Books:
IQ & Righteous (IQ Series 1 & 2) by Joe Ide
These are a the first two books in a crime/mystery series about an early 20s DIY PI in gang-infested Long Beach who, in addition to dealing with an event in his backstory which I won’t spoil, gets drawn into investigating a larger mystery. To me what put these first two in the series a notch above others in the genre is the writing which is just great IJHO and is why I ended up reading them back to back. The mystery component is well-plotted as well, but it wasn’t the main event to me; rather the author is really good at capturing the voices (NOT “voice”!) of the various characters, and the investigation is mostly there as a series of events to drive the characters forward. The books are standalone in the sense that the main mystery wraps up at the end but there are larger character issues that build book to book so you kind of have to read them in order. Also, they're pretty fucking funny - the humor goes from dry and character-driven to some mashup between gangsta and Henny Youngman - and even though I’ve downplayed the mystery part, there’s plenty of page-turning action. Given that the author has managed to write two books at a pretty high standard - think Tana French if you’re a fan, not in terms of style but in terms of quality - I will definitely be reading everything he writes.
The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji
So this book not only started some locked-room-mystery trend in Japan in the ‘80s but is also apparently a prime example of the honkaku mystery subgenre, a rule-bound type of old-school detective story which includes such highly-specific-bordering-on-insane strictures as: maximum number of secret rooms - 1!; no twins or doubles unless the reader has been - I’m quoting from the original 1929 rules here - “duly prepared”; and, of course, no Chinamen. Why you ask? Because, to quote the rule originator again, "… if you are turning over the pages of an unknown romance in a bookstore, and come across some mention of the narrow, slit-like eyes of Chin Loo, avoid that story; it is bad." Now do you get it? Sadly, the rules are far more interesting than the book itself which is nothing more than a howdunit, a series of events acted out by cardboard characters with all the clues sitting right there (apparently) so you can, I don’t know, see if what you thought happened is the same as what the author determined happened. Basically if you live for the part of an Agatha Christie where Poirot explains the logic, then honkaku is for you because that’s more or less all this book is, a deliberate homage to And Then There Were None with just a different explanation at the end of how it all happened. I’m really not sure what makes honkaku different from any other sluggishly-written mystery because I wouldn’t really say the explanation at the end of this book was so mind-blowing nor particularly anything you should’ve been able to infer since information was left out anyway IN VIOLATION OF ALL THE RULES!! Honestly I don’t really understand why anyone got all excited about this book let alone got inspired to write more let alone created a whole market for them. It’s quite possible this book is amazing in a way I just don’t get but, if so, well, I’m blaming the Chinaman.
TV/Streaming:
Outrageous Fortune (Seasons 1-6):
This is an ancient (2005!) New Zealand series that I watched and liked but didn't love, stopped watching, told a fellow Janice about, zie watched, liked it more than I did, stopped watching, at which point I started watching again. Can I call that my review? Okay, fine. The series is about a low-level crime family and their travails as they do (and also don’t) go straight and how, regardless of how much they’re trying to leave crime behind, still approach their lives in an underhanded way of trying to get one up on the other guy to hardly mention each other. The strength of the show is in its consistency in that the characters are determinedly exactly who they are and, while they don’t exactly learn from their mistakes, they do at least make new ones. The characters are also simultaneously simplistic - the hot airhead, the asshole, the other asshole, etc. - and complicated as they tend to lead with their baseline character but wind up behaving in ways that are more interesting across the seasons. It’s not really a crime show; it’s about a family holding itself together despite the forces from within and without pulling it apart. It’s well-written and really well-acted, but the decider for you will be the tone which is particularly Oceania-ic in that the characters are all very OTT while the essence of the series is grounded in family. I've seen other antipodean shows like this - wackballs in crazy situations (a group of strangers buys a house together!) but with, in the show’s mind, loving heart underneath - so I think your appreciation of this show will depend on how much you go for that. The tone is not remotely subtle, and the ping-ponging of I’m-a-cartoon-no-take-me-seriously is what made me stop watching it the first time and is honestly something that, had the rest of the show not been as strong, I’d never have bothered with a second time. Frankly, even on the rewatch, the goofball nature of it kept pulling me out and relegated the show to background noise but, if you don’t have that reaction to the tone, it’s actually a pretty good series.
