Books:
Howling Dark (Sun Eaters #2) by Christopher Ruocchio
Well didn't this book 2 in an epic SF series turn out to be an abominable hunk of garbage that ensures I will not be continuing this series. As a reminder, this is a kind of ancient-Rome-but-in-space book told from the POV of a 1500 year old emperor (or something like that) who's imprisoned and looking back on his life. The first book, which I enjoyed, told the story of the lead - Hadrian - escaping from his family and, without spoilering, having to scrape by on his wits and skills for most of the book in order to claw his way out of a bad situation. I noted in my initial review that the gladiators in space thing was something you just had to swallow. It was annoying and illogical in the exact same way light sabers were ridiculous in a galaxy of people shooting at each other, especially so in this series because the setup was that somehow the empire that Hadrian was a part of shunned tech... except they had a bunch of spaceships and advanced tech... so really the author just wanted people to do gladiatorial swordplay and left it at that. And made the bad guys, some alien race, also only have tech versions of non-gun weapons because, yeah, it's just dumb. But fine because the first book was mostly a kind of first-person Dickensian orphan story of someone pulling themselves up while also hiding their identity for various plot reasons, the Luddite-y nature of the empire didn't really impact the story. It didn't make sense, but I went with it because I enjoyed the story. Well this book, in which Hadrian is out of that first-book situation and is now flying across the universe in a big ship and encountering basically androids (and I don't mean the phones) and aliens and battles and whatnot it’s just so friggin' STUPID with having the entire thing, all battles, come down to hand-to-hand combat. I mean the author goes to great lengths to try to justify this but was really incapable in the end of pulling it off and actually at some point must have noticed the ridiculousness as he had Hadrian muse to himself why everyone in both his empire and the alien one only used swords and couldn’t come up with a reason and then just moved on from it entirely.
But honestly that wasn't the book's most egregious flaw, the one that makes me incapable of continuing. Nor is it the unbearable first-person lead character of Hadrian, a kind of Mary Sue who frets endlessly to himself about quote unquote right and wrong but all in the service of being the sort of quote unquote chivalrous mansplainer who's constantly leaping in to the defense of women who femplain about his mansplainy ways (but secretly like it) like what I imagine was a young Elon Musk or that guy who used to run Uber who in his mind is humanity's maverick savior of all the wronged and weak but is really just a delusional sexist narcissist. Believe it or not that actually wasn't the main problem (though honestly it was kind of a problem because the book is first-person thus it’s that sexist voice the whole time) nor was it the utterly untextured good/evil binary across everything in the book (though that was boring too) nor was it the endless rants about things like brain implants and whatnot all of which, as noted above, became more and more stupid as the book progressed - you're on a spaceship being technologically put into stasis for years on end but computers are baaaaad - I mean it's so dumb!; no the problem is the book is incredibly and atrociously overwritten. There isn't one bit of action that the author felt couldn't be paused for 5 million pages of thoughts, philosophizing, references to history, endless anachronistic "'tis" and "thee"s, thoughts about the thoughts, thoughts about what to do next, woe-is-meing about the situation, repetitions of prior thoughts, imagined dialogue with dead characters, contemplation of the universe, or the lead pondering his own feelings. And then a page or so later, or less, doing it all over again. And again. And again. How anyone made it through this book without skimming is beyond me and the only reason I didn't DNF was that I kept hoping that the promise of the first book would eventually show up in this one or that maybe the plot would be fun enough that I could just skim the subsequent ones and call it a day. But really no. The unbearable character, the idiocy around the technology and weaponry, just all of it combined with pages of drivel, no I'm done and my advice to anyone thinking of reading these books is never start because even if they end up eventually paying off at some point plotwise, I can tell you the trudge to get there is not worth it.
TV/Streaming:
Chloe:
This is a very entertaining - and, as it progressed, surprisingly emotionally deep - thriller about a woman who infiltrates a stranger's friend group for reasons I will not spoiler. It's only a six episode miniseries and while it takes a bit to rev up, it really becomes much more tense and interesting as it proceeds. Part of what makes it work is that you don't really know exactly what the lead woman is up to for the first few episodes, like is she a stalker, just some loser weirdo preying on these people for some other reason, etc.? And in fact, as the backstory is revealed (and the directing leans into this), you get a sense that those questions are exactly what she's asking herself and how she believes she's perceived and I'd say it's the underlying character issue, someone who believes there's something fundamentally wrong with themselves and who undergoes a thriller/investigative journey into something else, that really ended up making the entire miniseries work and is what gives it its emotional heft. To be clear: it is 100% a thriller and in fact as the series progresses and as the lead infiltrates the group more and more, the tension really ratchets up as to whether or not she'll be caught but, hand in hand with that, comes an understanding of why she's risking any of this at all, meaning it's not one of those things where the lead character, as in horror movies for example, does something stupid and dangerous and which no rational person would ever do just because the plot needs it; rather, the lead is forced to take manipulative and potentially dangerous risks because of something spoilerable. The writing's good but really what holds this whole thing together is the lead actress who delivers a performance which makes the character totally credible even when she's doing things that might otherwise seem absurd. What I also appreciated about this series is that, even though in say episode 2 or 3 I was thinking it seemed decent but maybe a bit bloated, I was actually ultimately wrong about that because the final three episodes, by far the most tense, required the character building in the first three to really pay off. The first three aren't boring or anything; rather, they led me (and I think this was deliberate) to believe the series was going to be one thing and therefore I was thinking yeah yeah I know what this is let's get there faster but I turned out to be wronged because it was actually something more. As in I can assure you that in episode 1 I had no idea I'd actually be kind of moved by how the whole series resolved. There are some plot nitpicks for sure, but it was all so well done in general and driving somewhere that I just brushed past them because I wanted to know where it was all going to wind up and so really I'd say if this kind of classy character thriller is a genre you like, give this one a watch.
