Books:
Pachinko by Lee Min-Jin
This was a pretty decent multigenerational fiction book covering about 80 years of a Korean family in Japan. I'll say upfront: I don't love multigenerational books in general because I often find myself engaged by one set of characters in a time period and then they take a backseat for others that I'm less invested in, a bit like reading a short story collection where you do something similar though of course with a book like this you're not entering completely new stories each time. That being said I still enjoyed it. It's a sort of rags-to-riches story across the generations though what I'd say it's mostly about, and really what kept me engaged, was the brutal relationship between the Japanese and their system for keeping Koreans as second-class non-citizens, similar in certain ways to America and its Native Americans though quite different as Koreans are far more integrated into Japanese society. It's not an anti-Japan book or anything as the Japanese characters are as well-drawn as the Korean ones and it's not the kind of book where there are any villains per se. Rather the book is trying to show a reality for an underclass of citizenry and how it's pervaded across so many generations. I'm not really going into plot details not so much for spoiler reasons but because the book is mostly setup about impoverished people trying to scrape by and build something better for the next generation and those sorts of stories are less about plot details than they are about the particular obstacles faced by the characters - some systemic, some cultural, some personal - and how they either do or don't push past them. The writing wasn't standout either direction meaning it's serviceable enough to tell the story without either blowing your mind or getting in the way. I know this review is meh and in part it's because the book was just okay and in part it's because as mentioned this isn't my favorite form of storytelling. Having said that, I was never bored and ultimately enjoyed the book so if you're into this kind of fiction in general and haven't read this one or if you're just curious about the topic and prefer to read about it in fiction form, you'll probably have a more strongly positive reaction than I did.
TV/Streaming:
Masterchef (Season 18):
Well I love the earnest and gentle dragginess of a British competition reality show and this season of Masterchef was no exception. As a reminder, this is a cooking competition in which amateur home cooks battle it out by doing mostly pre-set challenges, i.e. those they've had time to practice (though there are a few "mystery box" challenges where they're either given or have to grab ingredients and come up with something on the fly) then having them tasted by judges in order to proceed to future rounds eventually resulting in a 3-way cookoff for the win. I know cooking shows are weird because, obviously, you can't taste anything even if you wanted to (and usually I don't) and also because you have zero basis for the comparisons the judges are making since how would you - me - be able to tell if something is underseasoned, perfectly crispy, not living up to its promise, etc. let alone relative to other competitors' dishes. In fact basically the only thing a viewer can really judge is the plating and even that's really subjective, like I'll take a burrito in a piece of foil any day of the week rather than some rectangular protein surrounded by supposedly random but really tweezed-into-place microgreens all sitting on, well, Jerusalem artichoke in some form if this series is tracking trends of any kind. And, because this is amateurs cooking, the judges, while definitely critical, are also trying to be helpful so it's not even like there's a ton of drama generated there. Really I know this show is boring and the producers somewhat pointedly don't even jazz up the pace with interesting challenges or whatever but rather keep it deliberately pretty slow and measured, and often you can tell from the judges' comments who's going to stay and who's going home so it's not like there's some thrill of suspense either. Thus all I can conclude is that the experience of watching Masterchef and its tonal ilk is in knowing there are stressed-out people in the world undergoing judgement by others and I, I am sitting on my couch eating dinner I didn’t make under the stress of competition and in fact may very well have microwaved or air-fried and this that I'm doing is so much better than what they're doing that I'm going to sit in the deep, meditative peace of knowing, whatever else my life may be, in this moment, right now, it's not that. I think the reason I like these shows, aside from the obvious deep-seated evolutionary thing of being soothed at a core level by staring at abundant food 24/7, is in part seeing how it's all going to come together but mostly the equally deep-seated evolutionary thing of watching people crack under pressure and knowing those people AREN'T ME.
