Media Report

The Paris Apartment, Bad Sisters in rant form, and more!

Books:

The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley

Well having read three Lucy Foley books at this point (here and here), I can safely say that she loves a modern character-y locked-room mystery though this one is a bit of a lateral move from her prior books, by which I mean the others really were locked-room (one due to weather, the other due to being on a island) and this one expands locales while still maintaining the same vibe. Without spoilering anything, the story is about and told from the POVs of various tenants of an extremely fancy but small Parisian apartment building and centers around the disappearance of one of them and what happens when that person's sister arrives and starts stirring everything up. The thing you'll find either engaging or annoying depending on your feelings about this particular construct is that it's one of those mysteries where everyone but the lead knows what's going on - or maybe not! - and they’re all engaged in misdirecting for their own reasons and it's the reveal of the reasoning behind those misdirections that I'd say forms the backbone of this story. In other words, yes, there's an investigative element because the sister wants to know what happened, but she's not remotely an investigator and is in fact pretty bad at it and makes a lot of mistakes, i.e. the author isn't presenting her as someone who's a closet detective. Rather, the mystery is generated by the various POVs and what they know and why they may or not be saying/doing certain things to/with the sister. It's more about unearthing their motives than it is about solving a crime per se. I'm noting this because, if you're not into character stuff and if you don't like the withholding structure of the entire book, this will not be for you. The reveals are fun and everything comes together, as in the author isn't interested in red herrings but rather actual herrings with hidden motives (okay, admittedly that metaphor may not be taking off for the rest of the planet). I'm dancing around describing much more because the description could spoiler and I don't want to do that. Suffice to say you have a group of people all in some way involved in the brother’s disappearance all working for their own reasons, some of which are and some of which aren't known to the others, to keep the sister from finding out too much combined with a really determined, somewhat emotional, and ill-equipped lead trying to get to the truth. I enjoyed it; I could also feel its structural bones as I read it, which didn't bother me, but I could tell this was a big puzzle the author was putting together as opposed to just seamlessly being immersed in the reading, but you know what? I liked the contemporary vibe, I liked Paris, and I liked that I didn't see the resolution coming and that it all made sense when it did. Thus if you've read and enjoyed her other stuff, you'll probably rip through this and if you haven't but like mysteries involving nosy neighbors and secrets then you'll probably be into this book regardless.

TV/Streaming:

Bad Sisters:

This mini - sorry "limited" - series about four sisters attempting to (in the show's mind) bumblingly/hilariously murder then cover up said murder of the hateful husband of the fifth manages the dual feat of being simultaneously infuriatingly dumb and insanely dull. The problems with this show are manifest. First, the husband is so heinous to each sister in so many different ways that the sisters' behavior is just friggin' bizarre (by which I mean really, as noted, dumb). For example: Sharon Horgan works with the husband - JP - and she's about to be promoted at her job when he throws his hat in the ring to compete. Bearing in mind that JP has spent years lying, undermining, being backhanded, and snaky - and by years I mean he has a teenage daughter with the fifth sister so at least that long - really knowing nothing more than that if you were Sharon Horgan how would you expect him to handle trying to weasel your promotion from you? Well whatever you just thought, Sharon Horgan didn't, and really that is, at baseline, the central problem with this show. It's not with the cartoonishly absurd JP or the absolutely stupidly ridiculous situations where these women, knowing they've at least attempted a crime, somehow treat insurance investigators like the police and allow them invade and inspect their homes, take away their trash, question them all the time, and, oh, one sister starts dating one (okay maybe that component is also part of the dumbness), but the real problem is how crazy stupid the leads are. You know, when you have a mystery of some kind - this is a whodunit/willtheygetcaughtit/whatreallyhappenedit in that the show cuts back and forth between the present-tense coverup and the past that led up to JP's death - your leads, even if they're somewhat comedic, can't be just blindly DUMB (again). Like I'm good with clever but outclevered or clever but lost in emotional mess or clever but, well, really anything that prevents them from having the best outcomes because they go into the thing with smarts. With this show, no. As you may or may not know, "moron," "imbecile," and "idiot" were, prior to their mass usage, actual distinctions between varying degrees of intelligence in 19th century English mental institutions with, if memory serves, moron being the smartest of the bunch. Well, by that standard, I'm sad to say that all these characters are idiots and I'm struggling to think of any moment in the show where they may have even demonstrated a smidge of imbecile to hardly mention reaching the heights of moron.

I've barely gone into plot here because it's so crazy draggy, much like Dead to Me (review here), a show in a similar vein but one that had the courtesy to be about friend-bonding and, while also silly, draggy, and murder-based, was only 30 mins per episode unlike this show. Look, I get what the writers thought they were going for: a family thing with four sisters coming together in their messy way over their hatred of this man and trying to kill him partly for revenge but mostly because they feel they're losing their fifth sister to him and, in the course of all the failed murder attempts and working around the investigation, breaking through the issues between them and cementing their family bond. Sadly, they were unable to write any of that. The characters are blunt, their behaviors incomprehensible, the situation with the insurance investigators so unrealistic as to almost border on contemptuous as in "we're so lazy and uncaring that we're not even going to bother with any kind of reality and just shove these two brothers in as obstacles and pretend anyone would do anything they tell them to and call it a day" - in case you can't tell, the insurance bros made me nuts because it was so - favorite word for this review and sticking to it - DUMB! Like how about cops instead? It couldn't be a police investigation? It couldn't be that one brother was an insurance investigator and the other a cop? It couldn’t be two PIs hired by, I don't know, JP's (non-existent) sibling? Like anything where you (I) might believe that these sisters would feel meaningful pressure to invite these nosy strangers into their homes in an effort to pretend they were innocent? Argh, whatever. I left this show on in the background and didn't DNF but frankly I kind of just hated even hearing it the entire time and I think I finished primarily because I kind of like Sharon Horgan and that's about it. Awful, boring, you know what’s coming… dumb, skip.

