Books:
The Affairs of the Falcons by Melissa Rivero
I feel kinda bad dissing this novel about the struggles of an immigrant family in New York, but I'm doing it anyway because in truth here I tried twice before DNF'ing out of sheer boredom. The reason I feel bad is because I know the topic is important and the writing not terrible but it read like a fictionalized version of a sociology book on immigration and, if I were interested in the subject matter, I'd rather have read that. The basic plot focuses on things we know to be true but laid bare: entire families crammed into the bedroom in an apartment they share with relatives, loan sharks, barely being able to pay for anything, sweatshops, abusive bosses, and inaccessibility to the system due to illegal status and the consequences of all that for the family. The problem for this Janice is, when it comes to that sort of thing, I'd always rather read a deep-dive news essay or listen to a multi-part podcast on the topic because when I turn to fiction, I'm looking for a story. The Girl with the Louding Voice, for instance, covered social topics (in Nigeria in that case) but with a vibrant lead character and a story of someone fighting to escape circumstances closing in on them. This book was too dry for me. The reason I DNF'ed wasn't because I wasn't interested in the true underbelly of illegal immigrant America but because the lead character felt like nothing more than a cipher - struggling mom, garment worker, etc. - rather than an actual character and the story felt more like points on a map, i.e. places the author wanted to take us so we could see what went on there rather than a coherent narrative. As I said earlier, the writing wasn't terrible or anything so if you're into the subject matter and prefer your social commentary in fictionalized form, then maybe you’ll be into it more than I was.
TV/Streaming:
Gossip Girl 2021 (Season 1):
Did you go into this reboot of the primetime soap about hot teens at a rich NYC private school hoping it would be as fun as the original which had lots of plots and romance and people screwing each other over but also had some character emotional realness which gave the froth some story grounding? And by you I mean me? Because you/I did and what we got is possibly the worst-in-a-bad-way series that I’ve seen in a while. At every level (though primarily the writing) the show is bad, and not fun-bad, but actual bad, the kind of bad that makes you (me again!) question the hiring process from top to bottom. By bad I mean this: the writing is awful and utterly devoid of anything resembling character, plot, logic, or even a basic idea of what the show is and what the audience is supposed to get out of it. The characters behave in ways that are solely for plot - unbelievably idiotic and nonsensical plot I might add - because no actual human being would ever do the things these characters do like, for example, a teacher parading around buck naked in front of a student, the sister-fight based on... okay I'm stopping myself here because all the plot/character stupidity honestly pales next to the true abomination of this show.
In the original Gossip Girl - which was mid '00s or so thus phones but no social media in the way it exists today - a student at the richypants school wrote gossip on a blog essentially making insider private actions/statements public and forcing everyone to deal with the fallout. No one, including viewers, knew who Gossip Girl was until towards the final seasons, but we knew it was student on student, and, in a world where people weren’t filming everything nonstop or confessing about all of it on Twitter, the Gossip Girl blog served as a kind of outing of bad/hypocritical behavior. In the reboot, it's not a student who restarts Gossip Girl but rather a group of teachers, the ostensible reason being that the teachers feel the rich students have too much power over them via parental financial pressure on the administration (this is idiocy I know but not the show's most egregious crime) so their idea is to create a Gossip Girl Insta account filled with gossip about the students so the students will focus on each other and not on the teachers - because, yeah, we all know teens struggle to focus on anyone other than themselves and their peers and then back to themselves again (no shade, teen readers, I was once one too I promise (assuming I’m not actually an AI, right?)).
At some point, this moronic reasoning vaguely creeps from "teens aren't self-absorbed enough so we need to make them that way" to “Gossip Girl is here to hold people accountable" - though for what exactly? We're talking about rich high-schoolers not, like, Congress or police officers or, I don't know, the Taliban. So what you end up with is the true abomination of this show which is that basically Gossip Girl is a bunch of adult social media bullies attacking children who are doing nothing more than making mistakes while sorting out their lives. That's what this entire show is. Teachers outing and publicly and anonymously shaming and creating trauma for students. How did anyone involved delude themselves into thinking adults preying on teenagers would be "juicy" rather than "repellent"? What made the original series work was that it was an anonymous peer writing all the gossip and, much like two 14 year olds having consensual sex isn't rape whereas a 14 year old having consensual sex with a 30 year old is, legally, rape, this show is basically positing that a series based around the gossip equivalent of a bunch of statutory rapists is super cool and so fun! It's not that I'm offended by it (nothing could penetrate my cold heart) but rather, once again, that I'm baffled that literally no one in the entire writer/studio food chain paused a moment to say, "gee, asking the audience to side with a mob of adult cyberbullies exposing the private lives of children for public mockery maybe isn't a great central idea for a show." So yeah the atrocious writing, nonsensical characters, and overall lack of anything resembling a coherent plot is nothing next to adults preying on childrens’ insecurities being the basis for a series. And while I eventually DNFed, as I knew the season had been released in two 6-episode chunks separated by several months (I don't know if that was a strategy, a COVID thing, or some other thing), I watched to episode 9 or something to see if the writers had had a rethink between the first 6 and the second 6 and I can assure they didn't but in fact only dug in deeper and made it worse, which I really didn't think was possible based on those first 6 so hats off for that.
