Books:
Malice (The Faithful and the Fallen #1) by John Gwynne
This is the first - and for me, only - book in a doorstopper fantasy quadreno (?) that I DNFed at 75% not out of hatred or anything but because I found myself skimming through entire chapters in search of the occasional plot beat in a book in which people talked about the plot/world around them and nothing else. Here's what I mean (and, no, I won't make you suffer through quotes): it's okay at the beginning of a book, especially a genre book, to have characters explain the world and the morality of the world. I mean, yes, there are elegant ways to do that, but frankly inelegant ones are perfectly fine as long as the rest of the book is entertaining enough. But 75% in. 75%!?! Long before that point, the characters should be actual people with actual relationships and the issues consuming them explicitly not crap such as - oh no I guess I am going to invent a quote sorry! - "It is known that our ancient law, brought over by the blah blah blah, forbids such yadda yadda" garbaaage like that. At 5%, okay. At 75%, well what that means is that the author is incapable of creating characters and relationships because, presumably, if the author were capable of that, people would be, um, relating to each other instead of spewing wordy junk. There are no relationships in this book. The characters are barely distinguishable from one another as are the worlds they inhabit - they're all kind of medieval middle-class or wealthier people in the same types of towns doing the exact same things (mostly training in swordfighting) and, really, I should've given up from whatever page I realized I was in a book in which the level of creativity was: giants, wyrms, draigs (dragons - and, OMG, even someone getting a dragon egg which may have, possibly (doubtfully) been an original thought to the author, but post Game of Thrones really needed to be nixed). Should I go into plot what little of it there is? Oh fine – I’ll leave it to you to fill in all the blanks and trust me you will because the book is that obvious. There’s this bullied kid who develops sword skills and finds a wolf cub [fill in blank about what happens]; there’s a prophecy of a world-destroying battle of good and evil [FIBAWH]; there’s a prince and his swordsman hunting down elements of the prophecy [FIBAWH]; there’s a cauldron, spooky dreams, bandits in the woods, ancient evils reemerging [FIBAWH], people being axed, stabbed, shot at with bows and arrows, every body part sliced out and splattered everywhere in seemingly every other scene – oh I just got so bored I decided I’m done describing this. It’s bad. Why, you’re clamoring to know, did I continue? Well primarily because I'm also in the midst of reading a somewhat homework-y though also somewhat interesting history book (future Media Report if/when I finish all 50 million pages of it) and was looking for something light and fast-paced to counteract the dryness. I did not get that. I got crazy boredom and I kept reading because other reviews noted this book was slow going to start though they all said it picked up but, no, it did not, slow going and slow staying and even if the last unread 25% is nonstop awesomeness (I’m certain it’s not) I can't imagine suffering through the same dull writing, meandering plot, boring world, and character sameness for three more books so why finish this one? And thus I didn’t.
TV/Streaming:
Spiral (Seasons 1-8):
This French cop drama turned out to be one of the most stellar series I’ve watched, something that was not apparent at the beginning and before going into details, just to tell you what makes it so great is simple to type and so hard to execute: twisty plots played out by utterly real and gripping characters (fantastically acted as well). Each season of the show tracks an investigation from the POV of the cops, the prosecution & defense, and - and this is particular to the French legal system - a sort of pre-trial judge with wide-ranging powers to ensure the prosecution legally gets the information it needs but while also serving as a check on prosecutorial and police investigative abuses, and in each of those arenas, the characters are so incredibly well-drawn that all the problems they wind up dealing with - some with the case, some with internal politics, some with problems they create themselves, some with their personal lives - add as much drive to the show as the crime plots do. The season-long investigation is generally a one-off, but the character stories change and grow across the seasons. I initially found this show to be very difficult to get into. In fact, I ended up watching the first few episodes 3 times over several years because I just was having such a hard time clicking with it, sort of like with The Wire where there are so many people in different areas that it’s hard to figure out initially who’s who and who wants what to hardly mention tracking the details of the case that it all can just feel confusing and boring. Additionally, while there’s one major case each season, there are also seemingly minor cases which sometimes balloon into something bigger and, I guess when starting season 1, it was just a lot to take in especially since I didn’t have an inherent sense of how the French legal system worked which made it harder to figure out what people were doing. Plus, as with many shows, the first season was good but kind of standard foreign-peak-TV good - it felt like every other classy cop show - as opposed to what it became which was a show operating at an entirely different level from others in its genre. As you can see I’m not going into plots mostly for spoiler reasons because there’s stuff that can be spoilered in the personal non-crime plots of the characters (which is a testament to how engaging the characters became) but also because so much of the pleasure of this show is watching the various players in the legal system trying to work their way through the cases. So I’ll just say this: the show never has a dip, there’s no bad season or one where you think its losing its way or anything like that, and the ending (season 8 is the final season) is pretty much pitch-perfect, meaning, if you invest the time getting into the show at the beginning, you have only delight ahead of you as it gets better and better and you can go into it knowing it stays excellent the whole time and doesn’t disappoint at the end.
