Media Report
Foundation, an Apple rant, Legendary, and more!
Books:
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
This is a fiction book set against Russia's transformation from a tsardom to communism but is really more of a gentle-humored novel about what gives life meaning. I will say upfront: in general I struggle with books of this ilk (the degree to which you were bor-angry with Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist may serve as a litmus test in this regard) because my tolerance for sweet small homilies with a character making observations about the important things in life borders on nil. So the review of this book is that I finished it and didn't hate it meaning if you do like these sorts of books and haven't read this one yet you'll probably love it. The basic story is: at the dawn of the communist revolution, a Count, for reasons not worth going into (fine, he wrote(ish) a poem) is, rather than sentenced to death for being part of an oppressive wealthy class, instead sentenced to life in Moscow's finest hotel and the book tracks his life there and the people who come and go as well as the overall shape of changes in Russia across the years. The writing has charm and humor but the book itself is pretty plotless; it's more or less a series of extended vignettes with time gaps between them. The plots within these vignettes are tiny - machinating to get all the ingredients for a Bouillaibaisse for example - but the writing is good and manages to infuse drive to fairly mundane stories with, as mentioned, quite a bit of humor. My struggle with this book was really that I never wanted to pick it up. I enjoyed it when I did but, due to the lack of an overall plot and its slice-of-life nature, there was nothing about it that made me want to continue simply because while I knew whatever section I was reading next would have amusement and a general extension of the Count's story/life, not much would be happening and the little stories - more fables in a way without the fantastical nature of a fable - while entertaining wouldn't ultimately go anywhere. This isn't a criticism of the book; rather it's what the author intended. But, for me, it almost read like an adult version of a young child's book, kind of like linked short stories set with the same characters in the same world at a different point in time but something you could put down at any second and where events from a prior section didn't really even need to be remembered to understand the subsequent section. Again, despite this reaction, I still finished the book and am planning to try some of the author's other books because he can clearly write. And I guess the fact that I finished despite being resistant to this subgenre means it probably is a very good book, just one not to my personal taste. So if you like, I don't know, inspirational (or something?) books - Life of Pi, Tuesdays with Morrie, etc. - then I'd say you'll definitely like this one and even if you're a cold-hearted cynic like I am, this book really isn't bad.
TV/Streaming:
Foundation (Season 1):
Look, I get it (kind of): you, Apple, spent, what I'm guessing is north of $100 million on this show - which let's face it isn't really even a rounding error for you given your company's trillion dollar valuation - and, because no one involved read the scripts or gave functional notes, you wound up with something completely unreleasable (for reasons I CAN'T WAIT to go into). And that's what you should have done, i.e. not released it. Because releasing this unwatchable piece of pricey garbage comes at a cost, which is your brand. The fan-base of your brand - or prisoners really, though of the Patty Hearst sort that gets trapped, brainwashed, and then super aggressive about their “choice” - who, due to the difficulty of getting out of your walled hardware garden, may keep upgrading to newer - note: newer not better since within Appleland there's zero competition thus no real need to make anything more than the incrementally better necessary for marketing purposes plus some flashy bits of software, i.e. has Apple really innovated since it was forced to a few decades ago when it broke into the phone market in such a huge way? (no) - but that imprisoned fan-base isn't locked into your content in the same way as people can watch whatever they want. Perhaps you're looking at the Netflix model which tossed any notion of quality ages ago and is just churning out volume at this point and maybe you want to do the same thing, i.e. have so much content that good/bad no longer apply since a viewer can always find something to watch if they’re willing to wade through all the junk. Though as Netflix’s prices keep going up, I guess we’ll eventually find out how long a sea of mediocrity or outright garbage broken up by occasional bright spots can last. But, Apple, given your slim content volume, and honestly given that you have a brand already associated with high-quality (unearned as, like Sony in the '90s, you've been coasting on your name), I guess I thought you were trying to be something like the next HBO, a brand associated with high-quality entertainment. I think AMC has a version of that brand as well as does the BBC in a different way. So perhaps I'm just misunderstanding your strategy but one would think after putting yourself on the map with Ted Lasso, you would've been more thoughtful about building audience.
WELL APPARENTLY NOT! This show is bad for a single reason and it's a reason that pervades every episode I was able to suffer through (and they're around an hour each btw so it was a fair amount of suffering): it's unbelievably fucking boring. It's so boring it begins to almost feel intentional, like the showrunner really wanted to create a 10-hour meditation retreat but was forced to do this sci-fi thing instead and went with their heart. Here's why it's boring: there isn't a single beat of character, not a moment in the show that isn't filled with seemingly endless exposition that - and this was an incredible trick - manages to explain absolutely nothing; to get a sense of this show, go watch literally any sci-fi movie but mute the sound and instead play back Siri-voice reading a stream of random Wikipedia entries for several hours and you'll have sense of why this show is so bad.
