Books:
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut & Adrian Nathan West
This book is so... weird. And I don't mean so much in the story but rather in what it is, why it was written at all as in what the author was hoping to achieve, and honestly and most irritatingly why it was categorized as fiction, though part of me feels it's because the publisher didn't want to get all caught up in cancellation drama because parts of the book are in the heads of real people and obviously that's made up. Okay so the book is basically a biography of a few mathematicians, physicists, and chemists in which, as noted, we're in their heads in the central moments of their breakthroughs. What I found to be so annoying about this fiction/non-fiction thing is that, because I haven't read biographies of these people, I had no idea what was fiction and was non-fiction; I mean, yeah, when I was in their heads I assumed it was fiction though obviously letters could exist somewhere where the person is describing what was in their head. This genre or whatever you want to call it really resulted in my kind of hating the book because, like, why not just have a preface that says, "All the facts are true but the author has taken liberties with describing thoughts and those are wholly his invention" because at least that way I'd know, for example, that Schrodinger in fact DID have his major breakthrough while locked up in a tuberculosis clinic as opposed to right now where, short of Wikipediaing it, I have no idea if that was an invention or not. Do you see how that might be annoying? These are real scientists, some of whom I was familiar with, some not and frankly I genuinely don't understand why the author didn't just write a biography about scientific breakthroughs told from the imagined POV of the scientists themselves and called it a day. I still don't know if that's what this book is! I mean, I can't even tell from reading other people's reviews what’s fiction and what's fact and what exactly am I getting out of a book about real people where I can't tell what's invented? Additionally there's an entire section where the author attributes the Jungian shadow dream to Heisenberg without ever mentioning Jung so like is that plagiarism in that am I, the reader, supposed to believe the author invented that section because he absolutely didn't? Or is that part of the fictional nature somehow and for an unknown reason Jung was never mentioned though he famously came up with it? You can probably tell I'm frustrated and part of it was because I actually liked the book and the writing and the information about the scientists and found myself getting more and more irritated that I didn't know what parts were biographical and which were invented which really just begged the question of what I, the reader, am supposed to get out of the book. This? Is this supposed to be my reaction? Well it is. Ugh, whatever. Like I said it's well-written (and super short) and interesting if it was real and boring if it was all made up and overall annoying if you're me.
TV/Streaming:
Atlanta (Season 3):
I don't know. I mean I know, as in I know this show, vaguely about a rising rapper’s manager from Atlanta but mostly an excuse to talk about money and race, is highly lauded and I liked the first season and the second though less so and now with this third season... I don't know. When this show is bad, it’s truly awful and unfortunately for reasons I'll go into in a minute, it's awful for about 50% of this season. When it's not being awful, it's being quirky and unrealistic but in a sometimes interesting way. In fact, its modernity on American race issues is basically the only reason I watch it as, when it's not being atrocious, it definitely has a POV on race, specifically Black/White and not just in terms of skin tone but almost more in terms of culture as in Black culture vs White culture in which people of whatever skin tone can engage with either, that keeps it interesting. It's a half-hour show and while it has funny moments I wouldn't call it a comedy - satire maybe at most occasionally? - but it's amusing. The bad part. So if season 1 was a coherent character driven series about a rapper and his cousin trying to break into the music industry sort of and season 2 picked that up but then expanded on side characters in a to me kind of meandering anthologyish way, then season 3 has tossed all semblance of interest in the main characters or cohesion of any kind and - and we're getting to the awful part here - has decided to be a kind of racial Black Mirror in which half the season is random episodes with random never-before-seen-nor-will-they-be-seen-again characters in some parallel America where there's a "what if" idea being really badly played out across the episode. The other episodes are the characters we've seen before, now rich and touring Europe, being put in a different set of race circumstances - a fashion company hiring the Black rapper to be the Black face of their damage control for an inadvertently racist shirt they made - which, as noted, was interesting because it’s a different and more modern and complex perspective on the intersection of culture, money, and race than I’ve seen in other shows. The bad episodes weren't bad because the driving "what if" was bad but rather because they were badly done. For