Books:
Too Close by Natalie Daniels
Well I totally inhaled this somewhat mismarketed book which cuts back and forth between a suburban mom who, prior to the book start, had a mental break and did something (vague to avoid spoilering) and is now in a mental institution and the forensic psychiatrist with her own backstory and issues who's trying to coax what actually happened out of the mom. The mom has a sort of situational amnesia around the event which adds some interesting character stuff between her and the psychiatrist, but what really makes this book work is the writing. It sparkles with a kind of witty but grounded modernity, not only in the voice of the mom but in the very different voice of the psychiatrist as well as diary entries from the mom's 9 year old daughter. While you have a pretty good sense that something really bad went down with a few details about what that might be, the author manages to maintain a nice sense of mystery, partly around why everything happened, but mostly around the character motivations all of which gives the book some drive. The marketing makes it look like it some kind of Girl on a Train-type thriller (or, if you're me, not so thrillering and in fact somewhat obvious and boring but I digress). But it really isn't that. It's about two women with somewhat different and somewhat the same messy lives with unresolved marital issues forming a, not a bond exactly, but an understanding, human to human, that despite their current differences, they’re in similar spots. The book touches on all kinds of topics - marriage, friendship, children, ambition, aging - in a way that I found to be both insightful and fun. There's some very entertaining sarcasm in the mom's voice as well as amusing observations about sort-of suburban friendships (I say sort-of because the book is set in London but the area the leads live in have a suburban vibe to them). Really it's the story of two women who would otherwise never know each other forced together through circumstance and how they impact one another. I have zero complaints. There was a vibrancy to the writing, I bought the characters and situation, I was interested in both stories as well as the child's stuff in the diaries, and - and this is key - this book told its story then ended, as in I didn't feel there was really any fat in the book and it got where it needed to go and took me along for the ride and what else could one ask for in a piece of fiction? Simply because of the amnesia/mystery component, you could happily read this on an airplane though just as easily do it the way I did, i.e. start it at random one day, get inhaled by it, and boom it's done the next.
TV/Streaming:
Beartown:
Blargh I'm not really entirely sure why I watched the miniseries based on a book I thought was a'ight but nothing special but I did. And the miniseries gets exactly the same review only, because it took the main plotlines of the book and compressed them in a way that detracted from a bit of what made the book work, probably worse though honestly the book made so little impression that I can't say that with 100% certainty. The plot: a dying town way the hell up there in Norway (OMG it may be Sweden and if so sorry, Scandinavia, too lazy to Google) gets a new high school hockey coach and, as it seems, in media at least, rape and hockey go hand in hand, that's what happens leading up to the final game when the top hockey player is accused of raping the new coach's daughter. It's by no means a bad miniseries though I imagine I would have liked it a little better if I hadn't read the book because, even with having forgotten the drastic bulk of it, I remembered enough to feel like the book worked better because it delved into the interior experiences of so many of the townspeople and side characters and that the whole uber-plot relating to the big game and the new coach and the rape was more interesting and complex because of the differing ways it affected so many lives, i.e. the book was about a town whereas the series is about an issue. Essentially the miniseries tossed the bulk of the side plots and side characters and focused primarily on the transformation from crap hockey team into potential winners along with an ongoing conflict between the coach and the lead hockey player's father (they knew each other and had conflicts when they were younger) and all the victim blaming, e.g. "she was asking for it" and "couldn't she have waited until after the big game" etc. etc. The problem of course is that the story isn't particularly original nor does it even feel really all that current given all the real-world dialogue around issues of consent. We've watched underdog sports shows before where the new zie comes in and discombobulates everyone; we've seen stuff about dying towns trying to stay alive; we've seen stuff about teen rape and other people taking sides and whatnot. So I don't know. I finished it (it's only 5 episodes) and like I said it's not bad. But it's also highly predictable, like there isn't a beat you don't see coming - it's the kind of thing where if you're with someone and they want to watch it, you'll be fine sitting through it but otherwise there's no reason to go seek this out.
