Books:
Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister
This is an okay mystery about a woman excavating the past in an effort to prevent her son from committing a murder in the present. While this is definitely not sci-fi and is firmly within the mystery genre, there's a time-travel device where the lead keeps going backwards to random days to learn more about the past in the hopes of ultimately unraveling why everything happened and consequently stave it off. Frankly, the time travel bit was a total turnoff for me but in the end the author used it more as a first-person investigation than as time travel per se, i.e. it's sort of what happens in mysteries anyway with the lead finding clues or interviewing people or whatnot in order to achieve the same end - figure out why something happened and what was really going on. With this book, the lead is simply sent to those bits of exposition rather than constructing a story where she finds them in the present. I liked the book overall and it read very quickly, though it was really more a book about unpacking reveals - which the author did pretty well I thought - with some fairly generic characters and relationships or at least nothing particularly exciting in that regard, the combo of which made me fly through the pages but at a certain level of my brain I was skimming (though not in reality) because there wasn't much of interest there beyond the structure. For example, there was an extended bit where the lead, back in the past a few years, has an encounter with her now-dead father (not a spoiler) which all felt very blah because the present-tense story had no relationship with her father (he'd been dead for 18 months at that point) so you're just kind of reading a big feelings/regret/resolution-dump that could be about anyone. And then the author just sort of leaves it by which I mean the lead continues going back in time but never bothers to even try to establish a relationship with her father even though there's nothing stopping her since she’s traveling back in time where he’s alive and so, well, that’s why it felt kind of generic in that the author wanted a resolution scene between father and daughter and was then done with that relationship. I'm noting this not because it bothered me per se but because it's what gave the book a skimmy feel and, if you're not into the plot reveals and/or are struggling with the time travel concept, there's really nothing else in the book to grip as I'd say the writing was fine but nothing standout. So if you're looking for something where you're idly flicking through pages to see what reveals are coming next, this book is a good timekiller. Really while I know much of this review was criticism, it's so you can be clear going in if you're in the mood for this kind of book because, if you're looking for something fast to breeze through and don't mind the time travel element, you'll probably rip right through this.
TV/Streaming:
The Beef:
Hmmm. That's the tl;dr on this, I don't know, comedic social commentary about a road rage incident (well kinda) that spirals out of control. It's the latter part that's the source of the hmmm because the writer(s), too, seemed to lose all control of their plot and, to a degree, their characters, but more on that in a minute. The basic plot setup is poor, stressed construction worker Danny almost backs his car into that of rich, overstressed-but-faking-being-fine Amy and they both snap and road-rage out at each other then start infiltrating each other's lives for even more revenge. The thin connective line here is that these people have financial and family responsibilities that are overwhelming them - Amy has a loser husband and Danny supports his brother and parents - and this thing between them grows because it's a displacement of their rage, i.e. they can take it out on each other because they're strangers whereas they have to hold it all in for their families. So the positive of this show, and the positive in the end for me maybe just barely outweighed the ultimate negatives, is that it's really well-written and acted. While the reasoning behind the revenge stuff honestly remains kind of hazy as in it doesn't really seem to be in either of their characters but you sort of go with it, the rest of it is fairly nicely, if often somewhat broadly, etched. The broad part is stuff like Amy's husband is a self-absorbed artist who makes ugly vases that don't sell and which she pretends to like while also making all the money and running the household. The show gives the characters some self-awareness of their behavior while also leaving them unable to control it. So I'd say the overall positive and the reason I watched the whole thing - aside from being only around 30 mins per episode - was at least it's something different, there's some character texture and, in many ways, it was an interesting lens on how these very different people struggled in similar ways and how money didn't solve any of their problems.
There were two main issues however in addition to the spiraling out of control issue. First, the show really struggled to make its main selling point - the road rage revenge thing - integrate by which I mean the show didn't need it because many of the episodes focused on either Amy or Danny independently and then all of a sudden there'd be a weird jammed-in road-rage escalation moment and then it would go back to being about these two people in their separate lives. Second, the show really didn't make the fight all that fair which detracted from its being satisfying; Amy always had the upper hand if for no reason other than that her wealth and privilege afforded her the ability to wreak revenge in ways Danny simply couldn't afford. In these kinds of things, you want an even tug of war and this really never was. So the spiraling out of control thing. Yeah, the writer(s) clearly had no idea how to wrap up their story and had boxed themselves into this thing where the raging-out part needed to get more and more extreme so they could end with some form of resolution or the like between the leads. I'm not going to spoiler, but the series went from a swallowable plot point in its setup, to such extremes that all of a sudden I started wondering what show I was in (and wondering why no one involved in the writing or development process had the same thought). Without giving away anything that actually happened, what would you think of a show that started with a parking lot incident with no car damage and ended with the lead characters bombing each other's neighborhoods? That's not what happens, but you get the gist. It just raises issues about what reality we're supposed to be in. However, again good writing, the writer(s) devoted the final episode mostly to character stuff and, while I wouldn't say the ending made a lick of sense to me nor did I think the setup for the episode was anything other than absurd, there was enough interesting conversation (vague to avoid spoilering) to elevate it from "skip" to "hmmm"; so there you go. You may have more tolerance for this kind of thing than I do in which case I think you'll genuinely like the show because it's well done. If you're like me and begin to get bothered by a small situation becoming very extreme but in a context that's supposed to be real-life drama, then know going on in that this one's on the edge.
Movies:
Cypher - This is an utterly confusing yet somehow I watched it anyway early 2000s mindbender-in-its-mind thriller about some near future where corporations are spying on each other by manipulating brains via, I don't know drugs and hypnosis (we're getting into the confusing part here), and each corporation's efforts to weed out the spies and some overall plot about something I'd say is spoilerable though that would require me to say I understood anything and I'm not willing to make that statement at this point. Basically, nothing happens in the movie other than the reveal of all the mind manipulation stuff which is, spoiler alert to the filmmakers, not a plot. I think it was trying to be a cheapie Christopher Nolan movie or something but just wound up being dull. The gist of how it all goes down: our lead guy is being inspected for brain manipulation and is then sent off to go do... something - go to a conference and record it? - where he begins to get flashes of something else going on then Lucy Liu shows up, vanishes, returns, some more conferences and corporate brain stuff then something involving getting a CD then the end. And BTW the movie was set in some nearish future with all kinds of Stanley Kubrick-y white elevators that go down 300 floors and some high-tech helicopter yet, yeah, CD-ROMs were still the only imaginable storage unit. Anyway it's that kind of the movie. What was so bad about it is you'd think the companies are spying on each other for, ya know, a reason and that those conferences would reveal that reason. But, no. I'm loath to call what I'm about to say a spoiler because it's so stupid but if you're even contemplating watching this idiocy feel free to skip the following: so the lead guy keeps getting sent nonstop to these conferences all over the country where, it turns out, everyone at the conference is also a brainwashed corporate spy. Only the entire point of the conference... is just to do more brainwashing. In other words, in filmic terms, we're watching a corporate spy get brainwashed then get brainwashed more then maybe unbrainwashing followed by more brainwashing all in the service of... of... yeah. Like literally, for 90 minutes, we're watching people be brainwashed for never-stated reasons and go from place to place where, rather than plot occurring, there's more brainwashing with an occasional appearance by Lucy Liu and uh that's the movie. Sound good to you? My response exactly upon finishing.