What is the plot of this show based on a series of books by Isaac Asimov that I never read you wonder? Me too! As far as I can gather like 4 episodes in before some self-protective DNFing, there's a big empire run by someone who clones himself, a mathematical prophecy that the empire is doomed, and then the mathematicians are sent off to some planet to build an encyclopedia. There are ZERO characters. Literally no one talks about anything other than prophecy and plot. Let's contrast this to another show that also had a lot to explain yet managed to do it in a way that was totally gripping for eight seasons: Game of Thrones. Yes those early episodes of GoT somewhat famously had people spewing exposition naked to distract us. But you know what else it also had? Comprehensible human motivations that didn't require a lick of exposition: a girl who imagined she'd be a fairytale princess and had to scramble to find herself when that fantasy was brutally ripped away; a brilliant but physically different person who both resented and sought approval from his cruel father; siblings who'd had their inheritance stolen and were seeking to get it back. Stuff like that.
Writers/studios/networks, especially in these fantasy/SF shows but really in most shows (this is the source of pilot-itis where the first episode is truly awful) seem to think that characters speaking exposition or spluging voiceover somehow explains things, but exposition explains nothing; what explains a show is seeing people with comprehensible motives in situations where they're trying to get something for themselves, and exposition is only there to fill that out. Story determines exposition because the only exposition necessary is that in the service of giving context to story and all other world-building is irrelevant and an active negative because it's so boring. As an example from this show: in the first episode, one genius mathematician (which we know because she keeps muttering large prime numbers to herself - are you seeing what I mean by NO CHARACTER?) is whisked off from her hillbilly planet to the main one for reasons that are explained while actually explaining nothing and... there you go. Is that a character? Is that a person in a place who wants a thing? What was her life plan if she hadn't won a math contest? Does she have she friends? Is she mean biatch? A pleaser? In other words, her math skill and how that plays out is meaningless in and of itself because its sole relevancy is that it's the mechanism to drive the character into an unknown place where she will have to find herself and change and whatnot. But for this show, it stops at the exposition and then just repeats it ad nauseam for hours on end.
The show is obsessed with exposition at the expense of all else. It has things like a character asking a lot of questions - and some random character who's there solely to explain things then vanish - but who cares about any of it because there's no friggin' story! A tour of all the VFX Apple spent its cash on is not a story. For all the voiceover, exposition, and tour guiding, hours in I still had no idea what's going on. A city is wiped out in episode 1 and the next morning it's a nice sunny day and everything looks fine... as if everyone forgot the massive destruction from the prior day (btw at a level that would've destroyed the planet which we know because we know a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs). The people have zero personality or relationships - all they do is talk about the plot, a plot where I don't even understand what the stakes are for anyone. Like, yeah, the current empire will fall and too bad for those people and there's some doomy statement about a "dark time" but that's never explained even remotely nor is it explained why, given that everything in our world is more or less online, um so somehow the entire interplanetary internet will vanish in 500 years and they thus need to build an information repository in the middle of nowhere that no one can access anyway? This makes sense to whom? For all the exposition blabbing, the writers actually managed to explain nothing.
This is my usual rant with these things, but I really to the core of my being do not understand how no one reading these scripts thought they were crazy boring and sent the writers back to do a rethink. Maybe the original books didn't have much of a plot in them and were more idea-based but I'd say it's on the writers to sort that out then since a visual medium is different than a novelized one right? Anyway this is a storyless, plotless snooze and, between this, For All Mankind, Ted Lasso, and Acapulco (kind of) I think, if, Apple, you decide to reach for quality rather than quantity I'mma say something I’ve said before which is that might want to hire, say, English/Lit majors or people who love story rather than the quant MBAs or whomever it is you have overseeing your scripts now.
Legendary (Season 1):
If ever a competition reality show were made for the gummied, it's this one. This is a ballroom dance competition series and not Ginger Rogers ballroom but rather the underground dance scene, also called ballroom (ironically I presume?) from the '80s that spawned vogueing and has matured into this completely insane INSANE (!!!) group dance-off. It’s structured like a fairly typical competition reality show in which there’s a weekly theme of sorts, different types of challenges, and judgment, but everything else about it is this amazing combination of mind-blowing madness with the genuinely moving. Many - perhaps most - of the dancers come from really painful backgrounds, some due to circumstances around poverty, others from issues around sexuality and gender, and a lot from both, and the show, especially in the early episodes, really doesn’t shy away from taking time to share the backstories and show how this dance form counteracted their life pain to become an expression of pure joy. Those parts reminded me of the best version of Olympics backstory drama where you really get a sense of the people and why they compete. Obviously not every group is amazing, but there’s always at least one, often more, performance each week that made my head come off. At some point in every episode, I would inevitably find myself - sometimes out loud! - giving a “No fucking way” giggle of total disbelief from the insane dances. Part of me wants to tell you everything about this show, about the categories - like “Face” and you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that category is super entertaining - the judging, the costumes, how it all unfolds, but another part of me wants you to discover it they way I did, by knowing absolutely nothing and then just having your gummy-brain set on fire for like 45 minutes a week.