Snowpiercer (Season 3):
Well I continue to love this series (as you can see from my season 1 and season 2 reviews) based on a movie I never saw (and which several Janices have told me was a total abomination and thus I plan to never see). The basic setup is a near future Earth where all life has been wiped out due to some global deep-freeze situation and, in preparation for this event, the only life left is that on an ark/train that endlessly circles the globe. It's a class war and people drama in a very contained space but mostly it's about power plays between the leads, some for the straight-up ego of running things but mostly, in this season, about differing visions or where everything should be going. I'm being vague to avoid spoilering, but the writers have managed to make something so seemingly limited and small (people trapped on a train) into a fun plotty drama in which each season builds to a twisty payoff. In this season you can start to see the endgame, like it feels as if the series will build to something next season which will be wrapped up in a season or two max. I mean, I have absolutely no idea if this is true, but it tells you something (positive) about the show that I can even imagine it’s reaching for a big climax. If you liked the prior seasons, you will not be disappointed in this one as there's the same mix of betrayals, twists, problems with the train, brewing revolts, and shifting loyalties all with a blend of writing and characters and acting that, sure, ranges from good to terrible as noted in prior reviews but all feels of a piece. Whether it's true or not (and I really hope it's true), the writers seem to have a total grip on exactly what they're doing and what kind of entertainment they want this show to be and they're very consistent with it and I'm knocking wood they continue in that vein because it's totally working for me.
Movies:
Spider-Man: No Way Home (Marvel Universe #27) - I feel what I'm about to write is so repetitive that's it's basically become my mantra for these films but I. Understood. NOTHING! Truly zero. Oh, yes, I got the gist of the basic top-level plot - I mean I say that out of pride but it's totally possible I didn't get that either - but the other stuff, what I guess many people would term the "plot motivation" or "source of the action sequences" was far far beyond my comprehension. And part of me is thinking/wondering this: I recognize there are essentially three possibilities here with regard to my ongoing lack of understanding of what's going on in any of these Marvel movies. 1, they actually make sense and I'm an idiot; 2, they make sense at a good-they/bad-they level but not so much in the details and the details are what I'm getting hung up on; 3, they actually don't make sense. At this point, I'm open to any of these options and, well, let's see:
Okay so from something that happened with Jake Gyllenhaal in a prior film, not only was Spidey's true identity revealed but also people hate him for reasons I've mentioned numerous times previously (and why didn't anyone else like say the writers notice this), i.e. superheroes are a bad idea because they don't seem to understand the old adage (saw?) about the cure being worse than the disease, i.e. i.e. they murder thousands and wreak billions in property damage all in the pursuit of a few baddies and that seems like a pretty bad tradeoff right there. Fine so now everyone hates Spidey for exactly that reason and the law is after him (though honestly what that means to a superhero is pretty much beyond my comprehension (add it to the list)) so he decides that the best possible solution would be to have Dr. Strange erase the memory of the entire world so his identity is hidden again, a solution I'm guessing most of academia would like to see applied to their various tweets or casual classroom commentary where, because colleges have decided that the best ones to make choices about education aren't highly-degreed adult experts but rather teenagers who, finally out from under the thumb(s) of their parents, are exerting their authority for the first time by having people fired for not living in the internal states of their students 24/7 to hardly mention whether taking a student into account is even anything a professor should ever be thinking of. Okay where am I in my run-on sentence about academia in the middle of a Spider-Man review? Right so the issue of course is the failure of the actual authorities - that would be the administration - to teach an actual lesson, which is that no one in the real world is going to care about or accommodate your issues and most corporations, for example, know the drill enough at this point to make a bunch of sorry and sad mouth noises when you complain that your ADHD isn't being accommodated or you need to leave for two weeks because your parents planned a family vacation or whatnot and then, later, find a reason to fire you. Admittedly corporations have been atrocious about hot-button issues, usually around gender, where, as with The Scarlet Letter, Salem witch trials, and Nazi-and-other-worldwide-dictatorship-run kangaroo courts, accusation equals dismissal.
