Books:
The Joy of Sweat by Sarah Everts
This nonfiction book about, well, sweat was totally riveting and completely great if you enjoy books about the science of the human body. I can't say I gave much thought to sweat before reading this book except in the context of its being disgustingly splattered all over some machine at the gym. The book is very breezily written yet still digs pretty deeply into the topic, and, given deodorant manufacturing, sweat and the aromas around sweat have been pretty thoroughly explored. But there are other aspects to it, like the use of sweat in crime scene forensics, stuff around pheromones, and the use of sweat to identify certain cancers because, apparently, everything winds up in your sweat eventually including cancer DNA. The book delves into how other animals get rid of heat (spoiler alert: many through poo) and then goes off into some pretty abstruse places like sauna theater where, apparently, stage performers make use of the heat, steam, and cooling to create some artistic experience for the sweltering nude crowd as well as covering the work of a self-styled Norwegian Scent Artist who collected then reproduced the sweat of phobics then created an exhibition for people to experience fear through sniffing whatever she'd smeared on the wall. Who knew? Well now me and, if any of this seemed intriguing to you, then soon you too.
TV/Streaming:
Squid Game (Season 1):
So before getting into the review I feel compelled to, once again, call out Netflix's disingenuousness in self-reporting its numbers and deeming this thing a mega-hit. In reality, for all we know under a million people watched the whole series but - and this makes me CRAZY - legit news media outlets have essentially become publicity shills for Netflix et. al. because they report Netflix's BS numbers as if they're real and act as if something's permeated pop culture when they actually have no idea. I mean, if I sit here and claim the absolute truth that Media Report is the most widely read piece of brilliance on the planet and that it's not only read but re-read literally billions of times - and I have the Excel spreadsheet I just cooked up to prove it! - will the New York Times report on that? (Um, please?) Because they sure do for Netflix and they sure did for this show. Good for Netflix but, hey media outlets, how about doing that journalism thing and not just blindly repeating self-serving marketing statements but rather, ya know, requiring access to the data or a report from a disinterested 3rd party before you trumpet something as truth?
Anyhoo, in case you were one of the billions who didn't watch despite Netflix's claim that you did, this show is essentially about a group of people who are deeply in debt and are invited to play a series of what are essentially very simple grade-school games only the losers are killed and the winners whittled down until a single winner claims all the money. This isn't really a show in which the games are about problem solving (like in this show’s genre sibling Alice in Borderland) but rather about creating game-theory-type trust issues among the players. It's... okay. Definitely too long and, for this Janice, more and more whys as the show continued, primarily the why of "why am I watching this?" because after a while the Saw-movies-level mega blood splatter violence just began to seem, I don't know, sad rather than cool or scary or whatever it was meant to be (what was it meant to be - really?). All these dead bodies piling up for something like losing at Simon Says just raised questions for me of what I was looking at, not because I was grossed out but because I couldn’t understand the point. And, beyond a kind of hazy top-level explanation which I won't spoiler, there's no real answer to the why of any of it, which probably wouldn't have mattered if this series had been shorter or a movie or something, but so much violence and death and betrayal dragged out across 9 episodes, most of them around 50ish minutes, just makes you - or me I guess - wonder what any of it is supposed to mean. I'm ignoring logic flaws here btw and the big swallow that so many game workers were just totally fine with everything and kept it all a secret for no reason I could see. But the larger why, the filmic why, the artistic why, the what-is-the-thematic-point why (okay a what not a why)? In other words, what was the writer trying to say that required 9 episodes to say it? What's my takeaway? Is it just supposed to be dumb fun like the endless stream of Marvel movies I've been watching? Put another way: there are 456 players and only one person can win. Thus we watch 455 people get massacred. To what end? To pick another Korean piece of media, one I didn't particularly like (though didn't hate), Parasite, while to me it lost its grip on its theme in the latter half, I did understand the point the filmmaker was trying to make about the way Korean society was stratified. With this? Shrug. Look, I didn't hate it; it's well shot, moves along, the characters while bluntly drawn are at least distinct from each other, and I didn't DNF. But as the show wore on, I found myself not really wanting to watch anymore because I knew with absolute certainty what was going to happen in every single episode. I didn't know the specifics of how and, as you can see from above, didn't know why, but I knew what because, barring some reveals, every episode is the same, and it began to feel like a trudge. The show moves between the players in the game and some backstage stuff with the people who run the game but really all that just began to feel completely meaningless. I won't spoiler, but towards the end one of the characters does a whole deep dive into what was really going on and the payoff of that... honestly I still have no idea nor do I understand the ending. I understand the explanation but there's a character shift I won't spoiler and I don't really understand that. So there you go. There was something sloppy and flaccid and ill-thought-out about this show - and no surprise there for Netflix frankly which IJHO consistently seems to lack any executives remotely capable of giving story notes - that isn't really apparent in the first couple of episodes but becomes more and more so as the show continues and for me began to overwhelm the games and whatever tension was supposed to be generated from them and the investigation into what was really going on with this sense of viewer pointlessness. Like I said, it's watchable, but I can't really say it's worth watching.