Bonus Family (Seasons 1-4):
If you're a fan of amusing family dramas - by which I mean about families rather than family/kid-friendly (think: Last Tango in Halifax) - then you will have 4 seasons (so far) of delight if you haven't seen this one yet. Apparently some form of Swedish prudery or the like made discussions of the issues around stepfamilies and remarriages förbjuden until relatively recently and this show is about exactly that - "bonus family" is how Swedes refer to families as a result of other relationships. The series tracks the relationships and interminglings of three families (remarried spouses with kids and each of their exes) in a way that's both completely entertaining and dramatically well done. There's no big drama in this show as the stories which stretch across the seasons are small work or life issues that get magnified due to the complexities around different people with different lives interacting with each other due to circumstance rather than choice (like stepdad/stepkid conflict leading to stepdad/dad conflict leading to exes conflict etc.). The show has humor to it in the characters and the way their issues unfold which offers some levity to otherwise dramatic situations like the feelings that emerge in shoving together people who otherwise wouldn't even know each other let alone impinge on each other in ways that rub up against both parties. When shows of this ilk are done well, as this one is, and when they're a polite 6-8 episode binge per season, as this one is, I find these types of dramas to be thoroughly engrossing and I can say 4 seasons in that the writers have managed to allow the characters and relationships to grow while still keeping the issues that arise small enough to seem realistic and with characters who are engaging enough that it's fun to watch the particulars of how they resolve their issues. A gentle, well-done, amusing, binge-y drama - no complaints here!
Oh wait one complaint - fine more of a note: a few of the leads are recast in season 4 and it makes it kind of confusing and honestly somewhat irritating at least for the initial episodes because I was used to the other actors and liked them. Apparently this is a thing in Sweden - "bonus casting" perhaps - where they swap out actors all the time but I'm alerting you now in order to avoid season 4 confusion. BTW it doesn't matter. The show remains entertaining regardless because the characters are consistently written, the circumstances amusing, relatable, and dramatic by turns, and the micro-issues around making life choices played out in ways that sustain interest across the 8 episode season.
Movies:
Test Pattern - So I had mixed feelings about this film (plot coming in a minute). It's very indie and in some parts in a good way but in many ways I'd say it more shows the potential of the filmmakers and actors than necessarily being a great movie in its own right. It's not bad by any stretch; there's some good writing in it and the lead actors are very appealing; however, the idea of the film doesn't really go anywhere and barely sustains it for its short 90 minute running time. In fact when I initially started watching I imagined I was going to avoid giving much of a plot description because I thought I'd be spoilering something; as it turned out that's not the case so here goes. So the first, say, third of the movie is a romantic meet-cute in which two people get together, fall in love, and move in with each other and it's very charmingly and amusingly done. There's nothing happening beyond that, which was fine for a while because like I said the romance was done well, but you're waiting for it go somewhere. The place it goes is that the woman meets up with a friend at a bar and gets roofied - this sequence is about another third of the movie - and then the rest of the film is the woman and her boyfriend driving to various places trying to find a rape kit. I understand what the filmmakers were going for, kind of. The middle third definitely begins to feel like an issue movie in which you're in first-person fuzzy POV of someone clearly incapable of consenting to having sex with the guy who drugged her. In that section, she makes a lot of choices that are necessary for the non-consensual-sex plot setup but really don't make much sense in reality. Like it's the night of her first day on a new job and... she's going out to get crazy wasted with a friend? These points are kind of addressed but in reality the filmmakers wanted to put the character in this situation but didn't really write someone who would find herself in this situation, by which I mean, yes, of course, a drug can be slipped into a single drink, but they have the characters drinking a ton plus eating a pot gummy. Were they trying to say that maybe she wasn't roofied but rather just got herself too drunk and too high or something? And what would that mean? They painted the guy as being less wasted than her which would seem to indicate he was in his right mind and knew she couldn't consent but then the filmmakers have him give her a ride home which would seem to indicate that the guy doesn't think what happened the previous night was anything other than consensual. To me this was thematic confusion rather than intriguing ambiguity because none of it was ever explored or discussed. The final third is, literally, the two leads going from hospital to hospital and getting a runaround because, I guess, it's hard to find a place with both a rape kit and a properly trained nurse to administer it. Okay. But what the final third set up and what it utterly lacked was any meaningful dialogue whatsoever between the two leads about how they were feeling or relating to each other after this event - which feels like what it should've been, i.e. a great exploration between two well-established characters in a well-established relationship and how they deal with this awful event together. Instead it's a lot of driving. See what I mean by showing potential but not paying it off? The pieces were all there and there was clearly talent in the writing and acting but the film really needed some development notes and a few more drafts to fully realize its potential.
Lara - This is a German movie about a mother trying, badly, to reconnect with her son. The entire film takes place over the course of a day, the mom's - Lara's - 60th birthday where her 20something son, an accomplished pianist, is performing at a concert that evening. While it's a little slow out of the gate, overall I thought the film was really interesting and completely glued together by a great performance by the lead actor who plays Lara. The movie doesn't tell you exactly what happened with the mother and son though you can infer it because she's a cold, horrible person and pretty much universally loathed so, even though the scenes with the son don't go into specifics, you get the gist of why things are the way they are between them. And this is really where the actor carries it because there's a lot of silence in the film, meaning the only way you can understand Lara’s internal state and motivations is through the performance and, while some of it was a little obtuse, for the most part it totally worked. Also, I thought the ending was both unexpected and completely spot-on for the character. Look, it's not a perfect film, maybe too heavy on implication rather than dialogue and the character makes some choices that no amount of top-level acting can really make totally clear, but it kind of didn't matter. Mostly what I liked was that she's a horrible person struggling with the recognition that she's created the - intriguingly codependent I might add - rift between her and her son and is trying to heal it but being in some ways functionally unable to fix anything. Also, without spoilering, I liked the way the filmmaker introduced a character into the mix who didn't initially seem to make plot sense but really became a driving character beat that led up to the ending I admired all of which I thought worked in an interesting way. I think you need to be in the mood for capital C Cinema to enjoy this film, but if you are it's definitely interesting and a good conversation-driver if you're watching with others.