The Morning Show (Season 2):
This show is bad on like 5 million different levels, not the least of which - though certainly top 10 - is the seemingly innocuous until you look at it and it becomes super ocuous outfit Jennifer Aniston wears to a dinner party in episode 2. I have no words by which I mean I have an endless stream of words but you may just want to experience it for yourself:
That aside as a reminder this is a horrifically badly done self-important yet - and this is key - somehow weirdly hypnotic (more on this in a minute) series set at a morning talk show hosted by Jennifer Aniston and ingenue (!!) Reese Witherspoon in the aftermath of a whole #metoo thing involving Steve Carrell; the completely awful first season involved a whole lotta "thoughts" about workplace gender power dynamics and this season is all that plus COVID in that the opening shots are scenes of an empty NYC before cutting to a dramatic "3 Months Earlier" and I'll say that that moment is the key to watching this show and in all honestly it took me most of the season - and an enormous amount of rage at the stupidity and an almost-DNF - to make me understand the only lens through which this show can viewed: it's pure, self-oblivious, camp.
To me, camp is something an audience brings as the writerly-delusion of self-importance rather than a creatorial wink-wink is what makes something camp and, trust me, if there's one thing this show lacks it's self-awareness of how truly bad it is and, quite the contrary, peacocks an abiding belief that it's brilliantly opening up a dialogue slash addressing all the complexities of a range of current social issues. To me, camp is big ideas tackled by mediocre minds and by that/my definition this show is textbook camp.
The show is a big glossy hate-watch and is embarrassingly clunky in the way only truly awful writing can be. For instance: you know how we learn Julianna Margulies’ character, a Diane Sawyer-y primetime news magazine host, is gay? I mean other than her slicked-back hair and slacks? Because she's intro'ed by another character as "the ‘L’ in LGBTQ" - camp! Camp as in has the CEO of a network literally ever appeared on a late night talk show to promote anything to hardly mention to laughter and thunderous applause as if he's a celebrity in his own right? On this show, yes - camp! There's an entire episode devoted to Jennifer Aniston fretting and upset that she's about to be cancelled... only to payoff with her enormous relief that she's trending on Twitter as in we're on the dramatic panic journey of reading Tweets as a character arc as in the writers devoted the entire time we're with private-jet-flying, that-outfit-I-mentioned-earlier-and-am-still-thinking-about-inhabiter Jennifer Aniston to discussing and monitoring her Twitter feed - camp! But she's okay - Twitter loves her! - but then, in a very dramatic turn in some other episode where she does nothing other than look at her phone in distress, Twitter turns on her and, as if Twitter's virulence were a metaphor presaging the global doom to come, she trips over high heels, cut to black, she's in a hospital and… cliffhanger: OMG FIRST THAT TWITTER DEBACLE AND DOES SHE HAVE COVID?!? - camp! A multimillionaire TV anchor's brother goes missing from rehab and she - that would be Reese Witherspoon - wanders the streets of New York handing out missing posters, the kind people tack to telephone poles for their lost pets, with her brother's face on it and later the CEO of the company - you know, the one who arrived on a late-night talk show to thrilled cheers of what I can only imagine was an audience packed with panicked shareholders praying their company stock wasn't about to plumment due to the launch of the new streaming service he was promoting - agrees to join Reese for a nighttime wander looking for her brother at homeless tent camps - camp being the operative word.
I will now tell you, though, where I almost DNF'ed because, well here: some might consider what I'm about to say to be a spoiler for both the first season and this one but I don't because its so meaningless and a spoiler requires you to be invested or give a crap about the show so if you felt invested-in/gave-a-crap about season 1 or haven't watched and aren't sure, move along. Otherwise... okay so I talked at length in my season 1 review about how much I hated how the writers were so lazy/bad/oblivious that they believe gender works like this: man-emotion can't feel can't express I man monkey PUNCH PUNCH PUNCH i.e when their lead male characters felt strongly about something they punched people because that's what men do. Woman-emotion oooo big big feelings I feel overwhelmed by feelings can't handle them meltdown and, for one of them, suicide which as noted in my season 1 review I felt was repellent as a statement about women in general and how they handle their problems, i.e. women are willowly nippled candles and, with too high a flame, they melt away. So all that showed up again this season and at first I was like once again, the writers prove themselves as being utterly incapable of imagining male characters as being able to resolve feelings of upset or stress without punching someone and women without getting ultra feely and whatever this may be saying about the male/female gender is nothing compared to what it's saying about the writing room's lack of skill.
