Books:
Bunny by Mona Awad
So before I describe this book - and perhaps in some ways this serves as the review - I'll just say that the minute I finished it, I texted a fellow Janice and asked zie to read it because I needed to discuss it with someone immediately. Good or bad don't exactly apply as it was just so... weird!! Though to be clear: any book that demands discussion is de facto good IJHO; whether this book turns out to be to your personal taste or not - and I’m not entirely clear whether or not it was to my personal taste - it is unconditionally good for that reason because, even if you despise it, you’ll still want to talk about it, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s peak fiction. I'll tell you the plot but I can't even tell you exactly what the genre is. The basic gist is the story is set at a grad school writing program in a place that felt kind of Yale-y in that it's a highly respected school in a dangerous town. The book is told entirely first-person and is about the narrator's hatred of the other four women in her writing program who are in a clique with her on the outside and what happens when she's, for lack of a better way of putting it without spoilering, invited in. The book is relentlessly what it is and step by step takes you down a, I have to say it, rabbit hole. The narrator is almost completely passive in what happens to her as she gets sucked into the clique but how she changes as a result and why she ultimately turns, what she does after, and where the whole thing winds up (I know I know so vague but, ya know, spoilers) makes it seem like the author absolutely had total command of what she was writing while at the same time leaving me grappling to sort it out, which is a compliment because I think she told the story in this manner, one in which the story itself is clear but the larger meaning isn’t, because otherwise the story wouldn’t have worked. I also think the the manner of telling the story in many ways echoed the internal chaos of the narrator. To be clear (again): the writing is good and the story is simple to follow. It's not obtuse or anything like. Rather it has dream logic or madness logic only it's not a dream nor is the lead character insane (I mean I don't think it's either of those things but could possibly be convinced otherwise). The author is super incisive about academia and graduate creative writing programs - I mean the book is friggin’ funny in the way it paints these characters - which is in part why the story felt metaphorical, only as mentioned I couldn't really figure out for what. Alternatively, I'm just reading into it and it's just some kind of weird witch-y genre book - though honestly I don't think so simply because of things like the following: as I mentioned, the lead character is really passive and just seems to let things happen to her and doesn't fight them even though she may not want them; very late in the book - and this isn't a spoiler - there’s a writing class critique on one group member's writing which features a narrator who’s passive and lets things happen to her and doesn't fight back etc. So there's obviously authorial awareness here and some kind of internal linkage which is what makes me think calling it anything other than contemporary fiction was a marketing ploy (the marketing seems to nod it into the horror genre though it really isn’t). In any event, if you decide to read it, my advice is read nothing about it and see what you end up thinking, though maybe make someone else, or your book club, read it with you because if the book is to your taste, i.e. if you don’t DNF, you’ll want to talk about it.
TV/Streaming:
Atlanta (Season 1):
So when this show first came out, I watched an episode, got kind of bored, thought I knew what the show was – slacker slacking his way through life/music-scene – and that was that. Then, because this show received so many non-Janice accolades (a garden path I’ve been led down countless times I’m sorry to say (sorry for me that is)), I decided to retry and, yes, the first two episodes kind of are that. And then the show decides it’s not going to be just that but is going to be something bigger about striving and race and groping through life and I got really into it. It becomes a series, not so much of episodes, but of meandering yet connected vignettes. There are overall season character plots but really it’s a show about minor issues which unravel in ways that feel more naturalistic than OTT. For example, the main throughline is about Donald Glover’s character, in his sloppy, lazy way, trying to promote his cousin who’s trying to break into the rap scene, and there’s an episode where Donald Glover’s character is at some kind of record industry party and is mistaken by someone for being a manager/agent they knew from back when. While mistaken identity is a fairly standard sitcom plot, what makes it interesting in this show is that, sure, there’s some comic flailing in there but really it’s played in part for the discomfort of not fitting in combined with a certain contempt for the people he’s hoodwinking combined with a conflicted desire to be part of it. That was my takeaway at least and also what makes the show interesting: it’s not obvious and the characters are messy and unclear within themselves. Nothing dramatic happens but it’s uncomfortable, partly because his poseur-ing isn’t the greatest and partly because the mistaken identity comes from a White person thinking he was a former colleague meaning there’s a casual sense of “all Black people look alike to White people” undertone which plays out in terms of a certain boldness by Donald Glover’s character in exploiting that cliche (it’s never stated and it’s left open whether or not the White person really did mix him up with someone who looks a lot like him or not) as well as the oppressive invisibility engendered by that cliche. It’s that mix of comedy with discomfort with underlying social commentary that makes this show so interesting and also very entertaining. What’s really great about this show is, in addition to the humor and characters, there’s a meatiness to it that makes each episode engrossing. It’s not a (an?) LOL-type comedy but rather an interesting slice of life drama with humor. Yay me for not being married to my initial impression and reconsidering!
