Books:
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
This sci-fi(ish) book is basically an '80s pop culture listicle with a plot and it was… okay. The basic story is set in a futuristic world where everyone plays this online game because there’s one winner and that person gets a bajillion dollars. More or less, it’s Willie Wonka in that the leads are young, the creator of the game a somewhat mysterious figure, and the overall tone that thing where it’s the good-hearted who deserve to win even if they make mistakes sometimes and the bad guys well they’re just really bad. I don’t want to totally diss it because it was fun enough, but it's also everything about YI hate YA: I really can't bear the overly simplistic romantic relationships and well-meaning leads. When it was breezy gaming action, fine, even though really the game part of it seemed to have a very hazy sense of its own rules, but whatever. I just struggled to get past the juvenile overly romanticized self-perceived-loser leads and the highly simplistic character interactions, the girl/woman-as-idealized-amazing-creature/object pined for by good-at-heart-but-unsure-of-himself boy and oh let's hope these two overcome their insecurities and get together. Really it felt to me like it was written by someone who'd never had a human encounter in his life, someone locked in a basement - perhaps by choice sexily - surrounded by nothing but Steven Spielberg movies, a director, btw, whom this Janice thinks is the filmic equivalent of a sociopath trying to pass for human in that his films feel as if he’s heard of human emotions but never actually experienced one himself and is fairly certain that, whatever emotions are actually like, they probably have a big violin score, a somewhat mystical quality to them, and maybe a girl in a red fucking coat. Which presumably made him the perfect director for the film adaptation of this book, though I’ll never know because, as someone who does have emotion - rage I’m imagining in this case - I’m unwilling to impose that on myself. All that aside, if YAness isn’t bothersome to you, you’ll probably enjoy this book more than I did and really even with the irritating YA stuff I still finished it and liked it enough to mention that fact in this review so surely that counts for something.
How to Walk on Water and Climb Up Walls by David Hu
This is a nonfiction book about the study of animal movement in order to apply it to robotics. Some of it's pretty interesting, like trying to figure out how flying snakes actually fly - and survive landing - since they look like every other snake in existence. Just to note: I’m acting like we all know what flying snakes are but of the many things I’m not interested in encountering in this life, those are now on the list. This animal-y part of the book was pretty interesting as it was about scientists figuring out things like how trout can use the energy of river currents so effectively to flex their bodies that even dead trout can “swim” upstream (who knew?). And, on the topic of swimming, a whole interesting section about how lizards swim through desert sand to hunt prey while remaining cool. Even though that stuff was pretty interesting, in the end I was lukewarm on this book, in part because the writing was sorta draggy but mostly because the parts I found to be interesting were studying animal movements which unfortunately made up about 1/3 of the book. The rest was engineers trying to figure out how to apply nature’s lessons to their robots which, really, was pretty dull since it was just about scientists failing mostly plus a lot of computer logic, and I guess as it turns out I’m only interested in the application of animal movement to AI as long as there’s an animal out there that’s somehow going to get engineers to figure out how to stop my robot vacuum from inhaling all my USB cables, at which point I’m totally glued.
TV/Streaming:
Succession (Season 1):
Well I guess third time really is the charm because the first two times I tried this series - once when it first came out and then like a year later after all the adulations - I DNF'ed. I truly hated it; I hated the nihilistic characters and emphasis on body-part quote unquote humor for quote unquote shock value (it opens with someone peeing on a carpet) and the complete sameness of everyone. Everyone quipped; no one did anything remotely realistic; they were all equally uncaring about how their behavior would be perceived by others to hardly mention why those others would then remain in the relationship with these people who treated them so badly. It all felt so forced and predetermined by the writers to do anything to make it feel, in their minds, edgy by having a bunch of rude people behaving in OTT ways and oh such a commentary on the shallow wealthy. It wasn't the rudeness that made me DNF but rather the sameness; I just got bored with it because every scene and character felt exactly like every other scene and character week after week after week. But then, knowing I had had a similar experience with The Leftovers where I DNF'ed after 5 episodes out of boredom then came back to it years later and found it to be compelling and moving and ultimately a great show, I was aware the same kind of thing could happen again. And drumroll it did. It's still exactly the above - everyone's quippy and nihilistic and uncaring about anyone else and behaving in absurd ways - but I think I turned a switch in my head and decided to hear the dialogue as, sort of, 30 Rock high-speed banter rather than actual text and put it a bit in the background of my mind if such a thing is possible (it is!) and focus more on the subtext and somehow that clicked. There's a lot of subtext, a lot of hurt, rage, confusion, frustration, feelings of less-than, feelings of being an outsider, not being enough etc. etc. - all very well-acted I might add - and somehow focusing on those real feelings being masked by all the same-y text transformed the show into something interesting because, while you always know the characters will in some ways make the worst or most destructive decision, as with real-world emotion-driven decision-making, the particular path, particular outcome, and particular response by the other party are all messy and unclear which gives the show a lot of drive. I imagine that's how people who've been loving this show from the start clicked with it and for whatever reason I got there this time. As you can see, this review is not focusing on plot - in case this show missed your radar, it's about a highly co-dependent mega-wealthy family that splinters and reconfigures in various forms around a plot involving the family business - but rather addressing those who, like me, nixed this show. It's 100% worth it if you can get into the same brainspace I got into (and which a fellow Janice who had the same initial reaction also managed to get into), and plays as a rompy well-acted quippily written family drama in which the nonstop text serves as an OTT cover for genuinely painful feelings in a family circumstance where vulnerability is crushed so everyone's trained to act as if nothing matters but where underneath it all deeply matters, and their core feelings, their uncertainty and that vulnerability drive all of their often destructive decisions. If that becomes your lens, this show is not only very entertaining - the machinations around the business are pretty fun - but also weirdly relatable.