Happy Endings (Season 1):
So this is a network Friends-alike sitcom that ran for 3 seasons in the early 20teens and, as my inclination - and I think many people share this inclination - is to avoid network sitcoms at all costs, I avoided this one. Frankly I'm fairly certain I had no idea it even existed during its broadcast - or, given network viewing numbers, perhaps narrowcast would be more accurate - years. Well at some point as I was browsing around, I noticed this show appearing on a number of underrated sitcom lists, generally a warning sign I've learned, one I repeatedly ignore despite having been burned by it oh so many times, and I ignored it once it again with this one and, well, it wasn't horrible! I'm sure everyone involved will be thrilled with that review and it stems from what multiple non-Janices said over and over which was that the first half of the season is a standard blah sitcom but that it later goes off the rails in a good way. In this case, the setup is three late 20s women and three guys who are all old friends - and btw I'm forgiving the all straight White women, one straight Black guy, one straight White guy, and one gay White guy as it came out a decade ago and I think that was fairly culturally progressive in its time - and two of them are a couple that's getting married only the woman ditches the guy at the altar. As it turns out the setup was entirely unnecessary though it took the show about 6 episodes to figure that out; sure, the part of exes transitioning to friends is played, but really it's barely relevant. What ends up happening is the show stops trying to be remotely real and goes for some straight-up nonstop absurdist humor, like the episode where, because the gay guy still hasn't come out to his parents and they're coming to town for a visit, the three women fight and engage in subterfuge which each other in order to be his beard. It kind of drifted into a Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23 vibe with some of the high-speed quippiness of 30 Rock. It's a network-y Friends-type show with the feel that it actually wants to be on cable. I mean, I LOLed, ChOLed, WSAIMHed (that would be Was Somewhat Amused In My Head - let’s make WSAIMHed a thing!) in places and assuming the subsequent seasons do more of the same, if you like rat-a-tat ridiculousness, this one, while it definitely doesn't start there, gets pretty (well, relatively) fun.
Movies:
Skyline (Skyline #1) - Where has this equal parts moronic and gripping alien invasion film been all my gummied life? And a trilogy no less?!? Basically, aliens arrive, shine some big light everywhere, and start sucking up everyone on the planet into their ships for reasons that are presumably (hopefully) made clear in the sequels, and we track four people trying to avoid all that. What I appreciated most about this movie is that the filmmakers decided to blow the entire budget on the effects - a choice I'm SO behind - meaning essentially the movie goes back and forth between big loud effects and 4 people in a single room having dialogue trying to figure out what’s going on. It reminded me of a horror film in that sense, a monster lurking outside the house, people in the house trying to figure out what’s happening and how to evade it with a few character asides but really mostly talking about the nutso event occurring outside. I’m not saying this is some genius movie but the effects were fun, the filmic downtime mostly spent with people running around in survival mode, some hot-adjacent leads (the movie’s central failing IJHO), and otherwise lots of screaming and panic. Plus it was a very very polite 90 minutes meaning it arrived, turned on some stadium lighting, sucked a bunch of people to their doom, then went on its way. Skyline #2, here I come!
Passing - In the great tradition of eminently DNFable Netflix movies, this slow-descent-into-napdom excuse for a film has formally been added to the list. Look, I get it. Netflix is in the business of marketing its services (see Squid Game above) to a subscriber base meaning it doesn't really care about any one particular series/movie (or, given the atrocious quality of so many, any at all (lest we forget: Netflix slaps its name on anything on Netflix making it impossible for those too lazy to Google (that would be me) to figure out what Netflix itself made and what it merely distributed so don't be fooled if you saw something good as Netflix likely had nothing to do with its production)). So what Netflix wants, as with all subscriber-based media models (HBO etc.), is to get other media - like mega-successful to hardly mention crazy hot Substack reviewers for example - to talk about Netflix's offerings as a means of promoting the brand. Netflix doesn't care what you watch, just that you pay, and the consumer cost/benefit on the monthly fee is about what you COULD watch rather than what you DO watch. Meaning if you fall asleep through a lauded piece of anti-cinematic pro-snooze drama like this one, you'll keep paying because maybe you liked, say, Ozark and like knowing that if you're bored you can hunt around and at least find something even if it turns out to be bad. In other words, Netflix is potential future boredom insurance, and you're on autopay in the hopes of staving that off, and, because you won’t know if you’ll be bored with something until you’ve actually watched it, you rely on the marketing, like reviews and unbacked claims of popularity, to tell you the service is worth your money.
So this particular movie, as with the equally revered and equally (well maybe even more) awful Exterminate All The Brutes, was highly lauded by non-Janices, I assume because it's about an important topic. But the role of a critic isn't to judge the intention of a movie or its social meaning but what it actually is and this one was a plotless slooooooooow bore. The film is about Black women passing as White in 1920s NYC which sounds like it actually could have some plot since there's (a) the chance of being found out, (b) the dire consequences of being found out (one is married to a White racist), and (c) the externalization of the inner conflict of, basically, racial-self-shaming vs seeking something better in a racist world. In other words, there's plenty there that could both generate a juicy plot and be about something meaningful. But... no. Like imagine watching someone sitting on a couch for three hours thinking about things then move them into a car, a jazz club, a hotel, a city street, some other random location and you'll have a sense of this movie. When I say nothing happens - and I gave it half the film before DNF'ing - I mean NOTHING. People meet, talk, make dramatic faces at each other, go to another scene, talk, make dramatic faces at each other on and on and on. That's the plot at least for first half and really, at that point, unless it becomes a Marvel-level action movie for the final 90 minutes (if only!) you, Netflix, the filmmakers, whomever’s claiming ownership of this shizz, have lost all rights to my further time. If you heard this was good, it's not. The topic is interesting though, so hopefully someone who understands story will go out and write a series or movie about it but until then, give this a skip.