So now we get to the part that I hated because if I didn't hate that suicide enough in season 1, oh boy oh boy did I despise seeing it show up as a solution to dealing with one's problems in season 2. Yeah there's another one. And, fine, it's not quite as suicide-y as season 1 though it's also someone driving over a cliff, letting go of the wheel, and embracing death so it was presented as if "peace exists only in oblivion" just like season 1 as opposed to peace exists with, you know, working through your issues and moving on. The show's infatuation with suicide as a solution to problems is something I find to be absolutely repellent, like it's really not cute. It was bad enough season 1 but the fact that when people have big emotions their solution is to die rather than resolve them is a pretty grotesque statement and, beyond that, is just so unbelievably lazy! I was offended on all levels because the writers, rather than figuring out how people deal with their problems and showing us that onscreen aka dramatizing internal states aka the entire act of TV/streaming/movie-writing, kill them instead because all that resolution would be hard to write and if the characters are off the show we don't have to deal with it yay!
BTW I'm not saying the above because the show posits that hopelessness is a permanent condition and the only solution is to take yourself out of mix (it does and, as noted, I find that to be gross in large part because the show is promoting the notion that, when things get bad, it's over for you as opposed to when things get bad you find it within yourself to turn it around - really, just at a basic level it makes me wonder what's wrong with all the people involved in this show that they’ve twice now promoted suicide as not just a viable option but, in this season, almost a romantic solution to one's problems) but because it does all that in the following pathetic way: without spoilering (well maybe I'm spoilering I don't know) how are you feeling about the cancelled Hollywood megastar who's all sad in his borrowed $75 million mansion and super down because he was surrounded by venal people and family who ditched him post-cancellation? Is that enough for you to justify suicide (more or less)? Because that's all you're going to get. Somehow the writing squad and every Apple exec involved feels that's a perfectly clear explanation of why someone would kill themselves, a very Hollywood stance BTW in which the only thing that matters is popularity and what other people think of you and when all that turns, well obviously suicide’s the only answer!
See? Is all that, the stuff that drove me to near-DNF, hideous.... or... CAMP!
So there you go. The show is awful but in the way where it thinks it's potent genius and you will either collapse under the weight of its awfulness (read: watch something else) or rage/giggle/mind-boggle-at-how-bad-it-is all of which adds up to "be entertained" in some form if not exactly in the form the writers intended but is ultimately enough for me to say I’ll tune into season 3 if there is one.
Movies:
The Good Lie - This is a drama from around a decade or so ago based on true incidents involving Sudanese refugees in the '80s and their efforts to adapt to life in the U.S. once they're eventually granted amnesty. This is one of those movies - and this isn't an insult just the sort of genre it's in - in which yeah, there are characters, but really the writer(s) did an enormous amount of research on the topic and interviewed lots of people and then strung together the most interesting bits into a cohesive narrative. It's very topic oriented and is dramatizing things that happened to various Sudanese people so if you're looking for meaty drama this is not that but if you're looking for an engaging narrative which shows you something you (okay I) may not know much about then this was a pretty interesting movie. The first 30ish minutes are what happened in the Sudan when the leads were children and it's really pretty brutal in that the filmmakers definitely made me think about if I were 10 years old and this - meaning my entire family and village and all surrounding families and villages were wiped out in a massacre and all I could do was flee with my young siblings but where? - were happening to me, what would I do? From there the movie jumps ahead 13 years to show life in the refugee camp and then what happens when the leads are given amnesty in Kansas City and Reese Witherspoon (she’s everywhere this week!) is assigned to help them get jobs so they can stay in the country. It's very much about a particular type of immigrant struggle - it's not a love story or some big character drama or anything - but more about the total weirdness of being uprooted from an impoverished refugee camp into less impoverished America and being forced to just figure it all out even though you know nothing. Additionally the movie deals with issues around the INS and the frustrations of the bureaucracy again more as an interesting demonstration of what people face than as driving plot or anything. I'm hoping this review doesn't sound lukewarm because I actually liked the film and thought it was informative. I guess I just want to make clear that this is definitely an issue movie in which you're following people through a world you may not know much about rather than a big drama of some kind. I enjoyed it and thought it was informative and worthwhile and whatever flaws it may have had - some predictability, some simplicity with plot and character, stuff like that - it didn't really matter because overall I felt like I was learning something about an area I was unfamiliar with packaged in an entertaining form and that was good enough for me.