Books:
The Magpie Lord (A Charm of Magpies #1) by KJ Charles
This was a flew-through-it-in-one-hot-second Regency (or something along those lines) first in a fantasy series about a rich guy who hires a magician to investigate and undo some magical problems all of which turns into a bit of romance. It's fluff, but very enjoyable fluff. It's basically a big opposites-attract story with an underlying magic/power/curse plot. The book reads like a one-off, though I see there are more in the series, so I'm guessing future books will pick up with the same characters but a different mystery which sounds delightful to me. The plot is that the ne'er do well (or is he...) rich guy's son - Lucien - along with his factotum, both of whom where sent off to China when Lucien was young because he was despised by his father and brother, returns as the sole heir to his family fortune only to discover someone's magically trying to kill him, and he hires snarly poor magician, Stephen, to undo that all of which in turn leads to the discovery of a larger magic conspiracy and said romance. The pleasure of the book is twofold. First, as mentioned, it's breezy. Second, I liked the world. It had a kind of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell vibe to it in the sense that that book normalized magicians in an otherwise typically stiff and manored English world, meaning you get the enjoyable Anthony Trollope societal trappings and the microaggressions of that era along with a mystery as to what's really going on plus some magic tossed in for good measure. As I said, this is a big goblet of fluff, which isn't an insult to the author as I think that's what she intended to write and frankly writing something absorbing isn't all that easy even if it reads easy. I think if there was one area I could've done less with, it was the romance. I'm not into sex scenes in books but that really isn't a critique since they're just not to my taste but there were a few of them in this book and I just skimmed right on by. Though this is (sadly) not how I ended up reading this, the book has the feel of a something you'd read curled up under a blanket on a cold day in winter in two sittings with a nap in between and if this Regency-(Edwardian?)-or-something-snobby-and-English-and-countryside with some romance and magicians is up your alley, I'd say grab a copy and enjoy.
TV/Streaming:
Rock the Block (Season 3):
Why do I keep both watching and writing about this idiotic overproduced HGTV show in which four teams of their quote unquote stars (read: people I've never seen or heard of in my entire life but who somehow all manage to speak in that weird overenthusiastic sassy-not-edgy hyper-explanatory HGTVese that has the feel of a nascent religious sect but one where everyone loves working together and the leaders just want to help you rather than have sex with you and wouldn't redoing your kitchen cabinets in teal really just make them pop and up the appraisal value BIGGEST EXCLAMATION POINT EVER!) each design a neighboring cookie-cutter home with the one with the highest appraised value at the end being the winner. It's entirely about seemingly all of HGTV’s conceptions of real estate and design, i.e. never about living in a place but rather how much can you get for it which is fine I guess - nothing wrong with wanting to make money - but also pretty weird. Like if design can really add that much value to a house, why didn't the home developers just do that upfront? I'll tell you why (and I kind of can't believe I'm wasting my time typing about this but I am!): okay so the designers are given a $250k budget... which doesn't include designer fee which I have zero idea about, like is, for an entire house plus garage plus yard plus exterior, uh $100k right? Is that too low? Too high? And many of the designers were also contractors so they did their own construction so should we say another $40k in the real world for the additional labor? Too low? After all, this was a whole home redone in 6 weeks rather than a more typical 90 days or longer so, I mean overtime anyone? And we'll add another $5k-$10k for staging? So by my utterly uninformed math, each house is $500k plus $250k for the HGTV budget plus the stuff that HGTV didn't count worth, say, at least $150k if not a bit more. And, according to the experts (meaning other HGTV people I'd never heard of), the highest appraised value added only around $200k. Are you seeing the math if my numbers are even vaguely right? Plus of course design is always a risk since people might hate it or, you know, you the designer added a nursery but the buyer doesn't have infants and now have to pay to redesign that. Or you put in a fancy grill instead of a fence in the backyard and now they want a price reduction. Okay I'm bored, mostly because I have no idea what I'm talking but also because I just don't care. Oh, the show. Yeah it's dumb and screamy and fake like all HGTV shows but (and this was true in prior seasons and remains true now), it's the sort of thing you can have on in the background and just glance up in the last 5 minutes to see the reveal - they do one house section per week - and for that, it's perfectly fine.
Happy Valley (Seasons 1-3):
I started watching this extremely well-written character-driven cop (but so much more than that) show when it first came out maybe a decade ago then there was a second season a year or so later then a big gap between that season and the series finale. I'm noting this because I didn't go back and rewatch so if you're binging all in a row you might have a different experience than I did. But regardless of how you watch, this is a great show. The basic plot - and no spoilering here as this is all backstory and the first season takes place like 8 or so years later - is the daughter of a cop in a Northern England medium-sized town gives birth then kills herself due to the abusiveness of her psychopathic criminal boyfriend; this event, aside from its obvious grief, splinters the cop's family, and she, not without qualms, decides to raise her grandchild. The meat of the show combines a season-long investigation with a larger story - also investigative - involving the criminal dad. The plots are good and engaging and I'm not discussing them further because they're 100% spoilerable. What makes this show shine is the combination of rich, deep, character-driven writing with a lead actor who feels so totally real that, despite having seen her in other British shows, it's almost hard to imagine she's not actually this person. It has the feel of real life, like yes, it's a cop show so there are some extreme and somewhat heroic acts, but they feel as if they're done the way truly competent but still very human (meaning scared) cops would handle these situations. In fact, that's actually what makes the show work in a way; the investigations drive the plot but because the writer and actor have managed to immerse you (me) in the person, what becomes most interesting is wondering what our lead - Catherine - is going to do and how whatever she does will affect the other part that makes this show so good which is a rich and complex family life. Raising the son of the person you feel killed your daughter already has a lot of interesting complexity to it, but Catherine also has a somewhat conflicted relationship with her loopy alcoholic sister and her ex-husband to mention a few. The other thing that makes this show really work is its dry humor which, combined with a lead who feels so solidly grounded, comes off as part of the gallows-tone of policework as opposed to snark. Clearly I'm giving this a recommend and I guess the only reason someone might not enjoy it is if this show feels too much drama and not enough crime for you. It's also fairly grim, like I wouldn't say these are joyous people in joyous situations but to me that all read like a reiteration of its immersion in feeling like real life - it's someone who loves her job and life but both of those in differing yet related ways carry dark circumstances and I found the whole series to be totally gripping.