Making It (Season 3):
I watch this crafting competition reality show for reasons that are somewhat beyond me but I'll do my best to sort it all out for you right here right now. I mean I generally like a competition reality show where you can judge the outcome and this one, in which crafty types are given big challenges in short timeframes, definitely hits that mark. But the production, hosted by Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman, is decidedly and deliberately family-oriented, meaning the jokes are pretty unfunny and the focus is more on keeping a bouncy tone to the whole thing rather than in a competition show like, for instance, Project Runway (until it got all woke in the worst and most derogatory meaning of that word these days), where it's more about the creative and practical struggles the contestants face. This show eliminates the bulk of that because most of the challenges are things they were clearly given in advance so they could practice meaning you're not really watching a creative process, just the execution on the day. This doesn't make it bad - I mean I've watched 3 seasons of it and not as background noise - but it does make it somewhat bland and really pulls away from any meaningful judge critiques since the idea is to critique without hurting anyone's feelings. But it also makes the judgments feel somewhat random since there's no "OMG that was awful and here's why" but rather some minor nitpicks which feel no different than the minor nitpicks the winner often gets. I like these types of shows in general as I like seeing what people create so I tend to care less about the quality of the production (I mean I sat through all of Haute Dog just sayin'). If that's you as well and you haven't seen this, then you'll probably like it as a kind of middle of the road family-friendly-toned competition show; if you're fussier about the genre, you can definitely skip this one.
Movies:
Chloe - Impossibly, there’s another Chloe out there with somewhat similar themes to the Chloe above and in fact when I started watching the Chloe above I wondered if it was a remake of this movie and mercifully it totally was not. This movie, in stark contrast to that series, is the most unironic, non-camp, ‘80s erotic thriller one could imagine being made by a Canadian in the past decade. You can see the trailer: Liam Neeson! <thwonk> Julianne Moore! <thwonk> Amanda Seyfried! <thwonk> Bad! <thwonk> Things! <thwonk> Happen! <thwonk> GLOSSILY! The basic plot of this self-oblivious genius piece of trash sounds like the start of a joke - a professor, a gyno, and a hooker walk into a bar - and if this movie is the punchline, it may be the greatest joke of all time. So basically the hooker (that would be Amanda Seyfried though in many ways this would have been even more revolutionarily bad if that part had gone to Julianne Moore - knock wood there’s a sequel and that happens) for reasons known only to no one becomes obsessed with the gyno (Julianne Moore though would it have been better if Liam were the gyno? I can’t stop recasting!) after running into her in the bathroom and begins one of those stalker-y life invasion things that seem to happen nonstop in movies and maybe in real life with vapid rich people who, out of politeness and maybe some genetic inbreeding issues or at least an upper-crust inability to Google, are willing to believe, for example, that some total stranger is a princess who should be admitted to their inner circle, Julianne and all involved don’t think it’s remotely weird that the woman like 30 years her junior whom she ran into in a bathroom and then hired to spy on her husband (did I not mention this plot point?) because she thinks he’s cheating on her would, you know, have some mental health issues around attachment. In any event all that does happen in the most exquisite hotels and apartments (un)imaginable on the combined incomes of a gyno and a professor only with some lite stalking along the way as in the hooker wearing gyno’s skin cream, wearing her outfits, etc. you know the usual things that one would imagine are part and parcel of shadily hiring an someone to trap your husband. Then, not only does the hooker actually start an affair with Liam Neeson (I refuse to call that a spoiler), but there’s some delightful gaslighting going on in which everyone on the planet think Julianne is the crazy stalkery one who’s going mad because her husband may be cheating. I feel at this point you’ve heard enough about the plot and tone to know whether this trashy erotic thriller in which everyone is entwined in a deadly serious morass of high-stakes poodle-’do-free Fatal Attraction-y plot logic that leads to consequences <thwonk> is for you. And in case you’re still on the fence, does the fact that there’s an actual (and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen this in a movie before maybe?) yes, an actual honest-to-whom/whatever-higher-power-might-exist fully realized and extended shoegasm in the movie tip you to one side or the other? If it does and it’s the side I was on, delights await.