Books:
Wolfhunter River (Stillhouse Lake #3) by Rachel Caine
Well the popcorn excellence of this series continues which I wasn’t totally sure about as at the end of the prior book (which I won't spoiler) it wasn't totally clear where the main story would be headed. As a reminder, this is a thriller about a woman and her kids on the run from her husband and his obsessive followers who use social media in very menacing ways against her. The first two books (here and here) are sort of one continuous story and this third book picks up in the aftermath and while the first chunk of it wasn't super plotty, it was still interesting because it dealt with some backstory reveals as well as relationship issues between the characters. Then the lead character simultaneously deals with a whole buncha plot (vague to avoid spoilering) while also turning the skills she's gained over the years of running from her husband and his followers to helping other people. It's a turn that I thought totally worked as it felt natural to the character and, frankly, allowed for some nonstop balls-to-the-wall action for the final third of the book. I just think these books are really the peak of this genre - the characters make sense; the plot are well-constructed; the action gets crazy; the writing is good enough to keep it all going without getting in the way. I have no complaints about a book that's well-done within its genre, in this case airplane/beach read entertainment with pages that fly by to create an absorbing piece of fiction. I think we tend to diss genre books because they're so plot-heavy and often atrociously written but given how many supposedly amazing contemporary fiction "voice"-y books utterly fail in the "absorbing" part (like, say, here or here or here to get you started), I think maybe the publishing industry needs to acknowledge how difficult it is to keep a plot rolling along as opposed to just putting a bunch of well-written but ultimately dull paragraphs on a page. If no one else does, well this Janice hereby acknowledges all the top-notch genre writers and hats off if I wore one!
TV/Streaming:
The Morning Show (Season 1):
This is a series in which Reese Witherspoon's character, a shoot-from-the-hip hardcore news journalist is, for various plot reasons, plucked from obscurity and made Jennifer Aniston's cohost on the eponymous Morning Show after Steve Carrell, the original cohost, is cancelled due to #MeToo issues. Up until the final episode of this season, I wouldn't have felt any need to rip this show apart. I mean, to the showrunner's credit, the characters, while often one-note, at least strike that single note in a fun and breezy way with enough plot machinations - there's a whole involved plot with the network executives and the show producer as well as a clash between the two anchorwomen - to make it watchable. But the final episode, aside from its being abundantly clear that the writers had zero clue about how to wrap up the season, set up the next one, or have any idea of what they wanted to say about anything - is so utterly degrading to the women (and to the men as well actually which I'll get to in a minute) this show is purporting to make a statement on that I am now thoroughly convinced that, as with everyone on the Marvel team, literally no one at Apple is reading the scripts - that's me being generous btw - or, more realistically, the executives lack any capacity whatsoever to give meaningful script notes. Like I said, the show is watchable meaning there's a showrunner and team in place who can actually write but every artist needs smart notes - something that's vanished from the publishing world as well at least based on much contemporary American fiction (see rant links above) - and there clearly weren't any given on this one or the final episode never would've done what it did. Just to catch you up on non-spoiler plot: after Steve Carrell's character is fired, the show shifts into looking at broader complicity in the harassment case, either direct corporate complicity (as in higher-ups knowing and hushing things up) or indirect complicity, like what did Jennifer Aniston's character and others kind of know but choose to gloss past? There's a woman in the direct corporate complicity plot who had a one-nighter with Steve Carrell in what's essentially the mess of #MeToo: she didn't say no and didn't leave the room and easily could have which he viewed as consent... but he was her boss or at least had significant power relative to her which put whatever mix of thoughts she may have been having about sex with him into a space where she was unsure of the consequences of saying no and thus said and did nothing.