So, yeah, I total get GenZer Spidey's solution to modify time and erase all memory because he knows what we all know: the internet never forgets. For some reason (likely that all involved - writers, directors, producers, studio, distributor - fear cancellation and its boxoffice consequences more than death), Dr. Strange thinks this - reversing time and erasing the memories of billions of people for the sole purpose of Spidey not being cancelled - is a solid plan and an excellent use of his superpowers, more solid than, say, telling Spidey to go deal with it and hire some PR people to do a reputation spin (I mean Louie CK and Kevin Spacey seem to be emerging from their cancel-caves as I type this). Only Spidey doesn't want his identity forgotten by the people closest to him thus keeps asking for exceptions to the worldwide erasure which in the end is what causes huge problems with this plan because - and once again reiterating that no one at Marvel thinks for more than a nanosecond about their own material - what exactly was stopping Spidey from having Dr. Strange wipe the world’s memory and then... just come out to those closest to him and explain the whole “I erased the entire world because I couldn’t deal with being cancelled” situation? I mean, yeah, you’d then have to deal with people yelling at you about the manipulative moral consequences of your choice but maybe you should think through your answers to that anyway before you do it, right?
Well he doesn't do that and somehow whatever Dr. Strange does opens up... I really have no idea but there are apparently a bunch of other Spideys in a bunch of other multiverses - hopefully for their sakes better written and plotted than this one - some of whom get dragged into the multiverse the movie's being shot in along with some villains, though really I couldn't tell what was going on with the villains because the implication seemed to be that villains are what happens when Spideys get sad because a human close to them dies and then they become bad and take out their rage on everyone (a trend with Spidey like maybe he should deal with his inclination to solve his problems by taking them out on the planet, either through erasing its memory or, if turned villainous, spending his entire existence in therapy) and thus all villains were once good Spideys? I may have totally made that up but it's what I thought was going on.
And as it turns out, because it's Marvel, the world's greatest purveyor of implicit racism and sexism, all Spideys and even all superpower villains in all of infinity's universes are (a) White and (b) male. Yes, it was inconceivable to Marvel that any other gender or skintone could possibly exist as a superpowered spider-suited being literally anywhere in infinity. I'm being a little unfair because there was Jamie Foxx as a bad guy but there was only one of him or if there were more none of the others were Black and no one was female (though I can't speak to how anyone identified).
What follows from that point onwards is unmitigated confusion, though entertaining confusion I must admit, not so much from all the Spideys doing stuff but from why anyone was doing anything they were doing. Like okay so the reason anything is happening at all, as noted, is because Spidey didn't like all the bad PR he was getting and, yeah, enlisting a buddy to warp the entire fabric of spacetime in order to squirm out of that is an awesome idea if you have a friend like that, one I imagine is fantasized about by many a roofieing rapist. But whatever. That happened then a bunch of Spideys showed up with a bunch of villains and then beyond that I was lost. There's a spoilerable trope with all the Spideys which I understood linked them but what I found to be so incredibly confusing was the notion of the film that - and I may be totally be getting this wrong so feel free to correct me - that there are no villains, just people acting out badly (and, I'd note, not really all that differently from the supposed good guys) who can be somehow be cured which to me sure sounds like the entire history of the pill-pushing industry that has become psychiatry in which undesirable traits are lobotomized, medicated, or Nurse Ratcheded out of existence for the sake of flattening responses enough so other people won't be bothered by them regardless of the cost to the person on the receiving end and without all that much interest in their personhood and I would just ask: who's the bad guy in that scenario? The one making the executive decision that someone's personality is unacceptable and needs to be "cured" as if the personality being manifested is an atrocious invader of the "real" personality or the monster with the power of the state behind him/her/them to enact that abomination on a fellow human/superhero in order to get them under societal control?
Marvel's vision of world, one primarily dominated by White men who "know" what's best for others and in which they draw on all power at their disposal and justify any illegal or otherwise immoral behavior in the name of some larger purpose, said purpose being to shape everyone in the world to their image of how people should be and crush all opposition is, well I was gonna insult it but I guess given that I was entertained by the film, perhaps, I, too, am complicit in Marvel's highly successful multibillion-dollar promotional campaign for the glories of living under fascism though as someone who feels they're in a country drifting into living under it right now, I'm really not sure it's as awesome as Marvel is making it out to be.