Media Report
Mare of Easttown, an unbearable quantity of Swing Shifts (read: anything more than zero), and more!
Books:
The Three-Body Problem/The Dark Forest/Death's End by Cixin Liu
This is a highly-lauded ideas-heavy sci-fi trilogy and if this review were solely about the first book I’d have said I didn’t really get what all the fuss was about (not that that’s such a weird statement from me but whevs). The first book is a total mess - and a poorly written one at that - which intercuts between the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a present-tense investigation of the mysterious deaths of a number of scientists (plus some videogame - it’s not worth going into), and an intellectually convoluted encounter with an alien civilization. The writing is atrocious and, while some of the ideas are interesting, they're not exactly original and get really bogged down by descriptions of all these people and characters who are so flat as to be indistinguishable from each other. Why, the world is clamoring to know, did I finish book 1 let alone the whole trilogy? Because, despite all that, I really couldn’t just outright dismiss the mind behind the writing, by which I mean I could whiff there was something there so decided to hang on to see what that something was. So the way it turned out was the first book sets up the second and it’s really in the second and third books - which jump farther then father again into the future - where I have to say it all came around. To be clear: the writing remains awful and the characters generally nothing more than authorial mouthpieces, but the ideas become more and more compelling as the series continues - and more and more grim honestly - as the author plays out a logic trail about the likeliest outcome of what might happen if life forms discover each other. I know I’m being vague but it’s deliberate because the primary - sole for me actually - pleasure of the books is not in the writing (as noted), characters (as also noted), or story to an extent but rather in their intellectual interest and in the way they unravel a ruthless logic and philosophy; there’s definitely a plot that revs up more and more but really it’s there as a means of playing out and demonstrating the underlying ideas. I’m trying to avoid spoilering all that because once you kind of understand where the books are going, the read becomes about seeing how they unravel and whether anyone can escape the logic traps set up by the author. If you’re into classic sci-fi (Heinlein, Asimov et. al. who similarly used the genre to explore ideas) and don’t mind wading through some blrrgh writing and characters to get to the good stuff, this trilogy definitely made me think.
Correspondents by Tim Murphy
This is a Non-“Voice” aka Old-School-Contemporary American Fiction book that tracks the parallel and somewhat intertwined stories of a female war correspondent in Iraq during the Bush years and a male Iraqi translator and his family trying to survive the war; the stories cross but they’re mostly told as two separate threads. The structure’s weird - the first 25% is backstory, engaging backstory, but still just backstory - and while the details of the leads' arcs are particular, the novel’s thematic arc itself isn't. I’m noting these critiques because I observed them while I was reading but equally they had no impact on my enjoyment of the book, which I believe is a testament to the overall strength of the writing and the author’s choice to put the characters in very Godot-like situations randomly punctuated by moments of extreme violence (or the impending threat of violence) which left a kind of lingering background tension to the entire read. Also I found the specifics of the world - journalists holed up in a compound then risking their lives for a story combined with the Iraqis trying to make the best of their situation but having to risk their lives to survive as well - really captured something in a way I hadn’t read before. The writing is strong, the characters are well-drawn, the setting is interesting, and I thought the journey of the novel overall was pretty moving.
TV/Streaming:
Vida (Season 1):
This is a shockingly entertaining and funny half-hour show about, kind of, gentrification in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of LA. BTW it’s shocking primarily because I expected it to be so boring (see “gentrification” from like one second ago). The main setup is two polar opposite sisters inherit the bar their mother owned and, as a result, are forced to reconnect with each other, their heritage, and their pasts all while facing the problems of a neighborhood and its community battling for different visions of its future. It’s a drama with a lot of humor, more a comedram than a dramedy (I have a feeling comedram is really gonna take off). The characters are well-drawn, the acting is good, the dialogue is snappy, and clearly the main studio note was "more masturbation please" because that's basically every other scene, and I’d have to call all that a blend that works.
The Split (Season 1):
This is a British show about a family of divorce attorneys and it's, I don't know, okay. I really wanted to like it more but the characters just do such unrealistic and OTT things, e.g. an engaged character gropes the vicar (already we're into ridiculous territory), then giggles about it with her sister who then announces it at the dinner with both bride and groom families present (really spiraling off into idiocy here) and then, after like a day of sulking, the whole thing is just written off as pre-wedding wackiness and everyone's besties again. The show is designed around a different divorce case every week with one season-long divorce case plus the family drama, which would’ve been fine but it was death by tone for me. I'm gonna say I don't know again because although I could have stopped at any second, I watched it all and I'll probably watch the 2nd season cause, you know, I'm me and I guess if that tone doesn't bother you and you're in the mood for some dramediocre rather than comedram well there’s this.
