Books:
Hi Five (I.Q. Series #4) by Joe Ide
While I wouldn't say this fourth in a series (prior reviews here and here) about a self-made super-genius PI in the gangbanger section of Long Beach is the best one I've read, it's still pretty great as what makes this series so good is the writing. It's really sharp and funny and all the characters feel extremely real and vibrant. The author gives backstory to everyone, good guys and bad, which offers some interesting texture to the whole cast of characters and both clarifies motivations as well as - sometimes - lays down clues for plot twists. The plot itself is both similar to and different from the plots of the other books which is also what makes them enjoyable in that they're all set in a similar violent gangbangy world with characters who repeat throughout the series but each book has its own very different plot driver and consequences. In the case of this book, it's about the lead - IQ - being forced under threat by an arms dealer to find the real killer for a murder the dealer’s daughter's been accused of. In many ways, I'd say these books lean more to action set pieces than mysteries per se in that IQ’s efforts to unwrap the mystery often leads to extremely dangerous circumstances which he then has to smart his way out of or hope that his friends, in their own particular and non-obvious ways, will help. The books also push out the mystery genre into something more approaching literary fiction - to an extent - though, so far, are firmly in the camp of character-driven mysteries rather than straight-up fiction. But there's enough stuff with the side characters that’s unrelated to the main mystery to give these books the feel of something non-genre (not that genre is an insult or anything, just clarifying). I'm not giving much of a plot description beyond what I've already written because there's no point (which is a compliment); the pleasure of these books is that the author grows the characters and relationship stories from book to book and, in this one, really begins to play up how the consequences of IQ doing a job enmeshed in violence affects not only him but those around him. I really love these books and kind of mete them out to myself because there are only 5 in the series so far (as I'm typing this and knock wood the author keeps going) and I enjoy them so much when I read them that it’s nice knowing I have another one coming up in the future. The mysteries are good enough to drive things forward, the characters are specific and interesting, the writing is really fun, and the author has sustained all this - and I'd say progressed from the first two which were much more in the genre pocket than the latter ones - across four books so far so I'd say if you like the genre and setting this series is definitely worth checking out.
TV/Streaming:
Five Bedrooms (Season 3):
This is a completely idiotic comediocre about five friends who buy a house together. It's dumb at a level I can hardly express (yet am about to) yet somehow I've managed to watch three seasons of it (prior two reviews here). When I say idiotic I mean that the characters interfere in each others lives in patently friendship-ending ways - like character A submarining character B's efforts to be a sperm-dad for a lesbian couple because character A's afraid she'll lose character B as a friend if he has a child and characeter B's SO understanding of that selfish crushing of his dream and the two of them sail on unaffected after a big late-season-episode heart-to-heart. Stuff like that. Nonstop. With every single character and plot. The show is just so friggin' dumb with characterizations drawn in a foot-long Crayola held two-handed by a newborn, by a blindfolded sleeping Pictionary player competing without a pencil, by someone who thinks this little piggy staying home and this little piggy going to market constitutes a gripping character conflict and an 8-episode season arc, by someone who wouldn't notice if all the actors were replaced by bodiless emojis all hate-watched for 8 episodes by MOI! The show is crazy bad but there are occasional hot people mixed in with the endless stupidity, and I guess I must find something vaguely engaging about all that because, well, if it gets picked up for another season I will assuredly be (background-noise) tuning in to hate-watch yet again.
Hacks (Season 2):
While I'd say the problems of the first season are a bit magnified in this second season, this show is still significantly more fun and interesting than a lot of other comedies on the air or whatever we’re calling the TV/Streaming transmission medium these days. As a reminder, this is a series about an extremely successful though aging standup comedian - Jean Smart - who (and this is much of the first season) hires a GenZ comedy writer to help punch up her act. Though the first season played more on the odd couple nature of the two leads, I'd say this season leans a bit more into the struggles of Jean Smart's character to find relevance both in terms of her act as well as internally as the two are highly connected. The GenZer mostly serves as a foil rather than a character in her own right and, for a show in which the GenZer is there for comedy punchup, she really isn't particularly funny, like there's nothing in the way she communicates with anyone that would make you think she's a hilarious comedy writer all of which was present in season 1 and, as noted, is somewhat worse in season 2. It feels as if the writers really wanted to write a show about Jean Smart but had sold this as a buddy comedy so were forced to give screentime to the GenZer but just weren't as engaged her character; in fact, she barely has a character and is more a collection of GenZ cliches than an actual person. I won't go into details for spoiler reasons but, as an example, there's an entire running plotline across the season involving a lawsuit and her behavior around it makes zero sense nor do the writers make any effort to clarify why a person would behave the way she does, which is why I think they weren't really interested in her as a character but just as something to create obstacles or, to an extent, closeness with Jean Smart's character. Like, yeah, you can justify to yourself why the GenZer behaves (or fails to behave) the way she does, but you justifying to you isn’t the same as writers crafting a character. In fact all the non-Jean-Smart characters are drawn with a really blunt pen - the one who sacrifices relationships for work; the wise/wacky friend, the absurd mom, the OTT management team etc. etc. - all of which makes it feel like two different shows, one a dry comedy about someone who has everything but feels empty on the inside trying to figure out where they go next and the other just some big cartoon of Hollywood caricatures. I realize this all sounds like I hated the show but that stuff was so thin and ridiculous that it barely made an impact beyond my wondering why the writers didn't apply the same character work to those side characters as they did to the main character and why they thought lampooning Hollywood - which is so overdone and really dull at this point - was the way to go when they clearly have the skill to do otherwise. All that being said it's still a highly watchable show, all the more so if the stuff that bothers me doesn't really bother you because it's Jean Smart's show no matter how you slice it and she really delivers a very textured and entertaining performance which holds the whole thing together.