instance, one was about what if the modern-day ancestors of slave owners were culturally pressured to pay the work value plus interest to the modern-day ancestors of the owned slaves. Or there's one about (kinda) rich White parents and what happens when the Trinidadian nanny dies and the odd cultural/financial overlap between the two families that ensues. The problem is that, clearly, writing a show like Black Mirror takes a sort of talent or attention to detail or perhaps just more time than 30 minutes or whatever that the writers on this show do not have. Black Mirror at its best setup characters, situation, world, and story and let us, the viewer, experience the idea as opposed to being told the idea and then just seeing it sloppily played out like in this series. In other words, it would've been interesting to see what would happen with the slave/ancestor thing but that would require thinking through the details of the world and the details of the characters and playing those things out in a way that made you, the audience, think. That is not what that episode was in this show. Instead there was zero character and the episode didn't even bother to make it comprehensible why anyone was agreeing to anything or what planet we were on where this would happen, i.e. it just said "this is happening now" and then I guess we watch that for 30 minutes. But the problem with that is that the end of the 30 minutes is no different than the beginning. There's nothing more than the "what if" idea at the end. And some of these episodes were so terrible that they couldn't even play out their own "what if" idea in that the writers had enough juice for like 10 minutes and then just fluffed it out with a bunch of meaningless crap to stretch the episode out to whatever time the network required. So, yeah, I guess I'll watch the final season (season 4) because I'm in it this far and, as mentioned, the show does do interesting things sometimes and, let's face it, I'm a pretty expansive and devoted TV/Streaming viewer so it not like I'm forced to choose between this show or something else due to time constraints. But if you're not like me, like if you have more limited viewing time, I wouldn't really recommend you watch this series because while it starts pretty good and has good moments, it's clearly going off the rails so if you're thinking of starting it just know it goes IJHO pretty downhill.
Borgen: Power & Glory:
The tl;dr for those who watched the original Borgen but haven't seen this latest season: stop reading and go watch as everything you loved about the original is here. For those unfamiliar, Borgen is a fantastically great drama about a woman from an outsider party who, in the first episode for reasons related to how Danes elect their leaders, becomes Prime Minister. The original series ran for three seasons and was just great for multiple reasons but primarily because it showed, via fantastic writing and acting, how and why the small the dramas and minutiae of government are so complex to navigate. Our PM lead - Birgitte - is an outsider who becomes the ultimate insider while trying to maintain her principles and family all while facing the realization within herself of her own driving ambitions. If you like drama and haven't seen this show, add it to your must-watch list; I specify drama even though the show has a snappy sense of humor about itself because if you're not into how micro-details become less-micro or even macro in government and the media, you'll probably find this show to be boring as it's not a show of big reveals and twists but rather one of someone navigating complicated waters and figuring out what to compromise and how and with whom and at what price along the way. The original - and I don't view this as a spoiler since it's not that kind of show - tracked Birgitte’s career rise, fall, and re-rise across three seasons covering a few years and this newest season picks up in today's world with her as Danish Foreign Minister and is in many ways about the corrupting nature of power, or really more the clash between the quest for power at the expense of self, and it plays out in a way involving Denmark's and its - honestly not sure - territory? protectorate? - Greenland, the intersection of major power brokers - US, China, Russia - climate, oil, indigenous rights, and a small country like Denmark's efforts to thread the needle of all those things. You do and don't need to watch the series in order. You do because the way the characters interact and change over the seasons is what gives this show such life; you don't because the plots are generally completely new each season and don't really require any prior knowledge to jump right in by which I mean there's no need for a recap if you watched the prior seasons years ago as you'll have no problem picking it all right up and, if you haven't seen and are watching with someone who has, you'll be just fine as well as you can go back later on your own and enjoy the first 3 seasons without worrying about some major spoiler in this most recent season (depending on your definition of spoiler - there's some family drama that unfolds in the early seasons which I guess you could say is spoilered if you view it that way). Enough rhapsody. Loved it, such great writing, acting, and ideas and if there's ever another season, I'm all in.
