Books:
Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby
This is an action-mystery novel about the homophobic fathers of two murdered married gay children who team up to get revenge on their killers as a form of redemption. The tl;dr is this book is a'ight. The writing is not great and the plotting, while somewhat fun, also has a simplicity to it, a kind of convenience factor, that makes it fairly predictable. All of that was actually okay but I guess what I really didn't click with at all were the characters, all of whom are in the flawed-but-good/pure-evil binary which on the one hand makes for some big action sequences since extreme measures are required by the good guys in order to overcome the bad guys, but in many ways, especially given the body count, makes it all feel really contrived. But the real problem lies with the two dads, one a Black ex-con who at some point turned his life around but could never accept his gay son and the other a White hillbilly, also an ex-con who also couldn't accept his gay son. The issue is that this book feels like it would've been super original and grappling with real social issues in like the mid '90s but I think it was published in 2020 or something. The book is set in the northern part of the South which kind of I guess maybe justifies what feels like some backwards attitudes toward sexuality but really the problem is that beyond "it's unacceptable to my ego that my child is gay" there are no personal, character-specific reasons that show why they'd care. As in it's not like the hillbilly is bigoted in other ways and in fact is somewhat drawl-y laconically easygoing and has a racist brother he doesn't get along with. So okay fine you're both anti-racist and anti-gay but there needs to be an underlying character linkage to make that work and it just doesn’t exist. Similarly, it's not really clear why the Black ex-con cares so much either. It's not as if the book gives him some major extended family where, I don't know, there might be shame and embarrassment coming his way or somesuch due to having a gay son. Rather, it's just a fairly generic gay-son-shame. And the reason this sticks out is even in parts of the country where gay-bashing and gay-shame and whatnot is still prevalent, even there people are aware of changing attitudes if only due to social media, the passage of gay marriage, etc. etc. But this book is written as if those things don't exist which is what gave it such a '90s vibe and not really in a good way. Like I would've been much more interested in reading about two dads who, despite knowing they're on their way to becoming cultural throwbacks and that they're in a world where gay acceptance is becoming a thing even in places where that at one time never seemed possible, still struggle with their own internal bigotry in the face of cultural acceptance. I could've gotten down with that. Instead none of that is ever acknowledged nor are there meaningful reasons given why the dads would care (to hardly mention the moms who are barely in the book) and thus the whole thing has a feel of the characters being patted on the back for making it to the other side and finally being non-homophobic (and non-transphobic as well) which really doesn't seem like much of a victory here I gotta say.
TV/Streaming:
Leopard Skin:
This (in its mind) kinda wacky Guy Ritchieish crime miniseries is unreleaseably awful as in I genuinely don't understand how anyone involved in the financing and distribution process agreed to fork over no doubt millions for this unbearable hunk of shizz. Really, why? How?!? The basic plot - which wasn't terrible btw and is what lured me in - is a diamond heist gone bad after which the criminals wind up at an isolated Mexican villa where the characters there have their own problems. Fine, I was fine with that even with the somewhat technicolor/heightened tone. I was even okay with the OTT characters that always seem to inhabit this subgenre - the hairtrigger drug dealer, his oblivious (or maybe not) hot girlfriend, the staid prudish one who's maybe up to something etc. etc. You know what's unfine? That setup followed by absolutely nothing whatsoever happening other than the most boring pre-pubescent female-attracted-regardless-of-gender cliches in every image, look, and line of dialogue plus a central lesbian BDSM relationship. And I'm not just talking in the background which would've been irritating but not show-killing. No, I'm talking two full episodes where literally nothing happens other than this lady telling that one to crawl on her knees or that lady saying she can't do it anymore then doing it anyway then it's so boring that I'm not even going to describe. Think I’m exaggerating? Go find this piece of crap and watch the episodes entitled Private 1&2 then report back. BTW the show is 8 episodes so, quick get out my calculator, that would be 1/4 of the airtime devoted to the BDSM to hardly mention that every other episode had it too so like maybe 2/3 of the thing total, on top of which we then had to watch all the criminals have (straight and/or lesbian) sex with each other too to kill more time. Plus the criminals were morons as in: if you're double-crossing someone and demanding more money than you were told you'd get would you assume (a) that person would send someone down to happily give you a suitcase of additional money or (b) that person would send someone down to kill all of you and you'd make a plan to deal with that? In other words, there's a crime setup that never pays off because all the 14-year-old straight boy who wrote and directed this piece of junk was interested in was the most boring of all sexual relationships, the one every writer uses when they have ZERO sense of how to write characters, which is BDSM because someone stalking around with a whip (or whatever) and the other person doing some hot debasing is literally the limits of the talent of the person involved in creating a relationship. And guess what? I'M BORED! Clearly the person who created this didn't have a clue how to write plot or character so threw a bunch of naked ladies in a pool and called it a day. Again, all involved, why did you pay for this? Why did my mortality pay for this!??! WHY?!?!?! Honestly I wish I could say this was so bad you might think it's fun; sadly it's just a dull retread of scenes and references from other things glued together with a logline and where its sole raison d'etre is to shame everyone involved. Though come to think of it, perhaps the studio and network execs were involved in their own BDSM experience where, in an effort to abase themselves and please their findom, they dug deep into their submissive selves and reveled in the shame/pleasure of bankrolling and releasing this OH GOD IT FEELS SO BAD/GOOD! And if so, well I guess maybe I'm glad at least someone enjoyed it.
