Books:
Wrecked (IQ Series Book 3) by Joe Ide:
I really enjoyed the first two in this series, and it just keeps getting better and better and the writing stronger and stronger. As a reminder, this is an often very funny mystery series about a really smart and self-educated PI - the eponymous IQ - in the worst of gangland Long Beach. While he’s at the center of the books, I’m really loving the way the author is letting the side characters become main characters and allowing situations to grow out of the original book without feeling locked into what was set up there. Each book revolves around a case that's often fodder for the subsequent book plus character stories that intertwine around the PI work as well. Without going into plot details for spoiler reasons, this one finds IQ drawn into an investigation that has the hints of the beginning of a larger romantic relationship and is an excellent extension of the series. It’s funny, violent, pretty action-packed, and a fun plot but the real strength is the writing and characters who are incredibly well-crafted and specific and which put this series both in the mystery/crime category but also in the category of contemporary American fiction due to the writing around character, place, and tone, i.e. contemporary fiction but with a genre bent. The three I’ve read are very entertaining and engrossing meaning if you like the first, - and while they’re technically standalones, you really do need to read them in order to get the character growth - you’ll probably like them all.
TV/Streaming:
The Circle (Seasons 1-2):
So I watched part of the first season of this show, a reality competition series where people are locked in different rooms and only communicate via a fake social media site (a combo of all of Meta’s offerings (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp basically)) in order to… in order to… I don’t know! There’s a prize involved but I literally couldn't figure out what the competition was. I mean the contestants are typing at each other and catfishing with some fake profiles and talking to camera about how they’re hoping to get the catfisher in the next room on their side but, like, what's the game exactly? No really. What’s the game exactly!??! The show is pretty boring to begin with but spending I think two episodes before DNF’ing trying to figure out what the actual competition was was baffling. Someone in the process understood it right? I mean there are winners - "Influencers" - declared at various points and people voted out, but how are those decisions being made? I couldn't grasp the strategy at all and began to feel slightly crazy because I kept watching trying to figure out what literally anyone was trying to achieve and to what end. Ugh my brain is hurting even now just trying to figure it out. Okay so I DNF'ed then heard that season 2 took everything to a whole new level and was totally crazy awesome and... it's the same stupid show with the same stupid lack of any understanding what the fucking game is! I mean I literally have no idea what it is beyond “type shit to get people to like me enough not to vote me off" and is that a game or just the basics of text messaging? Is the game merely to type convincingly? I have to stop now as I can feel the neurons in my brain desperately firing into the void and telling me that self-preservation demands I shut this review down before total mental collapse and I guess that’s the review.
ER (Seasons 1-4):
A bit of my history with this show which, for those of you who never watched, is basically the mother of all primetime hospital dramas, i.e. a high-stakes contained environment that mashes up office politics and relationships romantic or otherwise against life-or-death decision-making. I think its initial success (well aside from the fact that it existed in a pre-internet world where 20 million people would regularly tune into a show) was Michael Crichton’s name on it though I don’t really know what his involvement was and then, of course, launching George Clooney into the megasphere of the worldwide known. But it was also a pretty good show with a lot of then-unknown and some still-unknown really good actors with some solid writing that was kinda shaky in season 1 but really began to find its footing as the show went on. I watched ER when it first came out and loved it and then, in season 3, the show began to feel draggy and some of the actors left and I got bored and that was that. But realizing that I was running out Gilmore Girls and needed another bajillion episode series for that key transition 20-40 minutes between the end of real viewing and sliding into sleep - oh and did I mention ER ran for 15 seasons? - I decided to revisit and the review is in. The first 3 seasons are exactly what I remember - good enough, some unsteadiness early on as the show figured out what it was (though nothing bad enough to make you stop watching), and it took a while to sort out the long-term plots, but a well done show even though it remained, as per my memory, kind of draggy there in season 3. So Season 4 was my first new season and you know what? It’s pretty good! ER is, like Gilmore Girls, the perfect combination of completely engaging and eminently shut-off-able; it's a big, classy, well-acted, high-end 25 minute soap opera interrupted by 20 minutes of medical gibberish. The acting is as good as I remember and the show overall has even more and better relationship drama and office politics than I remembered especially as it settles into its groove and draws out storylines across multiple seasons. Zero complaints here and if you, like me, need pretty people in a big fat drama to shuttle you off to the land of Nod or for whatever other reason and you haven’t done ER yet, well then I imagine you will be as delighted as I am to rediscover this show.