So the first part of the messiness of this character, by which I mean writer thematic slop rather than the inherent messiness of sexual power dynamics in general, is that the plot really really really needed the character to come forward with her story and yet the writers created a character who has no interest or reason to do that yet keeps saying she will. The scenes are really strange because the character who, even though it's a few years after the incident, is still highly emotional and scarred by it spends an enormous amount of time talking about how she doesn't want to go public and how upsetting it all is and then says she will anyway then basically the same scene again on repeat across the season. The writers give her vague half-motivations like a guilty sense that telling her story will help other women, but really, the hesitation and upset are present in the show, as became apparent, because of how thoroughly the writers needed to degrade her in the final episode. I won't go into specifics for spoiler reasons, but the writers make the absolute worst character choice possible for someone who, okay, went into a place of self-doubt and self-loathing due to what happened to her, by using that character to make... well I think they were trying to make a statement to men about how deeply their behavior impacts women, a la “see the damage you’ve wrought, man, and how it impacts a woman across the years”, but what they really did was play directly into cliches around female emotional weakness that I found to be repulsive. Reese/Jennifer also become, in the name of empowerment, emotional wrecks who lose their selves to the power of their feelings. Because when women get the feelies they just lose all control! I thought it was gross. I know I’m being vague for spoiler reasons but the top-level issue here is that the writers chose - and Apple must’ve agreed this was an awesome choice because they financed and aired/streamed this show - to have the three central female characters unable to resolve their issues in any way other than by becoming sloppy emotional wrecks so overwhelmed by the power of their emotions that they were rendered incapable of doing anything other than having and acting on their deeply experienced FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELINGS. Do you really need to know the plot details to see the misongyny there?
I mean to my knowledge, this thing wasn’t written in the 1850s, so I’m not sure what anyone’s excuse was for having all lead women in the show - Jeniston, Reeserspoon, a producer who had an affair with Steve Carrell, and the #Metoo woman - be incapable of being anything other than emotional spluges instead of, I don’t know, people who had enough awareness, control, and self-esteem to get what they wanted in life without collapsing into a quivering pool of emotive goo. In fairness, what the writers did to the men was little better, though the men are barely-developed secondary characters anyway so I'll just say: hey writers, if you find that the only way you can have a confrontation between your noodly armed males who've never done anything other than sit their asses in chairs typing and talking to people for their entire lives is to have them, swept up by emotion (men feel too but only angry caveman feelings), start punching each other (woman weep, man punch, thanks for the evolutionary lesson, Apple!), let that be a cue to you that you don't understand your own characters or the scene they're in or what they want from each and its time to head back to the team to rethink what on earth you're doing.
The final episode aside - though the final episode is also of a piece with what I'm about to say - the writers created characters but they didn't create a series. The show is about #Metoo, no wait it's about someone given a big break and shaking things up with her sassiness, no wait it's about women bonding, no wait it’s about corporate subterfuge, no wait it's about messy relationships. Conceivably it could be about all of those things the way, say, Succession is about many things; but this show has no cohesion between the ideas. It jumps from one to the next to the next with no clear idea of what, in aggregate, I, the viewer, am supposed to be watching. Like I knew I was watching a teacher become a drug kingpin in Breaking Bad, but what is the overall big picture notion I'm watching in this show? It doesn't even remember its own plots like there's a whole drama around Jennifer Aniston's marriage (and a truly absurd sequence with her daughter) and publicity around that and then... it just vanishes. There's an entire idiotic subplot involving a low-level person on the show and the affair she's having with an older man on the show which, yeah I get it, is there solely to demonstrate the complexity (I guess) of office romances where they're not all power abuses or are they, but that's all it is and it takes up an enormous amount of screentime being that and to what end? I mean it's certainly a relationship that's not written in a way for anyone to invest in so like why? What is this show? I don't think anyone involved knows or, if they do, they chose to keep it a secret. I'll probably at least start season 2 at some point out of curiosity to see if it figured itself out between seasons (I'm not hopeful honestly) and will assuredly report back one way or the other.
Masterchef (Season 13):
This is the British version of the show and, if you've ever seen and hated the Gordon Ramsay American version - horrifically overproduced, lots of Olympics-type sob stories, and very very fake-feeling - and you enjoy an amateur cooking competition where the focus is the food and not the personalities then you'll probably like this one. As with most British competition reality shows, there's zero glitz or zing to this; it's super straightforward and the challenges are somewhat repetitive, meaning you'll either find it to be dull or, if you're like me, soothing. The basic setup, if you haven’t seen it, is home cooks presented with a challenge of some kind, usually iterations on ingredient constraints, where they have to invent a dish and cook it in a limited timeframe before presenting it to the judges with the weakest dishes eliminated. And that’s it. Sure there are some contestant interviews to get a sense of personality but mostly it’s tracking people as they struggle (or not) to put together a dish, cook it properly, and plate it in an appealing way before time’s up. For me it’s a strange viewing experience because I’m aware that the show is slow even as I’m watching it - like The Great British Baking Show/Bakeoff, what with its three challenges per episode, is a high-stakes rollercoaster thriller by contrast - yet somehow I don’t mind and, as with many British shows, the judging can be harsh, meaning the judges are doing their best to be honest without actively looking to hurt someone’s feelings which kind of makes the whole thing seem more valid. Most of the seasons are exactly the same so if this speed is up your alley well you have 13 20-something episode seasons of calm cooking ahead of you.
