Books:
The Magician King (The Magicians #2) by Lev Grossman
Color me a fan because I loved this second book in the trilogy as much as I ended up loving the first one despite thinking I wouldn’t (see prior Media Report for all the details). I have to credit the author for managing to write pretty downer sourpuss characters in a way that keeps them engaging and compelling instead of sadsack and dull. He has a real facility for capturing people who seem to have everything but are completely at sea on the inside and making their journeys to find meaning - the driving thematic of this book - simultaneously rootforable (hmm) and detestable. Like you kind of want them to figure it out while at the same time kind of having contempt for their whiny inability to figure it out. I genuinely think it’s a real writing feat to make an engaging book out of unlikable characters, the unlikability stemming not so much from what they do or how they do it, but from the fact that, no matter what they do, they wind up disliking themselves. The writing remains sharp and funny throughout, the world-building much more extensive, and the plot really takes off. I think the comparisons to Harry Potter did this series a real injustice (spoiler alert: I hated Harry Potter) because these books, so far at least, aren’t about growing up at wizard school but about discovering, dealing with, and trying to find a way out of the same trap everyone faces as they age which is that all the magic in the universe, metaphorical or otherwise, doesn’t have a shred of power to give your life meaning since the only power to do that is you living it. Loved, looking forward to the last one.
Cursed by Jeremy C. Shipp
This is a deeply strange book in the bizarro genre (I think) about a group of people who find each other after discovering they may have been cursed - or is it all in their heads? - and their quest to figure out who’s behind it, why, and how to undo it. The writing is very particular by which I mean you should definitely make use of Amazon's Look Inside feature and read a few pages before committing. Everything is a list. Seemingly every sentence is:
(A) broken down,
(B) given its own line,
(C) punctuated.
In some ways, it's wearing but in another way it creates an odd kind of rhythm to the book. Look I can't say the story exactly worked at the end or that I'd want to read a sequel or anything but it was interesting enough to keep me engaged and it felt like the author's writing choice was genuinely the way he wanted to tell the story rather than a gimmick. I don't know - it’s short, I finished it, I wasn't bored, and it was strange, and maybe sometimes that's enough.
TV/Streaming:
Chad (Season 1):
This is an IJHO insanely funny comedy about a simultaneously awkward, loser-y, vaguely empathetic, and completely self-absorbed teen - the eponymous Chad - who, in his effort to squirm his way into being a cool kid, enacts some of the most painfully cringe-y comedy I've seen since, I don't know, Weinerdog maybe. Chad is played by an ex-SNL actress who's also the showrunner and she nails the performance in a way that I found to be super hilarious. This isn't a Ted Lasso which you can really binge back-to-back but rather, for me at least, the kind of thing where I'd laugh and cringe and then need like a week off before I could face the next one. At first I thought it was just going to be a bunch of one-offs, but there’s actually an overall arc to the season and I really liked where the show wound up because the final moments of the final episode set up the second season in the best - and surprising - way which makes me think it will be at least as good as this one. If you think shows like Corporate and Louie are funny, then this one would likely be up your alley as well.
We Are Who We Are:
This show about bored teens at an Italian naval base and their aimless drift through friend/relation-ships is by the same person who did the only marginally less snooze-inducing Call Me By Your Name, but it has the same draggy plotlessness that that movie suffered from though without any rape-y Armie Hammer in go-go shorts to compensate. Non-Janice-reviewers went crazy for this show and for the life of me, as always, I can’t see why. I made it through a bit more than half of the season before having to choose between DNFing or smashing my head through a wall for the remaining episodes just to keep things interesting. Essentially, you have Americans, military, unmotivated kids wandering around unsupervised and literally absolutely nothing whatsoever happening. To give you a sense of how little happens, do you find: roughly 45 seconds of someone sitting on a bus and staring out the window followed by a 30 second exterior shot of said bus coming around the bend then slowly, like over another 10-15 seconds, coming to a stop followed by 10 seconds of original someone getting off the bus then pausing contemplatively for a few more seconds before walking out of frame to be engrossing television? If you do, then not only will you LOVE this series but you will also be totally nuts about…
Movies:
Dragged Across Concrete - If anything could me yearn for the gripping excitement of watching a Neapolitan bus turn a corner, it would be this movie about a suspended Mel Gibson cop who, desperate for cash, enlists his Vince Vaughn partner to rob some criminals they’ve been tracking. I didn’t think the plot sounded too bad plus I liked this prison movie the director had made but OMG was this movie so craaaaaaazy boring!! Try to imagine doing everything conceivable to make that logline slow and plotless then remove any last modicum of interest, replace it with either endless dialogue about nothing or long stretches of actual nothing, remove that last bit of plot you clung to because you couldn’t imagine anyone financing this project without at least THAT bit of plot left (as someone who suffered through proof to the contrary, I can assure you someone actually did), and you’ll have this movie. They talk. And talk. And talk. And then when they’re done talking, they talk more. Though maybe I’m not being fair because there was that one time when they weren’t talking, though that was only because, we, meaning me and Mel Gibson, got to spend 3 fer realz minutes watching Vince Vaughn eating a sandwich. Well, phew, cross that one off the bucket list!