Queen Sugar (Season 6):
Well I warned you, Queen Sugar, after your abominable season 5 COVID pivot that I'd give you one more chance to see if you went back to being the engaging drama that you used to be, the one that spoke in a unique way to issues of race and America while still keeping interesting plots in play, and, if it’s possible to be sorry for a success, then I am sorry to announce that Queen Sugar has successfully undergone genre reassignment surgery from engaging TV show to nonstop nanny-lecturing snoozy bore. The show has tossed anything resembling plot, character, or literally any continuation of anything that happened in prior seasons in favor of shoving the characters into Very Important Social Circumstances Which We The Writers Can Lecture You On situations so the writers can do exactly that, finger-wag, lecture, nag, tell us how it is. It's as if the writing team forgot it was working on a TV show and instead decided they were all of bunch of Substackers whose hook was turning Googled statistics about racial and class issues into a story form, sort of like ISIS does with their recruitment comic books only for carez-y awokening instead of terrorism.
For example, the writers must have decided that they wanted to tell everyone what they thought about domestic abuse so, for absolutely no plot reason whatsoever, they stuck in some domestic abuse survivor for one of the leads to interact with this season thus enabling said lead to make heartfelt statements about the circumstances and so the writers could teach us all a little something about the issue and so another character can look caring and kind. It’s kind of tragic that a show that was actually about something degenerated into a nonstop polemic about social issues and how, in the writers' minds, people should be behaving instead of what it used to be - characters in situations behaving as their characters would and, because they were a Black family living in a racist and unprivileged part of Louisiana, the social commentary and issues showed up naturally in the lives of the characters and the characters dealt with them in ways that felt both real and compelling BECAUSE THERE WAS A FUCKING STORY; absent that story, absent those specific characters, the show has nothing to say that I can’t Wikipedia - just like the writers did - if remotely interested. The failure of this show - sad given its success in this area in the past - is its failure to integrate social issues into a narrative. So ba-bye Queen Sugar; you lost the right to lecture me when you chose to bore me with your moral superiority instead. Once again, I'm baffled that no one involved in the financing of this show - because surely I can’t be the only person who ceased watching as a result of this shift from entertainment to nagfest (am I?!?) - said anything but either they didn't notice, didn't care, or drank the Kool-Aid (sidebar: how do we think Kool-Aid feels about still being connected to lemming-like suicidal behavior more than 40 years after the incident that generated the phrase? or is Kool-Aid in the “no such thing as bad publicity even if it’s suicide” space?) because it just isn’t possible that an objective outside professional, especially one who’d been involved in prior seasons, could read multiple episode drafts and not notice that the story had completely vanished from the show. RIP, Queen Sugar Seasons 1-4 and I’m sorry the creative team felt compelled to murder you.
Movies:
Volition - I DNF'ed this one so fucking quickly I can't even remember what it is. Let me think a second. Nope, I have no idea. Googling... oooooooooooh right, now I remember. First off, I did not DNF this one as it turns out but clearly the fact that I thought I did tells you everything you need to know. Second, I don't think there is a second. Basically the movie's about a lifelong-down-on-his-luck loser who has an ESPish thing where he can see a bit into the future kinda sometimes and not all that well which he uses to pay the bills (though not many of them) and how he gets dragged into some diamond-stealing scheme and how he attempts to travel back in time to prevent any of this from happening to begin with. Of the many barely swallowable plot issues in that pile, the thing I struggled most with in the film is that the whole thing is triggered by the loser’s failure to come up with $500 for rent because, like, it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to know that’s due on the first of the month and maybe you should get on that before the landlord comes banging on your door. Also if you had clairvoyance and were of a criminal bent, wouldn’t you be hanging out, oh, in Vegas or at the race tracks where your occasional vague vision of the future could result in some real cashola as opposed to, say, doing the same in an impoverished blue collar town? I’m sure there was some amazingly logical plot reason why someone with a power that could make them bajillions in stock trades couldn’t pay rent and was forced to take side gigs working for a criminal gang which got them into a hot mess of trouble… actually I’m not sure there was though now that I’m typing this review, I’m having vague flashbacksthat there was some kind of serum/experiment involved that allowed for the time travel and then some big logic puzzle about how past and present interrelate and perhaps that explained it? If anyone involved in the making of this film had had “clairvoyance” - aka reading the script - they would’ve known better than to finance it and I guess I proved my own lack of clairvoyance by choosing to watch it.
Free Guy - This is a Ryan Reynolds action movie about a background character in a videogame who develops AI sentience. Despite the fact that you could see every plot beat almost before the movie even started, it was still pretty fun. I mean, it's super G-rated in that while there's tons of videogame action chaos - the game Ryan Reynolds exists in is a Grand Theft Auto-type game where players are criminals going around robbing and blowing everyone up - it's still ultimately pretty gentle and much of your feelings about this movie will depend on your feelings about Ryan Reynolds and his chipper blandness which is in full force here. The bad guy is the CEO of the company that's marketing the game and there's a plot around stolen game code and a teaming-up between one of the real-world code creators and Ryan Reynolds to get the data to prove the code was stolen and help Ryan Reynolds escape into a world outside the control of the CEO. Nothing textured here, very lite and almost fairytale-like with a Ted Lassoish lead who, through force of personality alone, changes the nature of the game. The tl;dr here is lukewarm. The movie was okay, in the same kids-show-but-with-adults category as the overrated/hyped Lupin (but significantly shorter and with better effects though equally directed at 10 year olds) and while the plot was instantly forgettable and the CGI of the variety that's both impressive and yet also somewhat boring because you've seen its ilk so many times before, the movie’s still fine enough to sit through though I’m pretty sure if I paused it, I would never have hit play on it again and then completely forgotten about its existence (see Volition above).