Books:
Seek and Hide by Amy Gadja
Well this nonfiction book about (I thought) the legal history of the right to privacy actually turned out to be a (much more irritating and ultimately DNFed) history of the scandals which made courts consider the right to privacy. I can't say this was an authorial flaw so if you like American history and biographies of people like Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and the issues of his day (late 1800s) such as invasive newspapers and how those issues came up in the courts, then you'll likely enjoy this book and actually finish it. I'm reviewing this not because it's really a review as in if I'd known it was primarily things like a deep dive into Grover Cleveland's and later Warren Harding's sex lives, I'd have skipped it to begin with and it's really not fair at all to the author to criticize her book for not being my preferred way of reading about legal histories. (See Adam Winkler's awesome books on the history of the 2nd Amendment and how corporations acquired Constitutional rights for my preferred way of reading about these subjects which is the history as a framework for court cases and then an analysis of those cases and how they affected legal thought on subsequent cases which is what this book lacked). I'm leaving the review here because she wrote what she wrote. Apparently the book continues into today's issues with the internet but honestly I was so bored about 75% in when it was still giving details around Teapot Dome and the like that I just quit. So there you go. If you're a history buff who's interested in this topic, there's a ton of research and the book is easy to read and if I were that person I've no doubt I’d have finished the book and written a much more positive review.
TV/Streaming:
Schitt's Creek (Season 3):
So my backstory with this show (full RIVETING story here) is I started watching years ago, got kind of bored with the joke - the show is about a rich family that loses everything except a podunk town it owns and they move into a motel there - as it all felt really repetitive. Like oblivious wealthy people encountering aw shucks locals felt like more or less the same thing over and over and over and so while it wasn't awful or anything I just got tired of it. Fine so then some Janice told me it got better in season 3, like a little less SNL-skitty and more story focused and thanks Janice because that turned out to be so right. To be clear: it’s still incredibly skitty with one-note OTT characters. However, in this season, the writers stopped the thing where all the jokes were about the ex-richies being above the town and instead had the main characters, with their absurd POVs, integrate into the town, i.e. one opens a store, one runs for town council, etc. They're still ridiculous but because they're trying to achieve some goals for themselves, the show has more drive and, oh fine, some genuine charm to it as well. I cannot emphasize the OTT-ness enough - I mean, for those who don't know, it stars Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara so we're talking some pretty broad comedy here. But the episodes are 23 mins each so it's all kind of over in a flash meaning if one particular storyline bores you, well it'll be gone and onto the next. So if you’re like me and tried this show and were like meh, I can confirm what my fellow Janice said which is yes, it improves and has entered the territory of Younger meaning a ridiculous but delightfully fun show that you can binge or not and is entertaining without putting a lick of pressure on the brain as in you can fall asleep on it and finish the episode tomorrow no prob.
Handmade: Britain's Best Woodworker (Season 1):
This was a meh competition reality series about, you guessed it, woodworking. It seemed like the kind of thing I would've liked more because I like design competition shows in general and this series is pretty middle of the road for British shows of these types, i.e. nice production, a quippy host, a few challenges per episode, and mostly focusing on the work rather than contestant drama, a format which can sometimes be dull but which at least delivers on the competition element because that's the main focus. The problem is that woodworking is so abstruse that it's really difficult for a non-woodworker - read: me - to judge. I mean, sure, I can look at the final product and judge it like I would any piece of furniture. But unlike with, say, clothing where I actually understand good construction vs bad (as the torn seams and rivets popping off of my jeans can attest) it's really difficult to pick apart details of woodworking. Like, yeah, they can show me a sloppy join and I can see how the wood pieces aren't flush but I don't know enough/anything about joinery to make an assessment of how important it is or whether or not it's even a bad choice given the time constraints of the challenges. I also don't know what's complicated and what's basic. Like there was a whole challenge where one contestant was clamping pieces of wood into semicircles and leaving them overnight then assembling the rounded pieces and is that hard/risky or just a normal part of woodworking? No idea. Or there was a challenge where the contestants had to build a miniature lighthouse and, while the outcomes looked cool, what was the hard part because to me it all looked hard? Was it putting in those mini spiral stairs? Was there a house-of-cards-like construction thing where it was very delicate and fussy and could fall apart? See what I mean? Without a basis for judgment, it becomes impossible to assess the outcomes for yourself because you have no idea if the final product was complex or a piece of cake and therefore can't really tell how anything compares to anything else. I would have the exact same problem with a competition show around designing circuit boards as in I'm sure one's better than the other but how would I know which is which? Obviously, if woodworking is your thing, you will likely have a very different reaction to this show than I did. If not though you can skip.
Movies:
Thor: Love and Thunder - I mean, really. I know I've beaten this dead horse so hard there's kind of no horse left but I'm a-beatin' it again (sorry, horse): Marvel is incapable of conceiving of a Uni/Multi/Whevsverse where the true power brokers aren't male and White. At this point, it feels almost personal. I mean via some intensive Wikipedaing I can tell you with total assurance that this movie was written post both #BLM and #metoo yet neither of those hashtags, which could really be collectively summarized as #itaintjustaboutwhitemenyall, seems to have made the remotest dent in the blissful Red State that is Marvel. Yes, there's that one Black chick in the movie as a side character, but beyond that it's all just a sea of glorious #XYWhite. And, sure, while I understand that Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman probably aren't going to be recast at this point, baddie Christian Bale's character was new and could’ve been any actor in any gender/non-binary/shade and oh whatever. In the Marvel propagandaverse, true power only has one form.