Table Wars (Season 1):
This is a bottom-feeding reality competition series about tablescaping - WHAT HAVE I BECOME?!?! I'm so ashamed to type that word to hardly mention admitting I actually watched this show, though then again I’ve fessed up to watching 90 Day Fiance: Before the 90 Days and the even more horrifying Marrying Millions so by contrast this is huge personal growth - that somehow managed to get Martha Stewart as one of the judges. Given how cheap everything on it looks, I'm thinking they handed to the entirety of the production budget to her. Of the many many many many home decor arenas I care absolutely nothing about except maybe as competition, I'd put tablescaping right up there. I mean, sure, I like a plate and spoon as much as the next Janice and I guess the layout of such items can offer a different mood, like for a fancy dinner, but do I really feel the need for a sleigh hanging over the table, chairs done up like thrones, train tracks running around the table's perimeter, a contrast color scheme, a Mad Hatter tea look complete with overgrown blooms and a big purple hat, or having a breakfast burrito while surrounded by a bringing-the-outdoors-indoors quantity of potted tropical plants? I feel safe saying a solid no and, while I thought there'd be some amusement in watching other people obsess over arranging utensils in the service of... of... do other animals prefer eating and socializing in crafted environments just curious? My genius new viral video for someone else to do and me to watch: an experiment with dogs to see if they choose their plain old stainless steel bowl on the floor or the tajine-shaped bowl on the floor with a hookah next to it beneath a Moroccan tent for scarfing down their IAMs. In all honesty, this show was kinda just depressing and boring. The production is really bad and these craft-y tables isolated in spaces too large for the designers to fill in the time given made them look like tablescapes but post zombie/alien apocalypse, like someone had been planning a dinner party for 50 and was in the midst of choosing plates before getting eaten alive or sucked up into a spaceship thus transforming their tablescape from "fun party!" to their memorial mausoleum. Fun only if you like Martha Stewart's flat weirdness commenting on ill-lit table-corpses.
Movies:
The Raid - This is an Indonesian action movie from like a decade ago about a police team assigned to nab a gang leader (kind of) at the top of the tenement apartment tower he controls and their battle floor by floor to get him. Once it gets going, it is complete nonstop action - hand to hand combat, crazy gun fights, etc. - from start to finish. It has a fun videogame quality to it where each of the cops’ battles to get to the top has a kind of leveling-up feel where the fighting gets tougher the farther they go. There’s some basic plot and character stuff though really none of that exactly stuck and none of it mattered because the fight and action sequences were pretty awesome, sometime OTT with insane amounts of bullets flying everywhere and diving in various directions while shooting but always in a completely satisfying way. For a very contained movie - it’s all set on different levels of one apartment building - the director came up with a ton of creativity for how the various action sequences went down. It's a few cops trying to outsmart a bajillion bad guys and is low-budget popcorn at its best, nothing more but also nothing less. I thought it was pretty entertaining, and there's a sequel I haven't watched yet but surely will.
Les Notres - This drama, essentially about pedophilia but not as a crime film or anything like that but from the POV of the teenager in love with and being manipulated by the older man and how her feelings and actions play out, was pretty interesting though - and this isn't a spoiler alert but a rather a fair warning - it goes nowhere. I mean clearly the filmmaker had no idea either what he was saying or perhaps he did but had no idea how to say it and basically the last 15 minutes of the film are a lot of intense stares and cryptically meaningless dialogue and behavior but no actual sense of the interior thoughts and state of the teenager we've been following the entire time. I found it to be frustrating because I was kind of into the movie in that I'd never really seen anything of this kind. I'm avoiding certain spoilers - I refuse to count the pedophilia as a spoiler since it's the entire film - but there was something very interesting and sort of morally complex about a sexually active and aware teenager making a choice to have sex with someone while not understanding due to lack of experience the extent to which her emotions were being manipulated and also the fallout among her peers and family and how she dealt with them. Unfortunately I have no idea about any of that because the filmmaker decided that obtuseness would suffice at the end and, really it makes me kind of mad. I mean I invested time in this thing and I'd say, especially given the topic, that clarity of some sort is actually critical, i.e. when you’re doing a movie about pedophilia from the perspective of a teenager who thinks she’s in love, you need to end your film and have it say, well, something. This filmmaker didn't. I genuinely believe it's a combination of having created a character whom he wanted to have behave in certain ways without actually thinking about the underlying person and why that person would do those things. In other words, the character's motivations were amorphous and ill-defined and guess what? A bunch of cryptic camera shots is not a substitute for thinking it all through and then translating that thought filmicly to an audience. Aargh, I was frustrated, clearly, because up until the ending I would've said this was an interesting film. But the interesting part is merely saying "a sexually active desirous teenager's interactions with an older man are drastically different than a pre-sexual child's interactions (the most commonly tackled type of this crime in streaming/film) and let's at look that" and that's not enough. You need to take that uncomfortable thought through to something. You need to end it in some manner, let me know what someone - anyone! - is thinking about that topic. Anyway, that's what it is. I don't know. It's not super plotty really but it does generate tension, in part because of our expectations of how it will all play out due to how we've seen this topic play out in prior movies (I'm not giving details here due to spoilering), and in part because the lead character didn't really know how to deal with her situation and was constantly groping to figure it out, meaning there was tension in not knowing her next steps. But I needed a "why" (why is she making the decisions she's making) by the end because absent that, what was any of it really about? What was any of it saying? So I don't know. Perhaps knowing up front it doesn't coalesce into anything discernible will make it a better viewing experience than I had because up until that point I'd have said it was something interesting to watch and, if watching in a group as I was, would've generated some interesting post-film conversation, as opposed to the post-film conversation about being irritated which is what we had instead.