Black Money Love:
If you're wondering how that stream of seemingly disconnected words could translate into a 164 episode series then you have clearly not gone down the rabbit hole of Turkish soap operas. I say the following with deep shame but this is my third time (which is nothing compared to my mother I might add who probably by this point has watched likely 5 figures worth of Turkish soap opera episodes). Because the episode count is so high - around 45 mins for the international release though apparently in Turkey each episode is 2 hours with 30 minutes of commercials and they air twice a week or something like that - not only do they feel like they take years to complete but I need several years in between just to recover before trying another one again. In case you haven't gone down that rabbit hole, Turkish soap operas are a THING - people go crazy for them and I think they've made Turkey one of the biggest media exporters in the world (apparently there’s a 300 episode one airing in Israel as I type this that the Israelis are completely bananas over). In essence, they’re humongous soaps that fall somewhere between a (relatively) reality-grounded telenovela (a form which can drift way too far off into the fantastical/goofy to appeal to moi) and an American daytime soap - not that I, ahem, watched every single stinking episode of Passions or anything like that so how would I know you’re wondering - but with Lifetime-level prime(ish)-time production values. They are NOT GOOD which you know as you’re watching, but you kinda can’t stop. The basic plot of this one, which is quite similar to all of them, is that a cop's fiancee is found dead in a car with a rich woman's father and the entire show is a bigass slow-burn romance between the lower-middle-class cop and the rich woman (clearly they hate each other at the beginning) as well as an investigation into why the fiancee and father were together and why they were killed. Look, it's dumb. I mean in order to drag it out for that many episodes, there are some seriously absurd plot contortions - think: a 12-episode arc involving an escape room - though not, I need note, as ridiculous as in one of the others I saw where the character equivalent of Al Pacino in the Godfather has a one-night stand with an advertising executive who gets pregnant while he takes over the family mob business - I think it was something like 40 episodes before they met up again - and at what was clearly a moment of writer desperation in the triple digit episodes, the mafioso for some undefined reason goes on a refugee rescue mission to Iran that also involves double-crossing a sheikh and shooting people on horseback. Not that any of that stopped me from finishing it. At some point, as with gambling addicts at the craps table or stock market day traders, there’s a sunk cost thing with these shows where you’ve invested so much time that you’re going to get to the end no matter how much your brain is revolting at suffering through the lead being shot and hospitalized for the third time or yet another 20 episode dramatic arc generated solely from one person not telling another person something critical or some new character introduced at episode 120 which makes you realize OMG if there’s someone new here they are so far from wrapping this up!
Also everything is romance-novel-sexist, meaning men punch their rivals and the sassy women push back against the guys for some semblance of equality but really everyone loves their gender role. The mother of the poor person is always dressed in a babushka and drab clothes and is an amazing cook. There are seemingly endless montage sequences set to what sounds like the Turkish equivalent of Boyz II Men combined with someone being burned at the stake while singing karaoke to Boyz II Men against shots of bridges, people staring longingly over bridges, shots of Istanbul at sunrise, at sunset, at sunrise again, people staring out of hotel windows wishing everything would be okay, big dramatic electronic strings sections that swoop in to emphasize the drama, ‘60s mod cartoony music to indicate we’re in a lighthearted part of the plot. Everyone's scheming and undermining everyone else and there are plots and sideplots, a number of which seem to be entirely forgotten about by the writers as the show progresses (I mean who could keep track) and none of that matters. Really. Turkish soap operas are what they are and while these sorts of primetime soaps don't exist in today's streaming/cable/network universe, when they're well-enough done like this one is, they're entertaining. Come to think of it I don't know that these sorts of shows have existed since their '80s heyday with Dallas, Knots Landing, etc. In general these days they're packaged in a law office or hospital (ER’s offshoots) but sometimes it's nice to get sucked into something like this, ridiculous and sexist though it may be, because in the end it hits a lot of the same beats that made daytime soaps so equally stupid and addictive and if you're looking for something like that and have, like, a year or so to make it to the end of the series this one (and Love and Punishment if you can find it though be warned it does involve that trip to Iran) certainly hits that spot.
Movies:
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Marvel Universe #9) - In this thrilling second installment in the series, in addition to the normal Marvel madness/plot-gibberish, Captain MAGA gets a Black friend. Such radical social commentary aside, this movie also managed to be, as with all of these movies, completely insane with an especially incomprehensible plot and, a new addition I've noticed recently, about 90 minutes worth of dialogue padding, making this film a bipolar blend of insane OTT action sequences broken up by seemingly entire acts from the world's most tedious regional theater two-hander.