Movies:
Extra Ordinary - This... supernatural comedy (?) is either (a) awful at a level that begs a question I've begged before (that would be "why on all that's holy would anyone finance this?") or (b) genius for reasons I'll go into in a minute. Look, I'm 99% sure it's (a) and therefore you should absolutely skip this abomination. However, if you're willing to take a gamble (and, clearly, get crazy high prior to doing so), (b) might possibly deliver exactly enough to keep you watching the whole thing as it did for me. So the basic plot: a driving instructor whose primary skill is, I think, banishing ghosts (OMG already right?) is contacted by some dude for driving lessons only it's secretly to get rid of the ghost of his annoying now-dead wife; in the meantime, and honestly I'm a little less clear on this part (and kind of not so clear on the prior part either come to think of it), some rock musician is trying to sacrifice a virgin in order to revive his career only somehow the virgin inadvertently dies via (I think) another nagging-though-not-dead wife and now the musician needs to hunt up another virgin. Well as it turns out, these two stories collide as the daughter of the dude - who himself turns out to be paranormally inclined and, QED, the love interest of the driving instructor (sidebar: I can't believe I'm actually writing out this plot) - is a virgin who's kidnapped for the rocker-reviving sacrificial ceremony and the driving instructor and the girl's dad go off to save her. In between all that, the virgin-sacrificer also wants driving lessons partly because he has drivingphobia and wants to overcome that phobia but mostly because he'd seen the driving instructor doing something with ghosts previously and wanted to steal her hair for ghosty/summoning reasons. How's everyone doing so far with this plot? Okay, so then there's this sacrifice in the works and... a crow? magpie? some bird gets involved and everyone winds up somewhere doing battle with the bad guys or Satan or something and then there’s a summoning, during which - and I can't say anything was a spoiler by this point in the movie but just noting there may be a spoiler coming - it's revealed who's actually a virgin and who's not, and, after some public devirginzation in order to avoid being a vessel for the devil, everyone goes into battle including the bird, and only some make it out, a big reveal about the bird, possibly a birth?, and then it's 3 months later and all's fine.
So there's that plot - again, financing, why? - and you can absolutely see how atrocious this wacky-yet-also-moving-and-romantic-and-actiony-in-its-mind film is totally terrible as noted and leave it at that. Or, you can watch having the recognition or at least the .0000000001% possibility that the following is what was actually going on with the movie: the writers (who also directed) were just totally fucking with their idiotic producers and were trying to see how far they could push the stupidity and how convincing they could be to get the producers to keep throwing money at the worst script ever (aka theirs) they'd written, high, in a weekend. Like about 18 minutes in, I definitely had a moment (and don't ask me what it was because I've long forgotten) where it struck me that maybe the filmmakers knew how truly awful the movie was and were just going for it. Like the whole thing with the bird? I can - and did - totally imagine a scenario in which one filmmaker said to the other, "Let's see if we can talk the producers into paying to put a bird in this thing" and the other goes "How much" and the first says, "I don't know, $50k?" then immediately goes over to the producer and says, "You know, beneath all the humor in this movie we're going for something much more powerful about family and connection and the moral spirit that connects everyone and we thought what would be great would be to have all that in a bird who later joins the battle and then sacrifices itself, which we kind of need anyway for the big battle scene and we don't really want to kill any cast members because we're paying them so it would be better to keep them around and the bird will probably be around $50,000 for the trainer and additional shooting time which in the scheme of things isn't much for all the power, mystery, and drama it's adding to the film." And then the producer says okay and the filmmakers are like, "Well we shot half the movie and now we have to jam in a bird. What should we do with it?” “We could chop its head off?" "Yeah, that's good, and then we'll have a closeup of someone's really sad hand reaching in to cradle the bird head." "Perfect, in slo-mo." "Exactly." This, for me, was the entire film and if you watch it through that lens, the lens where you decide that just maybe the filmmakers knew precisely the movie they were making and were completely manipulating everyone around them into believing they were crafting a potent supernatural action romance whereas they were actually making some hidden self-aware idiocy well then you just might be entertained. If you don't think you'll be able to make it to that space, avoid at all costs because, barring this movie being intentionally deceptively bad, it's actually just awful, borderline unwatchable, and, despite being released, unreleasable.