That aside - and maybe it would've been pushed more aside but for the next point - the movie was crazy boring! I believe the running time is a polite 2 hours but I think it took me three full viewings to get through it due to my own sliding off into Marvel’s other parallel multiverse called napping. But I'll do my best here with the plot with what I saw when awake.
A pasty, be-robed Christian Bale has an ill daughter who, despite his pleas to his local God (small-g god?), dies which somehow - and believe me no one understood this less than I did - sexes up a semi-conscious magic sword somewhere (don’t ask - no really, I won’t be able to answer) that wants to murder everything and just needs to find a wielder and - I guess I am going for this metaphor after all - goes on the Marvelverse’s equivalent of Grindr (🍆🐷🐷🐷 looking for now, NO PIC NO RESPONSE! 🍕), finds Christian Bale, and off they go to kill all Gods in existence. As I noted in some earlier review, Marvel constantly raises riveting (read: ill-thought-out) epistemological questions around what, precisely, constitutes a God. For example: Thor's a God; so is Iron Man, who seems to have exactly the same powers, a God too? Is a God just anything that can wipe out all of humanity or, alternatively, grant wishes? Like is I Dream of Jeannie a God (as with "actor" I refuse to genderize God)? Or, since the whole notion of religion is that God is an act of faith and in fact proof of God's existence would directly contradict that existence (at least as theoretically constructed by, well, at least some slash a lot of American Christianity), are there QED no Gods in the Marvelverse but rather just powerful assholes who could help if they wanted but, like all of us who know most of our clothes are made by slave labor but shrug and feel bad rather than doing anything, only do so occasionally when it suits them? Though let's take this to its logical conclusion: who's the asshole, the powerful potential wish-granter who, through laziness or boredom or whatever, ignores a wish or the serial killer who comes after him/her/them/it? Really, as with Marvel's incredibly ill/not/(OMG-what-if-they-really-did-and-this-is-actually-their-best)-thought-out quote unquote character logic for the baddie in Dr. Strange 2, I believe the idea here is that Christian Bale is wounded and hurt and lashing out and therefore we should be kind of sad for him in all of his murderiness as don't we all get angry sometimes? And isn’t angry sadness a fine justification to wipe all of existence? Feels!
Anyway, CB and sword turn their initial hookup into an LTR and go off on a God-killing spree. In the meantime, I don't know, somehow Thor finds out his reconstituted homeland - though, given that my hazy memory recalls only like a ship's worth of people surviving Cate Blanchett, I'm not entirely sure what that entails, as in maybe it's more "neighborhood" than homeland - is next as I guess CB put his God-murdering schedule up as public calendar somewhere. Thus Thor along with Natalie Portman who, I can't even be bothered, something with terminal cancer and a big hammer and then she's blond and in red viking garb and I think I am bothering because we're now at such an extraordinarily confusing point that I must pause a beat to discuss. So apparently Thor is... a title? Or Thor's a name and Mighty Thor is a title? Because, according to this movie, hammer-wielding Natalie Portman is “the Thor” because the current hammer-wielder is Thor so, like who’s Hemsworth-Thor if Thor is not Thor? Am I the only one asking this? Am I even clear what I’m talking about? Anyway both of them are (or aren't) Thor and they go off to thwart CB and then aaaargh I can't believe I have to go into this too but somehow Thor crosses time, space, and mythology itself to, in the most confusing way possible, go plead with... Zeus. Like in a crossover episode of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (BIGFOOT!) the Norwegian Gods and Greek Gods kind of knew each other I guess?
So Zeus won't help and Thor gets mad and there's a big battle and Thor wants a thunderbolt which to me looked like a lighting bolt but okay and that happens and then Thor learns about Natlie Portman's cancer and concludes that the magic Thor-naming hammer, far from healing her, is draining/killing her and, because Marvel's sexism is so ingrained at this point that it can’t help itself and maybe I feel bad for it as a result, Thor insists she stay in bed and do nothing so he, man, can go out and risk his life which of course she ignores but, like, is the definition of love “I'm man, you woman, man go fight, woman stay home” or is the definition of love “I, person, will support your choices, person, even if those choices make me super sad?” For a deeper read on this topic, please see my review of this unknown action movie which dealt with this topic in compelling depth.
Regardless they go into a big battle because apparently and conveniently there's a humongous thing called Eternity where if all weapons are somehow combined - and honestly this was so crazy lazy and boring where all discussions were about getting this thunder(lightning)bolt and that hammer and that sword and WHATever - and wipe out Eternity all Gods everywhere will magically disappear so, the deal is that Gods are some kind of extension of Eternity, like trees and roots or something? Really, it's horrifyingly unclear but that's the way it is and CB goes to kill Eternity and Thor et. al. go to stop him and, as noted earlier, the fate of the xverse comes down to a battle of White people (though Eternity looked kinda black though not actually Black) and I guess everyone's in it for CB's redemption because somehow at the end we're supposed to feel terrible for his murdering self because somehow Eternity, you know the one CB was coming after to murder, feels really bad about the whole thing and grants CB a wish - I mean am I crazy or is this like the worst plot of all time? - which comes full circle since that’s the first wish CB had i.e. his daughter's life, the one that wasn't granted and, I guess, Marvel is saying that, in the face of you not getting what you want, you should go on a murderous rampage and wipe out as many people/Gods as possible until someone realizes that you're just lashing out from your inner pain and not because you're bad on the inside and then, billions of murders later, give you what you asked for in the first place and I am the only one who thinks the Marvelgand of being given what you want after killing a bunch of people sounds like active encouragement of school shooters?
Thus I guess the moral of this story is if at first you don't succeed, kill kill KILL!