Movies:
Moffie - I feel like I repeat myself endlessly in this regard, but once again I'm baffled as to how this film wound up on anyone's best-of or "overlooked gems" list (and believe me, it did multiple times), and the only thing I can think is my go-to conclusion that non-Janices are telling people to watch movies for topic or edification and not for entertainment, though how anyone can be edified while snoozing is beyond me (though I'm open to it). This movie, basically a boot-camp new-recruit army drama of the kind we've seen millions of times before, is set in South Africa in 1981 when everyone was conscripted at 18 to go fight a war against communism at a border country. Oh and the lead character's gay. I say it that way because, while the film is entitled Moffie which is more or less Boer for "faggot” and while there's a lot of anti-gay locker-room talk in the barracks of the sort that was typical of that era and while some other gay recruit is whisked off perhaps to a mental institution never to be seen again, the character's sexuality was a complete irrelevancy to anything that happened in the movie. Sure, I get it there's no real coming-out in a country that's vehemently anti everything non-straight-White and... he didn't come out. But he seemed at peace with himself. And that's it. I believe it was this topic - neat, a different kind of apartheid - that prompted non-Janices to adulate this film but in all honesty I have no idea. The movie is slooooow; really nothing happens and the beats that do happen are, as noted, ones we've all seen in, say, Full Metal Jacket and the like, meaning there's a lot of soldiers standing at attention and being yelled at and running around and a bully recruit being mean to people and, yeah, some tentative vague offscreen gay sexual flowering I guess. And there you go. A guy goes to boot camp, nothing happens, he's sent to fight in a skirmish somewhere and that's scary for him and then - I promise this next bit, the ending, is no spoiler - he's in the ocean with some guy and maybe the guy is gay and giving him subtle cues or not and maybe the guy is getting closer to him or not and then the guy says he’s cold and gets out of the water and our lead follows and they lie down on the sand and then the guy says he's going to the toilet and our lead lies there for a bit and that's the end. It's also the entire movie, so if that sounded like gripping drama to you and some kind of subtle character juiciness then you will love this film. If you fell asleep reading it like I almost did typing it then you, as should I though I never do, should avoid all non-Janice overlooked/underrated quote unquote gems because basically I'm 99% sure based on past experience that they'll be precisely as boring as this one.
I'm Your Man - This is one of those German woman-falls-in-love-with-robot movies but unlike most in the gender-develops-feelings-for-robot subgenre I've seen, this one, while definitely somewhat cliche and thus boring for the first say 30 minutes kind of picks up and becomes more engaging, both storywise and intellectually, as the film progresses. The basic plot is there's this company that makes robots that have an algorithm to learn about a person and become their ideal companion via having programmed in the romantic notions of millions of people and what happens when a somewhat misanthropic archaeologist agrees to beta-test one for a few weeks. What made the early parts of the film somewhat dull were that the characters weren't doing much and felt like they were playing into type. She's a dry witted eye-rolling doubter who agrees to test the robot for reasons I wasn't honestly super clear on - I'm sure there was a sentence of exposition that I missed but it didn't really matter - and the robot (Dan Stevens) does a bunch of cliche romantic things (flowers, candles, etc.) in an effort to tune his algorithm to her. So for the first bit, she's not into it and he's playing a type. However, at some point, a work event completely unrelated to romance or relationships occurs and from that point on the movie becomes somewhat more interesting because as opposed to the forced romance that preceded that event, it's a completely different and very human thing of someone figuring out - algorithmically - how to be there for someone else in crisis, i.e. the robot doing what actual humans do with people they don't know well which is try to, with our own meat-algorithm, figure out what will help and form connection through being there for someone. In other words, harder than the cliches of romance is figuring out how to be someone’s friend. What makes the movie interesting is that she simultaneously finds herself connecting with and falling for the robot while also fighting against - and discussing with him - her intellectual self which knows she's being manipulated by an algorithm and that she's developing feelings for something that has no feelings just responses. And this is where the film became much more fun. There was something appealing about watching this woman - there's some decent humor in this film - battle within herself and something equally interesting about seeing how she was (and this is the interesting part to me)... manipulated? Cared for? Played? Understood? In other words, the movie trafficked in ideas around what connection really means if it can essentially be programmatically determined - or is that all we mean by connection, i.e. figuring each other out and giving each other what each of us needs so it’s fine for a computer to do it too? Though don't ask me what the filmmaker meant with the ending as it was just a bit of dialogue that I rewatched twice because it didn't feel like an ending at all and I'm really completely unclear what the takeaway is; maybe the ambiguity was intentional but it also definitely had the flavor of the filmmaker being unsure how to end the movie. So while it took a while for the movie to rev up and while I really don't know what the filmmaker wanted my takeaway to be (and again I'm not sure the filmmaker had much more than a hazy notion either), I thought this movie was a decent watch with some real charm to it and a fun play between emotion and intellect and I ended up enjoying it much more than the first chunk made me think I would.