Making the Cut (Season 1):
This is the Heidi Klum/Tim Gunn fashion competition series that, in its effort to differentiate itself from Project Runway, managed to suck all the life out of the subgenre and make it so painfully apparent that the entire purpose of fashion is to SELL SELL SELL (Amazon produced it so, yeah) that it ends up being just weirdly venal and money-grubby. The essence of the show is that a bunch of designers get a challenge, draw some sketches, then send their stuff off overnight to be whipped up into garments and, ooo the tension, knock wood hope it comes back looking like what they thought it would when it’s delivered the next day (presumably by some offshoot of Prime). And, yeah, the winning look will be immediately available on Amazon, though based on some of the looks in this show, I sure hope for the sake of anyone who ordered that they fell under the Free Returns policy. I know designing is a real job, but, as with trash collection, writing formulas in a spreadsheet, restocking a shoe store, or clicking through Yelp reviews while trying to figure out which restaurant to go to for dinner, it's also super boring to watch; I mean, does "overseeing," “opining,” and “hoping the seamstresses did what I asked” sound like the source of a thrilling competition to you? Plus there are all these weird asides with Tim and Heidi, like we’re all so obsessed with that super cute duo! (Actually, are we/humanity obsessed with them?) Though no one could be more obsessed with them than they are with themselves. Oh the joys of seeing Tim and Heidi being wacky around Paris, trying on hats, crap like that and all directed with this weird underlying current of Godlets sneaking off Olympus to frolic among the mortals before doing what Godlets usually do, i.e. raping and/or eating the humans before going home. It’s really the thing that makes me appreciate many British (and the occasional Australian) reality shows which is that the competition is front and center of the show and personalities emerge through what they’re doing - cooking, dancing, singing, whatever - as opposed to American reality series which seem mostly designed around generating hashtags and IG followers. Blargh show though clearly I’ll be watching season 2 and no doubt blarghing about it again.
Movies:
Blackhat - This is a Michael Mann/some-Hemsworth-brother movie in which the Hemsworth plays a jailed hacker who's released from prison in order to team up with an FBI agent to hunt down the person who hacked into a Chinese nuclear power plant. Basically, the Hemsworth is every hacker’s dream of what they could look like if they stopped sitting in front of a computer for 16 hours a day drinking Soylent and went to Crossfit instead - beefy, strapping, and, perhaps less desirably, imprisoned. The Hemsworth is somehow connected to a Chinese investigator and the FBI gets him released to help with the investigation and there is, as always with these sorts of movies, an enormous amount of typing, computer operating systems with extremely 3D and glossy graphics which mostly serve as countdown clocks for copying data to a USB stick or uploading somewhere, a lot of tech gibberish around cameras, cell phones, GPS, and basically anything the writer wants the character to know without the character actually having to do anything, followed by some hacker dream fantasy feats of shooting, shooting while jumping, rolling and shooting, shooting and driving, shooting and driving in reverse, and, eventually, as we approach the big finale, a ton more frantic typing, server cables being ferociously pulled out, hard drives swapped, and then some inexplicably physical humongo-showdown maybe with a big helicopter explosion to finish it all off. The film is terrible in the way only super expensive megabudget deadly serious Hollywood action dramas can be. The mixture - hacker Hemsworth, hackonteur Michael Mann, Chinese, computers, nuclear, spies, typing! - feels like a hedge funder desperately needed a tax writedown to offset some huge biotech gains, and asked themselves what the worst and most overbearing possible combination of elements could be to absolutely ensure a money loss, saw this script, the cast, and the director, couldn’t believe their luck, then put up a hundred million dollars for it and laughed all the way to the crypto blockchain. Alternatively, Universal financed it.