Media Report

The Boys S3, Plane, and more!

Books:

The Farm by Tom Robb Smith

I really enjoyed this novel about a woman who may or may not be crazy narrating, to her son, the events of what happened to her in an effort to get him on her side against her husband. The book is billed as a mystery and it is to the extent that the author withholds the what, why, and how but I'd say it's really more of a character story wrapped in a mystery and that its main thrust is that the story puts you, the reader, in the same position as the son, i.e. if this were your mom, would you think she was crazy or would you think she was the victim of something real that your father had done to her? That mystery is really what kept the story going for me as the story itself is simple: a woman and her husband buy a farm in Sweden for their retirement and either there's something very shady happening in the isolated rural community they move to or not. There's another thread overlaying the mom's story about the son not having come out about being gay but it's really completely useless and in fact I'm honestly not sure why it was in the book at all. It didn't detract because it was barely present but it was there nonetheless. The events that happen on the farm aren't momentous which is why I wouldn't say it's a mystery in that sense - and am noting it in case you're thinking this book is a thriller of some kind which is what the publisher wants you to think - because the events are minor and all the mystery relies on the mother's interpretation of other people's behavior. Thus in some ways the story is very mundane and it's the setup - she was briefly institutionalized before the doctors released her and then flees to England to tell her son her story first while her husband is frantically coming after her - that generates the mystery. This is why I'm not going into the plot details as there kind of aren't any. The mother's interpretation of those details and your - the reader's - questioning whether or not those interpretations are valid and what might really have happened in Sweden is where the drive of this book lies. I really liked it. I mean once I understood that I wasn't in a thriller but rather in this psychological assessment, I was into it, and, even though at a certain point I drew my own conclusion about whether or not the mother had had some kind of breakdown or was genuinely the victim of a conspiracy, it didn't matter because by that point I was interested in seeing how it all turned out and if we'd find out one way or the other. I think if that's not your mindset, you'll find the book to be slow because, as noted, not much happens; if it is your mindset, like if you get into the spirit of the book in which you, a child, are really paying attention to your parent and trying to understand what happened and whether it was real and if one parent is turning on the other or not and then, once you draw your own conclusion, what you do about that, well then I think you'll inhale this book like I did.

TV/Streaming:

The Boys (Season 3):

I'd say this most recent season of a show in which superheroes are a sort of corporate commodity reverted back to its season 1-ness which isn't a compliment (hmm I guess I never published that review) especially since season 2 demonstrated how entertaining the show could be (how could I not have published that review either, me?!?!). So the gist of show for those who haven't seen yet but are also somehow riveted by reading a review of the third season of an unwatched show: superheroes are the product of some kind of drug where there was an experiment ages ago - I'm honestly a bit hazy on the backstory meaning it's possible I'm just inventing it - where pregnant women were injected with something and their kids came out with superpowers. These kids, once grown up, are part of a large squad sent off to do various superhero-y things depending in part on their power levels but mostly on whether or not they can be marketed with the most popular ones treated like megastars. On the other side are people who think superheroes working for a corporation (to hardly mention superheroes in general) is a bad idea and those people - the eponymous Boys - go off and oppose the corporation and their superheroes more through wiliness than anything though, given that that's absurd, later seasons have either brought in ex-superheroes to work for them or they've given themselves temporary powers using some drug. Meaning it was human v. superhero and now it's kind of superhero v. superhero. This mushiness over what the show is and its rules around what's possible and what's not is, in part, a piece of why the series is mediocre at best. For these sorts of shows to work, there need to be Achilles heels all over the place because otherwise the world is constantly knocking you out of its own reality, like if no one, not even another superhero, is powerful enough to kill the #1 superhero, then there's either (a) no drama at all or (b) no logic at all or (c) in this show both. There's a sort of sarcasm to the show that I guess is supposed to be amusing but for me never hits, but there's also a real dragginess to it because none of the characters are particularly well-drawn (asterisk on the season 2 lead character who, without spoilering, was very well-drawn (though I think the actor was mostly responsible for making that character so alive and not the writers) and set up a clear and logical antagonist for everything that was going on). They're blunt, like: the Iowa good-girl superhero, the nice guy, the closeted lesbian superhero, the not-nice-but-solid-underneath guy, the hairtrigger guy, etc. It feels like the show doesn't know what it is, as in"I'm a quippy action show, but with drama, and I'm about corporations and power only I'm not because unpowered people have power over powered people when it's convenient for me, and I'll have my characters talk as if they're in meaningful relationships without actually showing the soap opera development of those relationships, oh I also have plot when I need it but no real ticking clocks (except for ones I toss in there when I realize I have no ticking clocks but Amazon ordered 8 episodes and I only have enough plot for two), and yeah that's me!" It's really flaccid because unlike, say, Umbrella Academy (ugh yet another review I forgot to publish stop that, me!) which has a similar vibe and where there's kind of the same ticking clock each season (world destruction), there at least IS something that the characters are doing and up against every season. In this show? Really the first few episodes were more or less people sitting around talking about their existential crises and then around episode 6 the show woke up and remembered it was supposed to be an action series and went ahead and did that. Blargh. I mean I didn’t DNF and will no doubt watch future seasons, but I can't imagine binging it because many episodes are just so sluggish - in fact, up until the final three episodes I don't think I made it through an entire episode in one sitting without getting so bored I needed to go watch something else. Season 2 was good though because of that lead actor but, yeah, I'm not so hopeful for future seasons but I guess I'll see <yawn>.