Movies:
Gray Man - While I know there is at least one Janice out there who's going to vehemently disagree with everything I'm about to type - and I'm operating on the assumption that that Janice's critical faculties were swept away in some overwhelming tide where that Janice was blinded to everything other than Ryan Gosling's hotness - but this spy v. spy Netflix movie, as with basically everything made by Netflix, blew. The setup is Ryan Gosling murdered someone but for all the right reasons - and honestly I'm not entirely sure how Hollywood reconciles its anti-death-penalty stance with its good-hearted-murdering-maverick stance in which murder (including of innocent bystanders as long as the murderer meant well like in basically every Marvel movie (as you can see in Marvel’s first foray Iron Man but really in all of them)) but it does - and then he gets trained as a shadow assassin for the CIA meaning they'll hang him out to dry if he gets caught. Okay, fine but are you noticing anything missing from this setup? Character! There's nothing. He's a good, moral person who did a bad thing for good reasons, is hardened by the prison system, trained to be an assassin and there you go. There COULD be a person here or even a personality because, well let's face it: the good-hearted murderer who becomes an assassin... may not be so good-hearted and may simply like killing right since they started that way as a teenager and are now making a career of it? Frankly the utterly ridiculous Kate Beckinsdale movie where she had a genetic disorder that turned her into a raging psychopath or come to think of it even Richie Rich have more character, texture, and depth than anything offered in this film. And, yes, I'm aware the movie is a big action thing were we're supposedly just tuning in to watch spectacle. But given that Netflix spent something like $200 million on this thing, at least a fractional percentage of which is mine in the form of my monthly subscription - and where’s my producer credit! - do I have the right to demand that they spend $0 extra but write a fun character instead? Because this was the essential problem of the entire movie. Ryan Gosling is a good-but-damaged spy and Chris Evans is your typically yawny quippy airquote nutso/out-there spy trying to kill Ryan Gosling and isn't that unbelievably boring no matter how many kickboxing fights they're in? The plot, as it were, is about a series of snoozy double-crosses and - and this was the real kicker in this turd - the action sequences were boring. How dare it?!?! By boring I mean pick the dead center most obvious action sequences you can think of from any movie in the past decade and string them together. Generic running-on-a-train sequence? Check. Generic car chase? Check. Nightclub sequence - I mean how many times have we seen variants on the club music and pulsing lights and the person with a gun and another person slipping into the crowd and - and OMG I'm just so bored even typing about this. If you're hoping for some dumb fun with eye candy, literally go watch anything else unless you consider the insides of your drooping lids to be the candy your eyes had in mind (assuming eyes have minds) because, like, if this is why Netflix is raising its prices nonstop (and I’m pretty sure it is), why don't we cut the fee in half and go back to the glory days of Netflix when they made nothing and simply aired other people's stuff because, while I can't speak for anyone else (by which I mean I speak for everyone else), it's becoming harder to justify paying them monthly given the level of overpriced garbage content like this which, come to think of it, is a similar reason to why I recently - everyone remain seated and just breathe! - cancelled - in then out, deep breath innnnnnn then out - Prime (are you aware that “Free Returns” now means “Free as long as you’re willing to schlep the return to Kohls, Whole Foods, or a UPS store because otherwise it’s $7.99 to pick it up from you” and, um, 2-day shipping aside (do I ever need that cheapass USB plug that quickly btw?) wasn’t Prime solely about convenience as in if I have to schlep, what exactly is the difference between Prime and… pre-Prime where we all bought stuff and, if needed, schelpped and returned it only without paying $130/year?). Yes. I. Cancelled. Prime. I think that statement’s traumatic enough that I’ll just end the review there.