In fairness to the writer(s) who wrote this magnificent play with cars being flipped over and thousands blown up during the scene changes, I must confess that I lost my theater gene eons ago, perhaps sucked out of me via a form of epigenetic DNA remodeling that occurred over the course of several environmental exposures beginning with a 9-hour production of Shakespeare's Plantagenets sequence and ending, years later, at a rage/snooze-inducing Broadway production of Dear Evan Hansen. Thus it's possible that those who still enjoy doctor’s-waiting-room-level clock stoppage, having their knees jammed up against the seat in front of them, a random winter coat strewn across their elbow and also why-is-it-so-fucking-hot-in-here might be riveted by Scarjo and Captain MAGA's hitting the boards to spew exposition for hours on end, often in profile, though not this Janice. There’s literally nothing but discussion about the plot (none of which I understood obvs), not one single shred of anything remotely character related which really begs the question of why these two superbeings are in the same room/movie at all. I mean while I wouldn't say the relationship between Iron Man and Goop, Ed-Norton-Hulk and Liv Tyler, or Thor and his Hammer reached new textural heights or anything, at least there was one. Experiencing the Scarjo/MAGA relationship, by contrast, is about on par with spending 3 hours listening to two backoffice bank managers describe how they’re going reorganize the company database for this year’s audit.
So the basic premise of this movie is that there's a mole/s inside the government division Captain MAGA and all the superheroes work for who's developed some mega-assassin to kill division-head Sam Jackson and everyone else and then launch a bunch of helicoptery things that will give the moles total control of the planet. After MAGA and Scarjo spend about 10 hours standing in front of a window talking to each other, there's big chase sequence followed by Scarjo and MAGA talking for 30 more hours somewhere else followed by an enormous action sequence followed by MAGA and Scarjo meeting up with MAGA's Black friend, by which I mean the person he ran into while jogging or something at the very beginning of the film where they exchanged pleasantries then blabbed backstory at each other - they’re both military and had met before - before vanishing from the film’s existence until MAGA and Scarjo need a place to crash where the moles won’t find them. Thus they wind up at his place where he mentions some winged suit and then the next time we see him, he, now renamed as Falcon, appears - soothingly for those who still struggle with the notion that a non-White person could possibly be elevated to planet-saving superhero level - with half his face in a white mask as I guess the Marvel team felt that half Black skin tone combined with that half white face mask would be the safest transition to bringing a non-White into the Marvel Universe in a lead-adjacent role (as opposed to Don Cheadle's sidekick role for example). This was a totally understandable choice given that literally only one White superhero has ever been masked at all - that would be Captain MAGA who frequently (pointedly?) removes his mask in this film whereas Falcon basically never does - not even Iron Man really as most of the time the POV is of RDJr from a camera inside his suit. I guess the face covering plus American-flag outfit is there to notify everyone that the bullet-spewing metal-winged guy with just a touch-o-Black around the face isn't there for the usual reason one might think of upon seeing a masked Black guy - holding up a bank - nor to sell drugs on the corner, or, worse, march in a BLM protest against racist police murders, but is rather one of those okay planet-saving Black guys and no need for a stop-and-frisk or to rush over to a neighbor’s place to grab a gun and/or Stand Your Ground or anything else that might result in a murder sheerly due to seeing someone of a non-White skintone and Karening your way into killing them then later justifying the murder as self-defense because you were afraid… of the completely reasonable reaction, engendered by you, of someone being assaulted by a gun-toting racist stranger. It’s okay everyone, we’re okay, we can put our guns down, it’s fine.
Sadly, in addition to all that, Falcon apparently got his wing suit off of Amazon and didn't realize the 5 star reviews were fake because at some point the secondhand suit falls apart and the poor thing is reduced to secondhand kickboxing since really isn't that all primo kickboxer Scarjo does? As usual, after everyone finally stops sitting around talking to each other, there's an insanely incomprehensible showdown where the writers clearly ran out of ideas or, perhaps more generously, decided to be very economical in their plot plundering by stealing, not from previous movies or from other movies, but from what they did in the first 30 minutes of the movie, presuming - and this was not a terrible assumption - that the audience would've entered such an intensive fugue state from the sheer unmitigated boredom of listening to Captain MAGA and Scarjo conversate between buses being toppled over, that we would've forgotten that drilling a hole through the bottom of an SUV to escape the bad guys was the EXACT SAME THING that Sam Jackson did a mere hour-that-felt-like-weeks earlier in the film. I guess it's hard to come up with a second idea or, apparently, even read the script before shooting - and given the level of excruciating exposition gibberish, I almost can't blame anyone including all the writers for being unwilling to reread the screenplay - which is why the movie is filled with delights like the following: there's an entire sequence where one of the baddies breaks into a room and demands a launch code for the helicoptery things and in fact threatens to shoot a guy to get that code at which point Scarjo and the baddie get into a big fight and she shoots the baddie and misses but saves the guy he was threatening and the baddie... reaches over and types in the launch code. Why, you may wonder (if you’re anyone other the the person/collective/AI who/that wrote this movie and didn’t seem to think either once let alone twice about it) didn't the baddie just skip all the overly dramatic hostage-taking and simply type in the code that he already knew? Perhaps because this script was written by the same Romanian scribe farm that wrote Falcon's 5-star equipment review, which is clearly not the same person/farm who's writing this decidedly non-5-star review.