South Side (Season 1):

Bearing in mind that comedy is subjective, I found this series about (mostly) Black people on the south side of Chicago to be crazy hilarious. I'm noting Black because the point of the series is give us a very particular and to me sharply funny lens on various characters - cops, retail store employees, some aspiring venture capitalists - that are more often presented in terms of drama, like crime or drugs or whatnot, whereas this show is just about people living their lives but infused with perspectives, attitudes, and plot points that are specific to a world I hadn't seen before, as in there's an entire episode - and in fact this episode was the turning point for me from "yeah amusing show" to "genius" - devoted to one character's efforts to get the right wig for her high school reunion (well it's actually a funeral but a bunch of her high school friends will be there so she's viewing it as a reunion, a setup in and of itself I thought was pretty entertaining) combined with another character getting stuck on a roof, which doesn't sound like much but, with both plots, they were taken to hilarious and, in the wig plot, sort of interestingly character-driven dramatic, extremes. To me. I can't emphasize the “to me” part enough. I thought this show was genius in its writing and its combo of absurdity and real - kind of like Corporate (finally a review I can link to - here) a bit in tone - but that may not be your response so if you've noticed across the eons of Media Report that our humor doesn't line up, well you've been warned if you end up watching and don’t like it. What I loved about the show most of all was the writing as it was super sharp though not apparent to moi up until the wig episode, but really from wig onwards it was just kind of hilarious genius. I also liked that these were characters I hadn't really seen portrayed before, to hardly mention in circumstances that were both deeply specific but also, via the writing, managed to spiral into something either bigger or even more specific, either of which outcome was totally satisfying. You can kind of feel the love the writers have for their characters and the subsequent humanity that infuses everything and allows you to laugh, by which I mean you're laughing because of someone rather than at them - it's not cringe comedy - and that combined with the fun acting and ridiculous yet somehow character-grounded plots made me absolutely love this series and I'm knocking wood that the subsequent seasons are as good or better than the latter half of this one.

Movies:

Plane - This is an indescribably bad action movie that I'm going to attempt to describe anyway. And to be clear: I have no problem with a dumb action movie (John Wick - yes, please!) and in fact I initially thought this Gerard Butler/Mike Colter film about a plane crash resulting in a hostage situation and a rescue attempt - you can easily fill in all the blanks yourself there as they're exactly as generic as you're imagining right now - would be some entertaining dumb fun. And I was wrong. My take on the entire film was: I'm not bored... but I'm not interested. There was also one deeply deeply strange component to the movie but the plot first: Gerard Butler is flying a NYE flight - presumably to justify why there are only 10 people on the plane (read: the studio couldn't afford more than 10) - one of whom is handcuffed ex-army (or somesuch) dude Mike Colter who's a murderer but for all the right reasons plus a bunch of other types - the asshole, the self-absorbed GenZers, etc. - and there's some kind of engine blowout and maybe an unexpected storm (I can't remember, it was too dumb) and they crash land on some island. In the meantime, a hostage gang on a neighboring island decides to check out the crash and see if there are any people alive to ransom and even more in the meantime, there's an airline-crash-in-hostile-territories-where-neighboring-island-gangs-might-come-over-to-take-people-hostage consultant who advises the airline honchos to send in a crack team of Navy Seal-type experts to find the plane and save the passengers because... honestly I don't really know, something about the government being too slow, but really this character raised many of the stupidity issues with this movie which, again, almost made it good-bad but never managed to really get there. Like does anything I just wrote about the consultant make a lick of sense to you, not least being how there's enough business generated in this very particular arena for him to have an expertise and consulting business in it at all? The movie is filled with this kind of stuff, like there's a scene where Gerard Butler is in some decrepit office in the jungle and a random guy for no reason whatsoever and with zero dialogue just comes in and starts beating the crap out of him, a feeling I could relate to admittedly but still. But the thing that made this movie just truly weird was that it looked like it was shot in the mid '60s. The airplane they used was so ancient it didn't even have an engine on the wing like modern jumbo jets; there was this odd hazy look to it, kind of washed out like you'd expect a '60s movie to be when viewed today, only I don't think that was intentional as in I don't think it was a filmic choice but rather some cheapness with a heaping of lack-of-talent tossed in for good measure. It looked like they spent 98% of the budget on their big(ish) name actors and just made the movie with what was left - I really think I'm right about this. As you can see from the review, the movie wasn't bad enough to have inadvertently hilarious sequences worth recounting nor was it engaging enough to write about the cool plot or whatever. Not boring but not interesting, as in you can totally group-watch it and people can kind of make fun of it while playing on their phones and actually watch the whole thing rather than DNF or equally the power could go out halfway through and no one will ever think to turn this on again. If that's what you're looking for, and in some ways it fit the bill the night I watched, here you go.