Books:
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
I'd say this highly-lauded, fellow-Janice-rec'ed novel about (ostensibly) Black twins (one of whom lives life passing as White) plus both of their daughters set across a timespan covering roughly the '50s-'90s is (actually) about none of that and is in fact about absolutely nothing. I mean I finished it partly because a fellow Janice liked it but mostly because I kept thinking surely it most go somewhere at some point, right? (Uh, no just FYI). So if we're counting not DNFing as a win well this book won. Here are the main reasons this book is bad. First and foremost and really by far number one this book is an object lesson in the total narrative disaster that comes from not heeding the age-old writing adage of "show don't tell." There is nothing but "tell" in this book as in, to pick one of bajillions of examples, the author tells us that a character is tired of a relationship instead of showing us the character in the relationship and witnessing her tire of it. Fine, here's another one: while we are told endlessly that the passing-as-White twin (who ditches her family in order to pass and can't/won't (for the most part) acknowledge or see them ever again), we're never shown anything about that character that would give a single lick of a reason as to why; instead we're just told this information. Why can't she visit her sister secretly if she feels she needs to do so? No idea. Why does she go through life feeling perfectly fine leaving her mother to wonder if she's dead and never seeing her again like that’s pretty cruel right? No idea. We're told she does, but we're never shown why, and this tell-don't-show makes the book crazy dreadful. I mean, the setup isn't terrible. Like sure I'm into knowing about race and to an extent gender issues across a time period then seeing how all that plays out over two generations. Well, spoiler alert, nothing happens. And this would be the second problem with this book: nothing. HAPPENS! Really, you'd think a book with this setup would be fraught with plot; instead you just have an enormous tonnage of the "tell" noted above and then people doing extremely mundane things with no reasons as to why any of those things are in this book. For example, at some point (and it's not spoiler since it's so obvious this is going to happen), the two daughters meet and the White one finds out her mother is Black and has been lying and, oh, she just discovered she has an entire other family and that she is biracial. This would seem to be fertile ground for lots of character beats and drama and whatnot. The author's choice? Spend 50 million words ignoring all of that and instead focus on that character's pretty lame acting career and tell us all about the time she spent acting on a soap opera and some of the soap opera plots she was in. Ummmm, yeah. The underlying writing isn't bad, but at a narrative level, it's the kind of thing you might expect from a college senior taking their first stab at trying to write a novel and certainly absolutely nothing publishable. Basically it feels like the author had a general idea for a story then wrote a bunch of backstory notes on the characters and then somehow someone to published those and slapped the appellation "novel" on it and called it a day. Which I guess worked because this thing was a bestseller so kudos. In any event, if you're looking for an intergenerational novel about race over across a 40 year time period, well just stare into space and imagine what that might be because whatever's in your head is more entertaining that whatever this author wrote.
TV/Streaming:
Better Call Saul (Seasons 1-6):
Well in the world of spectacularly great shows I'd say this is right up there with Gomorrah and The Bureau (well until season 5) and its predecessor Breaking Bad as really one of the most gripping series I've seen. What makes it so great is the patience and cleverness of the writing by which I mean it tells its story in its own time which makes its plot twists both shocking and utterly credible as in in large part for much of this show I never saw them coming but once they came they made sense. Clearly I'm not going to spoiler any of them here but I'll just say investing in this show is totally worth it, though admittedly not super easy in the first few episodes and particularly not if you (as I did) felt Saul's character in Breaking Bad was good but kinda cartoony and had no real interest in seeing his backstory. Well you do - trust me! It's a drastically different show from Breaking Bad but with the same interesting theme which is how a character starts one place and winds up someplace completely different and the show is about the how and why of that journey. The journey on this show isn't remotely like Walter White's on Breaking Bad which was really, I'd say, about someone finding and embracing his true, repulsive self, one that had lurked there the entire time and which the plot necessities of the series allowed him to free. This show is in some ways the opposite in that Saul's character is someone who starts knowing he's fighting a lot of inner demons and his slide into a kind of unpleasureable hopelessness due to being let down by so many people around him. What I mean is they may be set in an overlapping world but they're just drastically different people with very different paths. The strength of this show is basically in everything - it's a perfect confluence writing, acting, and directing where you feel that there are all these interesting and well-drawn people behaving in ways you totally buy and who feel like they have entire lives offscreen which is really the hallmark of a great show. I'll say though: you absolutely don't need to have watched Breaking Bad to enjoy this show; I watched over the years as this show was released and honestly by the time it started intersecting with Breaking Bad I'd kind of forgotten the details of that show and I can assure you it made no difference. This series is a big, juicy, slow-burn, character-driven, well-plotted drama with a lot of humor and, most importantly, the knowledge that you're dealing with a writing team committed to paying off your 6-season investment in a thoroughly satisfying and cohesive way and I just totally loved it and if you're not watching then stop reading this (well after you get to the end and share with a million people clearly) and go watch right now.
