Books:
The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk
This is a fantasy one-off set in a Regency-era-type Englandish world where women are collared and forced to lose their magic when they marry and a young woman's efforts to avoid that fate. You know what? I totally loved it. The writing is really good, the characters are fun, and the plot zips right along. What I really enjoyed about it, and where you can see the intelligence of the author, is that the book touches on issues around gender, law, power, and the complications of family all without ever losing sight of the fact that the book’s primary job is to entertain. There’s the more top-level gender stuff about women being enjoined from, metaphorically, being themselves and instead transformed into objects under male control, but there are also more textured issues around family loyalty and all that packaged in a big breezy action-y story where the fantasy elements around magic are really code for power - think Downton Abbey but with Lady Mary being forced to give up some crucial part of her being in order to save her family with a wealthy though loveless marriage and you’ll have a sense of the basic flavor of this book. The author clearly thought through her story and world, there's a nice element of romance to it, and it deals with underlying issues of gender oppression in a way that's intrinsic to the story rather than a polemic so to me a spot-on winner in the genre.
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
This is an autobiography about… sorry, it’s claiming to be a piece of fiction and not autobiography despite it quite obviously being an autobiography with a fiction label slapped on, perhaps by the author so he could make stuff up without being canceled or maybe attorneys so he could do things like talk about Trump's medical condition (his father - sorry the fictional lead's fictional father - was Trump's cardiologist) without being sued. Or maybe he enhanced some stuff and the publishing company, having seen what happened to James Frey eons ago, decided to call it fiction in order to stave off bad press if the puffery ever came to light. But the book is being sold as fiction thus I'm reviewing it as fiction.
This first-person novel is in fact not a novel at all but rather a series of disconnected, not even short stories because there’s rarely any narrative, so I guess a several hundred page multi-chapter musing on, as far as I could tell, whining, being a whiner, then whining more all from the point-of-view of a rich, syphilitic Staten Islander. The author presents the narrator as being in conflict with his feelings about America (much of the book is on the nature of feeling like an outsider) in that he feels despised by and to an extent despises his country of birth due to feelings of and sometimes experiences of racism - the narrator is of Pakistani descent - especially post 9/11. Unfortunately, the author undercuts the narrator’s credibility about his own experiences by creating a character who manages the feat of being simultaneously self-absorbed and self-oblivious. For example, the narrator grew up rich but, because there was a period of his life where he didn’t take money from his parents, believes he’s experienced poverty and feels perfectly qualified to opine about that topic (poverty, of course, isn’t merely the lack of money but the lack of money plus the lack of anything resembling a financial safety net, i.e. poverty doesn’t have rich parents, just FYI author-I-mean-narrator of this book). The narrator lacks self-awareness across the board, for example falling in with a wealthy celebrity crowd - hang on I’ll get to that in a minute.
First, though, the author tells us little to nothing about the narrator other than having the lead describe himself as being a celebrity - he’s a playwright - though the author offers no story about the lead’s rise to success, why he chose the medium he chose, why writing is his form of self-expression, or really anything other than the vaguest notion of what his plays are about other than, I think, screeds about race though really I’m not certain as they’re never fully described, merely mentioned in passing as if the lead weren’t a fictional narrator at all but rather an actual well-known person that readers would know everything about or if not could easily Wikipedia. The narrator discusses being super super into the ultra-rich celebrity/financial world, and we learn this via his journaling about that world’s vapidity then his later reckoning with his own hypocrisy, though mostly as a self-critique of the cliche ideas in his journal, i.e. a writing critique as opposed to a personal one (see self-obliviousness above), before sinking right back into that hypocrisy again but now with a pat-on-the-back self-satisfaction of, in the narrator's mind, having worked through it despite the fact that it's obvious that being surrounded by the rich and famous is the very thing that’s filling his internal void.
The author spends seemingly endless pages on the letting us know how amazing the fictional narrator is at oral sex, though at some point, and for no discernible reason as with everything in this tale, jumps to talking about syphilis and then, again for no clear reason, spends about the final third of the book with a word for word court transcript of the fictional narrator's fictional father's fictional malpractice suit. Why? No idea! I guess the author decided to create a narrator who likes to hear his own words and this was a way to write more of them, since obviously this wasn’t a real court case he was citing but rather an entirely made up transcript that he had to write from scratch, but, as consistent in this novel, for reasons untethered to narrative or character growth.
The fictional narrator also took time in the book to, in a nutshell, call the critics who didn't like his plays racist - which we’re meant to take at face value since as mentioned he never really explains his plays in great detail (it’s almost as if he thinks we’ve seen them which of course is impossible), why he wrote them, or how people responded to them, again tying into the narrator’s overall self-obliviousness since surely the author didn’t think we, the readers, would believe the reason a theater critic didn’t like a play was because the critic was racist, right? Surely the author recognized that it made his character seem insecure and, once again, self-oblivious though in the service of what I have no idea.