Movies:
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Marvel Universe #28) - Once again, Marvel shows that no matter how many universes there are or what Earth anyone happens to be inhabiting, the real power brokers are all White with a few non-White token sidekicks tossed in to make all involved feel very progressive. I guess the other thing Marvel is showing is that, now that they've devoted themselves to repeating this multiverse thing which they will no doubt go on to repeat for endless future movies as they LOVE coming up with one idea then doing the same thing over and over and honestly given how much money that makes them I guess they don't have much reason to change it but they might want to hire some writers who are good with things like logic puzzles or just have a penchant for rules making sense because if the logic in this film is the level of brainpower Marvel feels is adequate oh I shudder to think of slash look forward to the nonsense that will be flying our way shortly. I mean in the infinity of universes, doesn't one of them have a writer who can flowchart? Well onto the plot.
BTW for all the insults in the above paragraph I actually enjoyed this movie the same way I enjoyed Everything Everywhere All At Once which is more or less the exact same film but done significantly better i.e. completely high and I make zero promises for anyone in any other state. So the first moment of confusion which honestly sustained up to and including this very moment as I’m typing and will no doubt sustain far into the future is that somehow the non-Scarjo White female Avenger, i.e. Elizabeth Olsen, became a bad guy. I have no idea how, why, or when this occurred or if this was meant to be a surprise - and if so sorry for the spoiler - or if it was just something like duh everyone knows that. So for an enormous portion of the movie, I was trying to figure out when this Avenger, you know the superhero who'd gone to incredible lengths to save the uni/multiverse uni/multiple times over, now seemed deeply committed to destroying it. I mean, yeah, the writers gave a kinda reason which is that in one of the multiverses she had children and so was somehow using/destroying (super unclear) a bunch of other multiverses in order to get to the one with her children (I think). But I'm not totally clear on how "a mother's (well in one multiverse at least) love" translates into "I'm okay wiping out 50 quadrillion people in as many multiverses in order to be with said children." I think the writers thought we would all (meaning me) understand how primal feelings would drive us to do things like exterminate world after world in order to raise tweens but that really becomes significantly less clear with someone who, previously, had literally put her life on the line to do the exact opposite. Meaning I think my confusion over this was well-earned rather than gummied and kudos to me for that maybe?
And all that aside (which is honestly impossible to put aside since it’s the entire movie), how come the only way to get to her kids back was via destroying everything in her path? I mean, Elizabeth Olsen’s method, which basically involved her sitting in lotus position with big red streamers coming out of her and inhabiting other versions of herself in other multiverses in order to try to possess/inhabit (I think) some multiverse-hopping girl (another quote unquote logic I couldn't track but more on that in a second), didn't seem like it should require planetary destruction, like I don't remember any Earth anywhere being destroyed during Freaky Friday. So okay there's some prior good-them who, via a mother's yearning/love, acquires some magical thing and, for some reason, no amount of sitting in any position lotus or otherwise will ever be enough to get her children back so instead she needs some other person who has some other skill which kind of is exactly the same as her multiverse-hopping skill but somehow different. I think that’s her motivation and did any of us, including the people who crafted this brilliance, understand it? If so, text me.
And, like, okay so she needs this other person for some ill-defined reason to get to the mulitverse with her kids but instead of just asking a la "Hey, new adult - and sorry if that’s just a publishing industry marketing subgenre but my hips are cramped from all this sitting and just cut me some slack here - will you please take me to this special multiverse to see my kids?" because, well, what would be the downside be for either party - and I can't consider anything in something this idiotic and confusing to be a spoiler - because yeah, that's exactly what happens at the end! Am I crazy when I said that made no sense? The movie spent multiple hours of confusing if HIGHly entertaining multiverse destruction by one character trying to acquire something and another - Dr. Strange - trying to stop her only to end with giving her exactly what she wanted with zero deaths and her deciding it was a bad idea after all. What do you think of that as a plot? Because Marvel and all the writers involved clearly thought it was genius and by "thought" I mean "didn't think about it for one hot second" (or, I guess, did the best they could with the brains they have in the multiverse they’re in). I mean they didn't even bother to come up with a reason for why Elizabeth Olsen couldn't simply ask the new adult for a ride to a different multiverse (like "if I transport you I'll die" would've been fine though, philosophical question, if there are infinite yous in infinite multiverses then what does it actually mean for "you" to die or like maybe one of the yous has cancer and is dying anyway so is like screw it, I - you? - will transport her) other than, "Oh yeah."
I know this review isn't really a review but more of a logic breakdown but honestly it was all what made it kind of fun, i.e. big insane action sequences combined with barely following the plot - which, I think we'd all agree at this point, is a problem firmly with the writers not the viewer - combined with mostly having no idea what was happening even when I thought I was following the plot combined with noting - and fair warning once you see this if you haven't already seen it there's no unseeing it and it's something I noticed first in one of the Spider-Mans and now it's everywhere - who(m)ever is doing the CGI for Marvel really has a problem getting the proportions of actor head to CGI body right or, with Spidey, fully-CGIed with masked body/head combo to actual unmasked human, because they constantly do that thing that happens with green screen where slight portions of the actor's form are somehow erased and the VFX people can't seem to figure out how to put those bits back. So between all the plot confusion, character confusion, multiverse confusion, body proportion especially when turning to profile confusion, there was enough going on for my gummy brain to be pretty amused though I'm fairly sure if I'd watched this sober, it would've been more pretty annoyed, pretty bored, and pretty thinking of DNFing because it's so long and dumb.