Books:
Shape by Jordan Ellenberg
This is a nonfiction book about how geometry shows up everywhere in the natural world and geometry's impact on mathematics. I know I know, 90% of you passed out just from reading that sentence and can't imagine why anyone who didn't have to would willingly tuck into this stuff and admittedly the book was badly written enough that I was asking myself the same question but... through all that there were some interesting ideas. For example: how many holes does a straw have? Hmmm. Right? More hmmmmmm (apparently there’s a whole TikTok out there of bros getting into a genuine fight about this issue just in case you need a bit of that viral-geometric-frat-dude-type entertainment right now). Frankly if the book had been entirely about looking at seemingly simple ideas in the world around us and seeing how those ideas play out through the lens of mathematicians I'd probably be recommending it because I like books that make you see the world differently even if they’re obtuse. Unfortunately, those ideas are few and far between. The bulk of the book is either biographies of mathematicians which are SO BORING and pointless page filler or fails in the central necessity for a layperson math book which is that it drifts off into math gibberish and charts and graphs and becomes utterly incomprehensible. I've read these sorts of books before in quantum physics or evolutionary biology and the like and, when they're well done, they have the best of being in school but without grades or time pressure and you really learn something as you go. This book, no. Unless you're more versed in math than this Janice (and btw I liked math in school - calculus was one of my favorite classes just saying) then maybe you'll like this book. No, just kidding, eminently skippable no matter how good you are at math.
TV/Streaming:
Acapulco (Season 1):
On the one hand, I have absolutely no idea who this show - a half-hour character comedy set at an Acapulco resort in the '80s - is for; on the other, I didn't DNF; on the other other (ooops, my terrible secret, I have three hands!), I rarely made it through an entire episode in one setting but rather watched the whole season over a period of like 4-6 weeks in 15ish minute chunks. This is not a pan. The show is not bad. But it's odd because I really can't figure out what it is, which is part of what made it easy to start/stop watching. To expand the plot a bit: the show intercuts between the present day where a super rich Mexican middle-ager is telling his nephew the story of how he grew up poor and got a job at a resort in Acapulco and, presumably, how everything that happened there ultimately led to his financial success. The resort is run by a washed-up soap actress who bought it at some point and she has a son and there's a bit of class stuff along with American/Mexican stuff, but really it's all just a somewhat goofy sometimes more dramatic/serious coming-of-age story. The tone is pretty light and the plots revolve around this wide-eyed teenager/young-adult (the older guy's younger self) who's pretty chipper and optimistic and how he interacts with the hotel guests, the staff, his family, and I don't know, that's about it. It definitely has some charm to it and a sense of humor and the intercuts from present to past have defined characters in both but - and maybe this is what it's trying it be? - I just couldn't get super invested in it because it's so good-natured and the plots are all resolved each episode (though character stories play out) that it just felt almost too young, like a show designed for tweens, and simultaneously too old, as in there are too many adult stories for a tween show yet it's really all too simplistic to be continuously watchable by adults (or at least by this three-handed adult). This is what I mean by I couldn't figure out who it's for. Put a different way, you're asked to enter the fantastical world of a heightened version of 1984 tourist Mexico which is so oddly specific that you'd think there would be a reason for that timeframe and place. But there just isn't other than that the writers wanted to be able to intercut with the lead as his older self which, unless they were doing sci-fi, wouldn't really have been possible if the younger self story were set today. Meaning the show, while amusing and definitely well-written in places, isn't really all that sticky because unlike with, say, Mad Men where you understood the reason you were back in time was as a reflection on current cultural issues and therefore (assuming you liked the show) the time period was part of what drew you back episode after episode, this doesn't have that. It has '80s fashion kind of and '80s jokes (like the soap opera actress owner also sells aerobics videotapes) and looks kind of technicolor but no particular reason I can see to be set in that time period nor is it really using that time period to say anything, so I don't know. Like I said, I enjoyed it enough in short-ish chunks that I watched the whole thing and was entertained I guess but I can't say I really got what the showrunner or any of the people at Apple were going for when they released this. I'd say if you love Cobra Kai, maybe you'll like this because they have somewhat of the same flavor tonally and the same gentle/tween-ness with spurts of drama, but otherwise it falls into an odd review category of nothing I'd recommend and also nothing I'd say is bad enough to not recommend.