Snackmasters (Seasons 1-3):
This is a total background noise (and in all honesty barely that) cooking competition show in which two megachefs are tasked with recreating a common (British) product from scratch with the results being judged by people at the company that make the product, like make an exact replica of a Dominos pizza with zero improvements as the intention is to fool the judges. It sounded interesting and I watched all three seasons (by which I mean they may as well have been a podcast because I glanced up so infrequently) but the problem, and I guess a vague part of its interest, is this: industrial processes border on impossible for anyone, no matter how skilled, to reproduce. Part of the show heads to the factory to see how the actual item is made and while, yes, there's some marginally interesting craftiness in seeing how the chefs are going to, for example, get that mini-latticework in the British version of Chex or mirror the flavor and texture of the cheap waxy chocolate coating on a (British version of a) Whoopie Pie, in the end it's all kind of boring because it's so impossible. In other words, the show doesn't wind up being about creativity but rather kind of a challenge a la "make a souffle over a campfire" meaning you’re watching people butt up against technical limits rather than creative ones which is kind of not super interesting is it? I mean, yes, I'm sure the industrial oven used in professional kitchens is amazing, but it's nothing compared to a factory-sized oven/drying-device/steamer with everything on conveyor belts moving through precise temperatures for a precise amount of time. So the show is more or less watching chefs kind of live with what they have and sometimes getting kind of close but there's never the sense that anyone could truly fool the experts. Nor really is there anything you might want to have reverse-engineered by a pro to make at home, like remember in the dawn of the internet where arguably one of its first memes was a recipe for Mrs. Fields cookies which someone claimed to have stolen as revenge on the company only the recipe turned out to be crap, like an oat cookie with some chocolate chips, and later that same recipe and story showed up as a Nordstrom's Cafe revenge cookie? Yeah, you're basically watching people make that and if you're wondering why I stuck around with something that I'm dissing to this extent, it's because the show had a sense of humor so listening while being very involved in other things was perfectly fine.
Movies:
Skylines - This is the third in a sci-fi series about alien invaders sucking people up into huge ships and then eating their brains or using them for some other purpose and what happens when the power of familial love (kind of Ghost without the pottery wheel but with brain-inhaling robots instead) allows for the humans to fight back. I was highly entertained (high being the operative word here) by the first two (well first one because I guess I forgot to write a review of the second, not that it matters because it more or less would’ve been exactly the same as the first) and remained so for this third one. I have no idea where this trilogy came from; I'm not even sure it was ever released in cinemas and the first one came out like a decade ago so it wasn't some direct-to-Netflix movie either. The cast seems to be primarily American but maybe they're made and released overseas? Too lazy to Google but regardless, they're pretty fun and this third one is no exception. To the series' credit, it manages to tell a sustaining story you can watch in order like I did but you can also just randomly watch because it's not super hard to figure out what's going on and in this one they have a sort-of "previously on" to get you up to speed. Essentially each movie sets up a context for some big-ass action FX sequences which is what makes them fun: these movies know what they are - spectacles - but they also give enough color to everything that you know why people are doing what they're doing. The first one was based around the aliens invading; the second was based around the humans fighting back; and this third one is (more or less) the aftermath of what happens when the resolution of the second one goes awry in that (without really spoilering (not that it would make a difference to enjoying these films honestly)) the thing the humans did to subdue the aliens stops working and now they have to make a hard choice about what to do next. Look, these are not genius but they are the sort of popcorn movie that existed before movies became big-budget comic books in that the FX are better than average when it counts (as in vacillating between one or two big-budget sequences and otherwise looking a lot like the original Star Trek) but where a lot of the movie relies on a combo of character beats and action sequences like chase scenes or sneaking into places rather than wall-to-wall FX like in the Marvel movies. If you've seen District 9, you'll know exactly the kind of film I mean - entertaining, not super-bloated, a mission of some sort you can track across the whole film, and enough FX to setup the world while saving most of it for the big finale. In the absence of budget, you have to get creative with your story and other action sequences (unlike Marvel which throws money at problems and leaves its stories bloated and nonsensical - and with not even that awesome FX) and while I'm not saying these movies are like the height of genius or anything, if you're just looking for some SF popcorn, they've been consistently entertaining.