The Capture (Seasons 1 & 2):
This is a thoroughly entertaining and twisty two season (I'm pretty sure it ended) miniseries about a division of the UK government that deepfakes evidence and a cop who gets pulled into a bigger conspiracy case. What made this show a step above others of its ilk was twofold: first there was some well-delivered snappy dialogue which kept everything moving along even when the plot, of necessity a peeling-back-the-onion-layers investigation which is a more measured pace, took its time; second, the conspiracy posited here - that via CCTV video manipulation and deepfakes involving interviews with actual people saying made up dialogue (not going into more details as it could spoiler some of season 2) anyone can be accused of and convicted for anything - seems kinda real! There's a plausibility factor here to the digital video manipulation (more in season 1) and AI deepfaking (season 2) that makes you (me) question the entire underlying justice system. I mean if all video and audio evidence can be faked, what's evidence anymore? If you can take images of people, put words in their mouths, and send a video out on the internet, how could the victim possibly deny they said whatever is on the video? The phrase I've seen with regard to this stuff is "in screen we trust" and it's really true. If it's on a screen and it looks real, we think it's real. But what happens next year or the year after when some Edward Snowden type reveals video evidence in some criminal case was completely faked, like what then? Do we trust nothing? Is there nothing other than fake news anymore because even legit news outlets rely on video taken by others and, well, what if none of it's real? This show dives deep into all those questions and, while the plot in the series totally resolves, I'd say the series pointedly doesn't give answers to the larger questions. I mean the answers aren't so clear are they? Like on the one hand there are real public benefits to surveillance in, say, airports; on the other, if anyone on an airport security camera can be turned into anyone else doing and saying anything by NSA-type government agencies that really have no accountability well, um, yeah that doesn't seem so good. There's no point in going into the plot of this show because the plot is in many ways there to drive these ideas, like the first season is about the cop stumbling onto this thing (it's called Correction in the miniseries) and the second is what the cop does now that she knows and how much farther Correction is pushed, as in the second season delves more into deepfakes and government and business manipulations in, to me, a very interesting way. As you can tell, I was into this whole series, in part because it was fun, but mostly because it was really interesting and the ideas it raised were definitely thought-provoking. All that in a thriller package, I'll take it and, if you like this kind of thing, I advise you do too.
Movies:
Prime - This is one of those mistakes I never learn from - lists of ostensibly underrated movies where it turns out the original critical (bad) assessment was correct and the list is overrating them - and, yeah, this is a pretty mediocre movie from the early '00s which got blah reviews for a reason: it's blah. Conceptually it’s not so bad: therapist Meryl Streep begins to realize that patient Uma Thurman is dating her (Meryl's) much younger son. Seems kind of fun, right? Unfortunately most of the movie is obsessed with New York Jewishness as in there's a lot of upset on Meryl's part about her son dating someone outside the faith and like is that the movie I signed up for? No, I signed up for a marginally classed-up silly comedy but instead got a movie where the BFF of Meryl's son has a thing where he throws Magnolia Bakery cream pies in the faces of women who dump him. A movie where Uma frets about being with a younger guy but seems to have no handle on why she's in the relationship - despite the therapy I might add (or perhaps due to it) - nor really does much except demonstrate that, yes, if you're a straight baby-craving 37-year-old woman dating a straight 23-year-old man, that's probably not going to be a successful path for you. Also why was it called Prime? Did Prime even exist then (waah waah)? No really why? In any event, I sat through the whole thing so you don't need to. There's sadly nothing here, no real insight, no real characters, no real plot, no real comedy, just some I don't know unassuming slice-of-life that takes a fun setup and goes nowhere with it beyond Meryl making faces at Uma during therapy meaning if you removed that element, if you just had a woman in therapy dating a younger guy with a very Jewish family and then watching them individually and together and with her talking about the relationship to her therapist sometimes, well, yeah, it's about that insightful and dull. If this showed up on your list, either remove it or have a tablet nearby to play on because it's background noise at best and barely that.