Mare of Easttown:
When the reviews of this Kate Winslet cop drama first came out, I decided not to watch it because it was described as being a grim downer with downer people in a slow trudgy plot and if you've read prior Media Reports you'll know that downer, slow, and plotless are not Janice's thing. But then some Janice (fine, my mom) said she'd watched the first episode and it was pretty good and that I might like it so I decided okay, worst case I DNF and well... fucking loved it! Loved. Yeah, it is slow, if you're thinking of it as a mystery. But it's not; it's a drama about a character at rock bottom where the investigative element forces her kicking and screaming into a confrontation with a personal crisis she’s worked very hard to avoid. As a drama, it totally worked. Not something binge-y to me - one episode a night or every few days felt like the right pace - but completely engrossing. The performances were great; the characters had humor and behaved in ways that felt real; the murder investigation served as both a character and plot driver and was really effective in that way. It's not like a super twisty show - yes, there are some twists but nothing mind-blowing - but that's also not the point of the show. It's a really good character story that has a definite beginning, middle, and end and because I don’t think the mere fact of being lower/middle class is de facto grim - which is I think what the non-Janices meant by that description - I didn’t find it to be grim at all but rather just pretty human.
Movies:
Swing Shift/Swing Shift Director’s Cut - Okay so years ago I read this article about how Jonathan Demme's director's cut of Swing Shift (yeah, the Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell WWII-ladies-go-to-work Swing Shift from the ‘80s) was supposed to be some jaw-droppingly instructive demonstration of how an actor with final cut (Goldie) can completely destroy a film, the implication being that the Jonathan Demme version was crazy genius and was sucked of all life and vitality by Private Benjamin herself. The director's cut was never released; it's one of those things that's been passed from person to person and the version I got had clearly been transferred from 3/4 to VHS to DVD perhaps multiple times; the aspect ratio is 4:3, there's timecode all over it, and it has only a limited score. I think I got it in the early ‘00s and I kept planning to watch it but then kept punting for the obvious reason that it would require me to watch Swing Shift twice, and my memory from having seen it at some point in the last millennium was that once was actually one time too many. But I guess all it really took was a year of lockdown to transform the prospect of back-to-back Swing Shifts into a viable viewing option and the verdict is in: the Jonathan Demme definitely takes the released, Goldie-cut version from a D- to a D/D+. I mean it's better in the sense that the Goldie version, aside from the much-publicized cutting of as much of Christine Lahti as one human can, isn't really about anything whereas - and I can't believe I'm saying this - the Jonathan Demme version at least captures the theme of the double-entendre title, i.e. the shift from women in the home to women at work. Also the Goldie version has some very strange editing decisions, like Goldie's husband, Ed Harris, goes to war at which point Goldie goes to work, meets Kurt Russell and starts a flirtation with him. In the director's cut there's a line where Kurt hits on Goldie and she says something like that it's been 3 months since her husband left so she guesses it's okay to get a drink (the implication being that they’re going to sleep together after that drink). In the Goldie version, she ADR'ed in “5 months” - you can see her mouth still saying “3” - because… waiting 3 months to cheat on your husband who’s risking his life for your country makes you a slut but 5 months well anyone would agree that’s fine? Like why, in Goldie’s mind, were those extra 2 months of holding out better re: slut-shaming? I mean weird! Not that Jonathan Demme didn't make some strange choices, like constantly lining up all the women by height which had the end result of making Holly Hunter (who even remembered she was in it?) look about three feet tall. I'd like to tell you the entire experience was anything other than a homework assignment in a subject I hated but sadly that would've been an improvement.
Equilibrium - This Christian Bale SF action movie from the early '00s is 100%, pure, uncut, gummy delight (I make zero promises for the non-gummied) at least in part because I watched it over about a month and could barely understand what was happening when I was watching it let alone what had happened from the last time I’d watched it which made the viewing that much more riveting. The plot is about some future time where everyone is given a daily drug to eliminate all human emotions so society can function better without all those messy feelings creating equally messy societal problems and how Christian Bale is the best of the best in the Anti-Feeling Squad assigned to chase down people who stop taking their pill and thus start feeling again and what happens when he stops taking his and the feely enforcers turn on him! It's the perfect combo of confusion, bigass fight and action sequences, and deeply moving in the the filmmaker's mind things like Christian Bale, just off his non-feely meds, in slow motion, to classical music, smelling a rose for the first time. Gummy heaven!