The Magicians (Seasons 2-4):
How could I have hated this show when it first came out!?! Okay in fairness to moi, the first season really did sort of suck or at least it was hewing too closely to the books and hadn't found its footing writing-wise. But then it became just super fun. The season plots are ridiculous in the way that Buffy's plots were ridiculous, i.e. making total sense within the context of the show but with a lot of magic leaps and conveniences to make it all work. I'm not going into the plot since 4 seasons in there's no way to do that without spoilering - but that's actually part of what makes the show good! The seasons build on each other and what happened in prior seasons both in terms of plot and characters plays out in subsequent seasons. At its core, this show is silly, quippy fun - again, Buffy is good metric tonewise in that that show dealt with real character issues which changed and grew against a backdrop of violence and death yet with a lot of humor and a willingness to take it seriously when it needed to to provide it with some dramatic heft. I don't know if the showrunner had the same reaction to season one that I did, but that person must have at some level because these later seasons are really not the same show even though it's the same showrunner (and of course the same characters, world, etc.). The writing freed itself to be very entertaining and maybe that first season was more shackled to the books (which I also loved (Magicians #1 & #2)) and perhaps between seasons 1 and 2, the showrunner decided - correctly IJHO - that the most important thing was to capture the world, tone, energy, and character growth and only take from the books what helped with that and otherwise toss the books and just make shit up. Whatever happened, it worked. This is well-written, engaging fun; there's always a big uber-plot anchoring each season which gives it drive; there's an extraordinary amount of quippy sarcasm that keeps the show zipping along and I'm sad it was cancelled and I only have one season left.
Movies:
Those Who Wish Me Dead - The is an Angelina Jolie abomination where she plays a firefighter who lost some kids to a fire the other year and now there's this kid on the run being chased by baddies who are hunting down his dad and, yeah, it all happens in a big forest fire. It's absurdly dumb, by which I mean it's an ideal group-mock-watch, in large part because it’s a perfect mashup of core stupidity and deadly seriousness, i.e. an enormous amount of idiotic decision-making on the part of the characters solely for the sake of plot alongside capital d Drama emotionality. Let’s just start with the fact that, yes, while losing people and co-workers to a forest fire is of course painful and tragic, it’s also, as with ER doctors, police, and, if you’ve watched Deadliest Catch, crabbers, the entire gig, meaning presumably those who take on this work (as opposed to those who wish those who take on this work dead I guess) go into it and remain in it by having the internal fortitude to handle the losses and bounce back. But not Angie. Instead, she starts as a fragile trainwreck assigned to a ranger station - and just BTW she’s the only female on the crew and, I guess because she’s female and movies seem determined to perpetuate a gender stereotype involving male toughness and female emotionality, she’s the only one who can’t seem to get over what happened the other year - where she nurses her sad lady feelings in a big lookout. Eventually the baddies show up chasing the kid and his father and murder, flames, facing deepest fears, and a lot of smoke ensues. It ain’t good and not even fun-bad, just sluggish with a contrived - almost contorted - plot to jam people into situations just for the sake of generating, in the movie’s mind, tension but really just being eye-rollingly moronic (like the bad guys, who are supposedly black-ops hitmen, seem to be incapable of anything resembling a stealth killing but instead wind up spewing corpses everywhere and kinda crossing their fingers that no one will notice). I guess it's an action movie if you count running from a big fire as action but it’s really pretty static - there’s a lot of Angie making concerned faces in that tower I can tell you right now. Horribly written, and even worsely directed (yes, I'm inventing worsely because it sounds better with horribly), as in pick the least tense way to direct a scene and then remove a bit more tension then shoot it. Awful, fun to make fun of, but no way I would’ve finished it if I were watching on my own.
Honeyland - Just to get the negative bit out the way: this was a 50 minute documentary stretched to double its length, meaning the last 40 minutes was pretty gripping but the hour before that felt long and static. That being said, it still added up to something meaningful and certainly not a waste of time to watch. It's about the last wild beekeeper in Macedonia who, along with her mother and in a somewhat Grey Gardens-y relationship, lives in a rundown village in the middle of nowhere where they're the only occupants and what happens when an itinerant family moves in. Watching the lead woman - Haditze - deal with the bees is nuts; other than a head shield, she's completely unguarded and just reaches into the hive with her bare hands yet somehow never seems to get stung. And in some ways, this encompasses the theme of the movie which is that she lives in harmony with her surroundings not due to New Agey hippieness but simply because if she doesn't take care of the world around her - which in turn takes care of her financially - she and her mother will be starving and homeless. I'm not going to tell you what happens when the family moves in next door not because it's spoilerable exactly but rather, if you're planning to watch the documentary, because it’s something worth experiencing and drawing your own conclusions about instead of having a preconceived idea of where it's going. I, and the group I was watching with, definitely had a reaction to what ended up happening so I'll just say this: for a movie ostensibly about one species it's really very much about another. The bummer is you kind of have to sit through the first hour which isn't bad but, as I mentioned, seems kind of draggy and aimless at points. It's necessary as far as setup for what happens goes, but to me could've been better edited. Regardless, if you like documentaries, this one certainly said something and, as someone who group-watched it, I can say it definitely engendered conversation afterwards about what we'd seen which is an all-around good sign for any film IJHO.