My Kitchen Rules (Season 12):

I loooooved prior seasons of this Australian cooking competition show mostly because it created a scenario where there was room for massive screwups, redemption, and viciousness all of which was very entertaining (more on the format in a minute). Then the show took a downhill plunge in which it became a Gordon Ramsay show where they cast almost 100% mean people but of the type who were aware they were on TV/Streaming i.e. fame-seeking reality villains. Then they basically tossed it all and stuck the contestants in a house together and I, and I believe the rest of whomever was watching this, was done. It then vanished for most of COVID and I assumed it had been (rightly) cancelled because it had become so awful. Well I'm delighted to say that it's back to what it used to be which is this - and honestly this is the kinda unique part for a cooking competition show and what makes it to a large extent relatable in ways other cooking competitions aren't - for the first, say, 1/3 of the season or so, 5 couples of various kinds (friends, relatives, married, whatever) and 2 judges go to a 6th couple's home where that couple has to create a popup restaurant in a spare room and are then given a time constraint to shop for and cook their own three course menu for the other couples and the judges after which they're scored; the bottom team is eliminated, the top team gets an advantage, and the show becomes a more typical cooking competition show, i.e. various non-home-based challenges in which teams are eventually eliminated. What makes it interesting is that it's just normal people, albeit people who enjoy cooking, trying to create a menu and an atmosphere that they think will represent the best of their non-professional home cooking of the type that they enjoy eating, followed by going shopping, cooking it all, serving it, and then, unlike in non-TV reality, hearing what people actually think of the food. I mean much of the show is people sitting around the table either enjoying or critiquing the food they were just served and then eating with those people that they maybe gave a low score to the next night and maybe getting into some fights about it. Plus people begin to score strategically, like if they realize they're pretty low on the totem pole, they might give another team an undeservedly low score then have to suffer the wrath of their fellow diners soon after. BTW, I totally get how this show could also be viewed as unbelievably boring, but I don't find it to be that. I mean, I've cooked dinner for people with friends or family and served it knowing I'd screwed up but there wasn't time to fix it or I didn't know how and everyone appreciatively thanked me but I knew they were thinking "Hmm, that was bland, maybe I’ll reheat some pizza later" and on this show, you get to hear it. As with many Australian shows I've noticed there are often a humongous number of episodes, like I think this show previously had somewhere in the 60s. This season was only 16 (or maybe 12? I can't remember) and honestly I hope it goes back to its regular format. Look, this is not a genius show by any stretch of the imagination but, unlike with other cooking competitions where the amateurs may actually be thinking of turning pro, most of these people have no interest in opening restaurants or being chefs but rather just have a passion for food and entertaining and for the first time they're putting themselves out there under these weird constraints to be judged for it which means, in a world of a lot of fake reality, there's actually something real underneath it all with this show and that's what I'm clicking with and what allows me to enjoy it despite knowing much of it - I mean you're watching people sit around a table talking basically - would in other circumstances be a drag.

Movies:

Centurion - This is one of those incredibly baffling movies as in what - or no wait I think I know what (more in a minute) - but rather why did anyone think they could make money based on what this is? So here's what it is: 9th (or something) century Roman centurion Michael Fassbender is, along with a general played by the lead guy from The Wire and some other actors I recognized from Game of Thrones, trapped behind Pictish enemy lines as the Romans are slaughtered in a huge battle, and they have to fight their way across England to the (hopeful) safety of a Roman garrison all while being chased by crazy killers and the whole thing deliberately shot with B-movie-level gore, like heads chopped off and lots of blood spurting out etc. So to summarize, dirty people in furs running through forests being chased by people who look like they came directly from the spa and didn't haven't time to wash off their mud masks before leaping onto their horses and there's your 100 minutes. I don't know - would you put millions into that thinking it would be a hit? I mean there's nothing else there, it's not some Evil Dead-y wink wink slasherfest though that's clearly its reference point for the gore nor is it Gladiator or Braveheart or any other more character-driven epic nor, in fact, does anything actually happen beyond a series of set pieces. Like there's this huge battle then another set piece involving trying to rescue The Wire guy then running then a last stand then a wrapup. I watched the whole thing and for a little bit there I thought there might be something fun but it was all so stupid and characterless by which I mean really stupid as in: you have a crew of Picts on horseback right on your tail coming to slaughter you and one of your team members slips and very crunchily breaks his ankle and your only way out is running up a hill. I understood, in that scene, that I was supposed to think was of course the team is going to slow itself down and risk death for someone they can't save anyway since, even if they get away, they have no supplies. But what I actually thought when watching that sequence was "wait, I'm in a movie where they're taking a teammate up the hill instead of just leaving him?" as in 40 minutes into the movie there was just air, just some Hollywood implication of behavior but nothing actually scripted to earn the beat. And that was kinda the whole thing - it went from beat to beat to beat with just absolutely nothing linking them other than a notional haze of "we're all in this together" without, in fact, writing a script where anyone was together with anyone else in anything at all. Meaning you just had a bunch of people running and being slaughtered and uh yeah that all happened and now you know that.