I don't doubt the fictional narrator suffered the racism every non-White suffers in this country. But what, really, did he have to say about it? I mean looking at this as piece of writing in which you have a narrator feeling alienated from the country he was born in, sure, yes, anger at being treated badly I hear that and... and... and...? This would be the writing part of writing, where the author helps us understand something about his characters, perhaps something they themselves don't understand or, simply, a perspective, a thought, a something, perhaps even more so since both the actual author and fictional narrator won Pulitzers for their writing. I kept waiting for the POV on racism, specifically that directed towards Muslims and/or Pakistanis, but all I got was that Muslims and Pakistanis are lumped into a post-9/11 terrorist category. Okay, got it. And? For so many words, there's just no thought here, no perspective. Emotions, yes. Story, no. Character, no - I certainly have no idea why the narrator did anything he did. He talks about his sexual exploits with zero perspective on them nor any sense of why he's engaging in them or what he wants out of a relationship if anything. He talks about the racism he experienced even more so after 9/11 but it doesn't seem to drive his character in any way other than being angry about it - there's no character consequence or thought, just a factual reiteration of what happened to him. There's no internal structure. Why is the story told in the order it's told in? No idea. What's the linkage between all various chapters? No idea. What, if anything, is the central driving theme of the book? Nothing as far as I can gather. Despite an intense desire, especially during the seemingly endless sexcapade sequences, to DNF, I actually finished the whole thing. And I am left empty. He quoted a lot of great thinkers but actually said nothing himself. And btw the review would be the exact same if this book were an autobiography since personally I’d never heard of the author prior to reading it and I still know nothing about him other, I guess, than all his hookups should ensure they’re using condoms.
TV/Streaming:
Wentworth (Seasons 1-7):
This is an Australian women’s prison drama that gets better and better and bingier and bingier as the seasons continue. The first season is the weakest because it was trying to take some societal issues around imprisonment seriously but the writers obviously did a rethink between seasons 1 and 2 because somewhere in season 2 a new character arrives and the entire show really transforms from what it was into everything you want out of a prison drama - people screwing each other over, long-term multi-season plots, characters who grow and change, and some really nasty Walter White-level schemers out for vengeance. What the show is really good at is sustaining plotlines and characters across multiple seasons but being unafraid to introduce new players into the mix and reveal their true intentions and backstories over time, which definitely adds an element of interest and tension since you can’t always tell what everyone is up to. While the show has some predictable elements (or at least ones typical of a prison drama) over time it goes pretty balls-to-the-wall with everyone manipulating everyone else and it gets kinda stressful! I’m not going to discuss specific plots due to spoilering but I’ll say that the show weaves power dynamics between the prisoners, the prisoners and the guards, and the guards and the administration into a very entertaining piece of popcorn viewing. I guess you have to watch it in order because so many characters are introduced in season 1 and it’s not that that season is bad, just nothing great, but it really does get significantly better as it goes along - Line of Duty had this exact same issue - and the way I look at it is a writing staff that’s willing to toss what doesn’t work and find something better is a writing staff worth investing in since they’re determined to get it right and, really, at least of the 7 seasons I’ve seen thus far (there are apparently 2 seasons - or 1 season split into two chunks I’m not sure - left), they do.
Legends of Tomorrow (Seasons 1-2):
Given that I’ve been making my way through the Marvel Universe movies, I figured I’d give DC a shot and, if this abomination is any example, I will not be repeating my Marvel thing with the DC movies once I (eventually, years from now) finish. Basically this show is a bunch of sidebar DC characters tossed together to do something no doubt superheroic in a no doubt anti-superheroic way but what it actually was was a bunch of a fucking bores in a non-plot. I’mma come clean: when I came upon this show, which has been on the air and ignored by moi for like 7 seasons or something, I was looking for some background noise loud enough to blot out the sound of my neighbor’s child’s piano practicing and I thought, since superhero things are generally full of explosions and a big dramatic score, this would fit the bill, by which I mean I went to Reddit - already a huge mistake when it comes to reviews (followed rapidly by IMDB unless you reverse the order from lowest to highest because the high reviews all come from some English-as-a-second-language rating farm (I’m thinking Romania maybe based on grammar?)) - and they all said the first season was bad but the second rebooted itself itself something entertaining and, no just NO! Wentworth rebooted itself; Line of Duty rebooted itself; this remained the same crap-ass unbootable, no OS drive in sight, out of memory error it was in season 1. Aside from having no real plot other than your token Big Bad, there’s also nothing particularly interesting about (a) the superpowers (fire, ice, stuff like that), (b) the actors (SO BORING!), (c) the writing (SO BORING AND MORONIC), and (d) I’m so bored I forget what (d) is. Let me put it this way: bring on the Frere Jacques, the scale progressions, and the glissandos followed by the frustrated fist-banging of a resentful teen because believe me 42 minutes straight of that is a massive entertainment improvement over this shizz.
Movies:
Jolt - Okay I'm just gonna say it: I know this movie's stupid and I. Don't. Care! I was totally entertained by it. The basic plot is a child who grows up to be Kate Beckinsdale has some kind of cortisol disorder where, when she gets angry (and the disorder makes her more prone to anger), she gets super strong and beats the crap out of people. The story picks up with her as an adult and this medical device she has that enables her to stave off the cortisol response and what happens when she finally falls for a guy and something happens to him which I won't spoiler and she goes on the hunt to both unravel what happened and get revenge. Let me reiterate: I know it’s DUMB! I know it! The movie is ridiculous, the plot barely hangs together, the characters are cartoons. But somehow watching Kate Beckinsdale get in an elevator and punch a person who failed to cover their sneeze is just so deeply satisfying. In fact much of the movie - and this is actually part of how it's structured - is Kate Beckinsdale fantasizing about all the things she's going to do to all the annoying people around her at which point she uses the medical device to tamp down her anger and prevent herself from doing everything she just fantasized about, meaning we get to see a LOT of angry Kate which I was really really fine with. I never thought about Kate Beckinsdale one way or the other (the Underworld series didn't do it for me) but, despite the role's stupidity, she committed to it, like she’s clearly into her character, which made the whole thing a kind of a thoroughly satisfying vicarious experience where you get to watch her beat the crap out of all the people you too would hate if you were in her situation. For a piece of silly popcorn entertainment, you could do significantly worse (see endless prior Media Reports for that list) with significantly less beating the crap out of people.