COBRA:
This show was an irritated and not particularly satisfying DNF due to complete and utter writer aaarghness to the point that I could no longer handle it. The basic plot has to do with an environmental event and high-level government Brits dealing with the fallout. So basically there's a sunspot that causes some kind of photon plume that knocks out all the power. Fine, I thought, this sounds like a fun disaster show about people in crisis handling this destructive event and what happens to society etc., i.e. maybe dumb fun but fun nonetheless. That is NOT how this show dealt with it. This show dealt with it as follows: there's a photon plume wiping out all electricity in Britain - the show acts as if the rest of the planet doesn't exist but whevs - and all the media, the Prime Minister, the Brexiter who's trying to take down the Prime Minister and, as far as I can tell, the entire United Kingdom is obsessed with now that they are completely and perhaps permanently without power is... OMFG the PM's daughter’s college-aged bestie OD'ed on a molly the daughter gave her and oh the scandaaaaaaaaal! Because who cares about loss of power OR THE FACT THAT WITHOUT POWER NO ONE WOULD BE ABLE TO COMMUNICATE ANY OF THIS ANYWAY, no this remarkably unjuicy tidbit that I’m not sure would make it past, say, the editors at the NY Post (the Sun (newspaper not photon plume generator) I guess in the UK) even with all power flowing, becomes the center of the entire plot. It's that level of dumb. It's dumb in that the Prime Minister goes to some school or something to make a speech about everyone having to grin and bear life without power... only all the lights are on and the media broadcast is going where exactly without power? And everyone's frantically on their phones how? Look, I just couldn't take a writer who apparently cared so little about what they were doing and were so - I’m always baffled here: lazy? some straight-up lack of skill? - that they couldn't even be bothered to have anyone affected by the disaster they themselves had written into existence such that I was greatly relieved to learn I still had enough power in my hand to click “delete.” From the outside this may look like a classy high-end British miniseries but be warned it's been diagnosed by Janice as suffering from terminal dingbatry due to an attack by the lazy uncaring-and-or-unskilled writer amoeba. Avoid!
Movies:
The Wrath of Man - This is a kinda dumb but deeply entertaining heist/revenge movie in the classic Guy Ritchie/Jason Statham mold, i.e. lots of cameras swirling around, menacing music, chapter breaks, and a shitton of sneaking around and shooting people. If you hate the directorial contrivances of basically all Guy Ritchie movies, that thing where he smears his stylistic thumb onto every single frame, then you will hate this movie. If, on the other hand, you're a Janice looking for some silly entertainment that takes itself very seriously and with lots of tension, violence, and backstory reveals, well then you’ll probably enjoy it - I think it would be especially fun as a group watch. I've danced around giving you a plot description because parts are spoilerable (though really not in a way that would ruin the movie) but basically Jason Statham takes a job as a security guard for an armored car company and, during a heist, it becomes apparent that he's more than he seems and that the security job is the means to an ends of a spoilerable plot point. The movie is structured around whatever Jason Statham is doing in the present day followed by a big chunk of backstory followed by the present day payoff. Look, the plot is dumb dumb dumb and ceases making even a lick of sense the second you start thinking about it, but if you opt not think too much like I did (or didn’t?) and enjoy watching Jason Statham scowl, shoot people, beat them up, and enact a hugely complicated and completely absurd revenge plot, then you will assuredly enjoy this ridiculousness as much as moi.
Jan hon, about time you got on the SUCCESSION bandwagon. Won’t say “I told you so,” but c’est vrai. Succession is the greatest TV show of our times. Sucks that it has Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s and HBO’s name on it, but there’s also creator/super-genius Jesse Armstrong and he’s all that matters. You need to approach the dialogue like you would the language of The Bard because yes, this show is pure Shakespeare for the digital age and its language performs the same deliberate function. It is bawdy, grandiose, funny, metaphorical and scatalogical in equal measures. Characters USE it to distance, deflect and disarm each other. Much of the drama comes from what is unsaid or spoken around, exactly how real communication happens in real families. And yes, this is the Uber Family Drama on Steroids. Armstrong’s genius is in looking at Rupert Murdoch and all his Hellspawn and wondering, how does their supremely dysfunctional family dynamic play out such that it rattles the rest of the world, given how much of it they control. And how do we— all members of families— recognize ourselves in this? Season 1 is a warmup. Season 2 is so good it’s like snorting coke with Kendall Roy until you think your head will explode. Season 3 is arguably— and I mean episode by episode— the best season of written/acted/directed TV of our generation. Any episode of SUCCESSION makes a Janice understand the impossible process of filmed storytelling. The idea that one person (Mr. Armstrong) must keep an eye so tightly on this wildly flying ball that every tiny word, image and bit of physical inventory are relentlessly tracked such that the world he creates is seamless. A world that is imaginatively and fully alive.
I recently read he thinks the show should not continue much longer but exit the stage at a climax he can see coming quite soon. This Janice will be very sad, but understanding. Would Shakespeare sully his hands with Hamlet Part II? (No, that would be Pam Brady and Andy Fleming and see how that turned out)
Glad you came to your senses, hon. Jealous you have seasons 2 and 3 ahead of you. Meanwhile, i just finished season 3 and have started re-watching the whole show all over again at 1, something I will keep doing on repeat till 4 premieres.