Movies:
I Blame Society - I don’t care what anyone says (by which I mean the Janice I rec’ed this to who DNF’ed it out of mind-numbing boredom): this movie is pure gummy heaven! The basic plot is the world’s most annoying, whiny, wannabe screenwriter keeps trying to convince her friend to let her film herself breaking into his apartment as if she were a murderer because that’s the plot of the screenplay she’s written, essentially how to plan the perfect murder - which she eventually does. But to me what made the film so entertaining was the relentlessly whiny (can I say whiny one more time? I’ll probably be saying it several more times come to think of it) and thoroughly self-absorbed and egotistical lead character who is just such an irritating and awful human being - I mean forget about the murder(s), she’s unbearable at brunch talking endlessly about her screenplay - though of the sort who’s probably somewhere plunked into the mid/outer layer of many people’s friend groups, that I found myself completely engaged not so much by what she was doing but by her completely contemptuous and overbearing explanations of what she was doing. The movie is done as a sort of verite documentary so there’s a lot of address to camera and I guess I ended up really admiring the filmmaker’s almost pathological commitment to this character doing this thing in this way that I found myself wondering how long she could keep it up and whether she’d be able to maintain the tenor of the film right to the end. And she did! While other than aspiring writer stuff this movie isn’t about Hollywood, in some ways it fits nicely into films like Swimming with Sharks (a mediocre movie IJHO but the one that’s cited most as a progenitor of the OTT Hollywood genre) or the series version (not the movie ugh) of Get Shorty (a series I loved), i.e. movies about atrocious people behaving atrociously but all in the name Art. Your enjoyment of this movie really depends on the extent to which you find these sorts of characters to be entertaining - think Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction or Aya Cash in season 2 of The Boys - because while there’s a kind of escalating plot, the movie’s really about a person finally discovering the one thing she’s really truly good at, which is killing people. It looks like a slasher movie, but really it’s a film of self-discovery (if finding out you’re an amazing psychopath counts as self-discovery) which is why I found it to be entertaining while my fellow Janice found it to be a total snoozefest and who knows which side you’ll come out on!
Enemy - This is an extremely moody and mysterious it its mind psychological thriller that was actually, in my mind, an extremely dull and meaningless turd. It's one of those movies about nothing but which seems to heavily imply it's about something by having lots of ponderous silence, cryptic conversations, unexplained imagery, intense glances, and moody music or its absence in lieu of having a plot. Ostensibly it's about mild-mannered professor Jake Gyllenhaal who, while watching a movie, sees a background character who looks exactly like him and what happens when he meets his doppelganger. Honestly I just made the movie sound oodles more interesting than it actually is which, if you're hoping any underlying mystery about anything will be explained or unraveled, please let me disabuse of that notion upfront so you don't actually watch and then get sad/sleepy/enraged. It's not sci-fi or anything. I don't know what it. Isabella Rosselini plays one of the Jake Gyllenhaal's mother so what genre is that - self-important Lynchian nonsense? At another level of tedious and, like, don't even with the ending. I mean part of me wants to force someone out there to suffer through this shizz just for the final shot because it’s so insane and so we can type at each other about how WTF it is. But in order to make that final shot pay off that someone would have to suffer through the excruciatingly booooooring 90-120 preceding minutes. So I don’t know. I’ll just say: I didn’t see the ending coming nor would it be literally possible for anyone to see the ending coming. It’s a lot of ponderous and dul for 5 seconds of WTF but if that sounds appealing to you, well, let me know how it goes for you!