prospects, eventually settling on one, tossing it in the microwave, then ambling back to my sofa WHERE THEY WERE STILL PUTTING ON MAKEUP! Or you watch a boat on the river that's going to drop people off and you see the dock in the distance then cut to someone in the boat looking at the dock then an overhead shot of the boat then the boat moving closer to the dock then inside the boat as someone slows the engine down then a shot from the jungle of the boat 10 feet from the dock and… yeah, that was the problem. They had an interesting show that was pretty classily done but they kinda killed it with their editing. So while it's not a 100% pan because there was interesting stuff there, I'd say it's a kind of a bottom of the barrel pick if you've run out of shows and like the basic topic and genre and are at the point where some entertainment is better than none - and btw I'm fairly certain that descriptor was what everyone involved was dreaming of for a review - then maybe.
Succession (Season 3):
I'm so glad I overcame my initial reluctance to this show due to its relentless (mono)tone because I totally inhaled this latest season. For those who don't know: this is a series about a vicious family of billionaires and their painful interplay and struggle to remain a semblance of a family while also constantly undermining and grabbing power from each other. As noted previously (prior reviews here and here), it took me several tries to click with the tone of this show. In the same way that everyone on Deadwood, for example, talked in a particular, often repetitive, and sometimes distracting way, so with this show though this show is way less distracting than Deadwood IJHO. Even though I thought there were some flaws this season (more on that in a second), it was still so overwhelmingly entertaining that I really didn't mind. This season picks up directly from the last and, while I won't go into plot for spoiler reasons, in some ways, if you've watched this show at all, you have a general idea of where each season goes in that the entire thing is around efforts to manipulate a family company for personal ends meaning loyalties constantly shift throughout leading to outcomes that discombobulate whatever plan everyone had and thus compelling them all to reconfigure. That sameness, in which each season tracks the characters as they plow forward in their new uneasy, manipulative, and untrustworthy alignments with each other as they deal with (or cause or both) whatever's happening with the company, is very satisfying to watch because it's never really clear where anyone will wind up which creates a form of narrative drive that keeps it all moving forward. I guess my critiques in a way have to do with the way the writers managed to evolve one of the siblings - Roman - but really kind of left the other two doing iterations on the same things they've done before. This wasn't boring or anything because, as noted, the show is entertaining, but I felt like they were kind of held in a season 1 stasis whereas I really wanted them to start changing. I guess the other component that I'm iffy on is that the kids/parents relationship also seems stuck in season 1 though again not in a bad way exactly but rather in a way I hope goes somewhere else in season 4 (which I think is maybe the final season though I'm not sure?). Look, these are quibbles and vague ones at that for spoiler reasons. If you can push past the abrasiveness of the tone and aren't bothered by the nonstop "fuck"-stream that comprises a lot of the dialogue, this series is really pretty great - smartly written, vicious but also with emotional depth, and with a plot where the pieces are on shaky enough ground to provide a form of mystery in that you can't really tell where it's going to go since a sure-bet one episode can be upended the next. I'm 100% into this show, love it.
Movies:
The Boy Behind the Door - This horror/suspense film about two kidnapped children was so awful and so DNF'ed that I debated not writing about it all - trust me when I tell you the words I've written thus far are markedly more riveting than anything in the script - but decided to put something down in case this film wound up on anyone’s radar. Basically it starts off with two male best friends (they look around 8-10 or so) playing catch and discussing how they want to go to the beach at which point their ball rolls off into the woods, one goes to get it and never returns then the other follows and boom they're both in the trunk of a car, a scene we saw about 2 minutes earlier but where the filmmaker for no discernible reason decided to use that as a setup, i.e. kids in trunk screaming, card on screen with "6 hours earlier", 2 minutes of dialogue then back to the trunk. What follows is that one of the kids is taken into a house and the other kicks his way out of the trunk and gets away... then decides to return for his friend (this motivation, presumably, was why we heard them talking on the beach earlier, to establish their bestie-ness as if that were necessary). It's an atrocious decision obviously on like 2000 different levels since the obvious decision, even for a child concerned about his friend, would be to get adult help. Instead, the kid decides to sneak into the house he just escaped from and, basically, creep around hoping he won't get caught while searching for his friend to try to get him out. It's about as dumb as you can imagine from there but what made it a DNF for me was two things. First, watching adults do this kind of sneaking around thing in movies is drastically different than watching a child do it; with adults it can be scary and tense even if the decision is dumb because they at least have a chance to maybe win given body size and knowledge of how the world works; by contrast, there's no pleasure in watching a child walking into this situation since you know, barring the filmmaker making a billion contrivances as with this movie, that the kid realistically has zero chance of succeeding. It's depressing not fun. Second, this movie was friggin' boring! OMG you're just watching someone sneak around a house for like 30 minutes. He has no plan no nothing, just tiptoeing, then eventually the inevitable moment where he makes a sound and the bad guy comes after him and where the above contrivances come into play and really I've written too much about this movie. It's not fun bad; it's just dull and, if you're like me and don't gain pleasure from watching kidnapped elementary schoolers, a bummer as well.
What is DNF? Hard to understand some of this