Books:
Stone Cold Heart (Cat Kinsella #2) by Caz Frear
I thoroughly loved this second book in a crime series about a Millennial/GenZ junior homicide detective with a messy personal life and how that personal life collides with her current investigation. The personal life stuff is definitely spoilerable thus I won't be discussing it in detail and I'd also say this means you need to read the books in order which is a good thing because the first one was fun too. Without doubt what makes the books so good is the writing as it's very snappy and realistic and with dialogue that instantly establishes the various characters and tone of the books as in I found the relationships, for example, between Cat - our first-person narrator - and her older (male) partner and older (female) boss to be both realistic and very amusing, by which I mean there's nothing contrived, nothing combative, nothing sexual, nothing where she's being an unrealistic maverick (though, for the spoilerable reasons she's sometimes compelled to withhold information or skirt the law but that's all realistic within the context of the story), but rather just a young officer being trained by her older colleagues and admired, or not, for her work. This workplace element, in which you get to see these people in their various positions interacting with one another, is also what adds fun to the books because let's face it: in cop-based crime books, there's an awful lot of people standing around talking about the case or speculating about what the evidence means and whatnot and that's, you know, part and parcel of being a procedural in which a mystery is being unraveled. So realistic characters with snappy dialogue elevates all that from what, in other books of this genre that I've read, can be a kind of fact-dumping trudge. Here, it's entertaining, it's our lead character trying to impress her boss or the reverse afraid of sounding dumb in front of her boss and things like that, i.e. character beats that make exposition feel natural. As usual for me, it's never about the crime itself or its resolution (though this one had some nice twists and turns) since that all’s really just the motor and ticking clock for a lot of personal interactions, and my assessment of quality isn't based on whether or not I saw the ending coming or figured out whodunit early on or whatever but rather on whether or not the author took me on a fun ride, and this author has now done that twice plus her writing is definitely more assured in this one. If you like the genre the way I do - character-driven with a messy and flawed narrator but also one with a very amusing eye for detail - then I'd say add this series to your list because two books in it's some pretty consistently strong writing here.
TV/Streaming:
All That Glitters (Season 1):
This is a mediocre reality competition show about jewelry designers made slightly worse by a really irritating and deeply unfunny host (yeah, I realize humor's subjective but I'm 100% right!), but I watched it anyway because, even though I have something approaching zero interest in jewelry, some of the stuff was actually really cool. The reason I say the show is mediocre is because it's in that slow British vein where the series focuses on the crafting rather than personalities - something I completely prefer btw - but the crafting, in this case, is really somewhat hard to understand. By which I mean I don't have enough of a basis in metal and jewelry creation to be able to see all the fine details of the mistakes people make nor really have a sense of whether or not someone did something really difficult or really even whether the final creation is super original or pretty pedestrian. I mean the judges and the annoying host fill you (me) in on some of these details but as a non-jewelry-pro-viewer it's not easy to make comparisons between the final products. The challenges are pretty specific - a bangle in this metal with these five components in this width etc. followed by a different challenge (more on that in a minute) - so while there's measuring to see if everyone met the challenge, you're also just looking at x number of different bracelets where the distinctions between them, aside from the judge preference on overall design which they're pretty good about explaining, requires a jeweler's loupe to really see which, um, I don't have on my OLED. The final challenge each episode is much more interesting because it's a design challenge for an actual customer who usually has a pretty interesting backstory and a reason why they're looking for a particular piece of jewelry and what they want it represent, e.g. a stranger donated bone marrow to a now-in-remission cancer patient and they've since become friends and the recovered patient wants to give a friendship bracelet symbolizing how grateful she is and how much she values the relationship. This part of the show was much more interesting to me because that's pretty much, with a few constraints, pure creativity where you get to look at the final products and see which one you think delivered on the requirements and, of course, get to see which one the customer chose and why. I'm guessing if you're more into jewelry than I am, you'll probably think this show is pretty good (barring that host which everyone will agree with me on) so if that's you, I'd say it's worth checking out because even though that's not me, I'm still gonna watch season 2.
Pantheon (Season 1):
I'mma tell you true: despite having (at best) only the haziest notion of WTF was going on in this primetime animated Matrix-y (I think) series, I still found it to be really entertaining - and, as Media Report devotees can attest from my total lack of reviews of animated series, I am NOT an animation fan. Regardless, this show is definitely strange as in it's a total sci-fi drama cartoon about - and honestly I am so not 100% on any of this - people who kind of realize they're in a Matrix? Or something? Basically there's some company experimenting with uploading people to servers and —
...Okay that's as far as I'm gonna get on my own - Wikipedia it is! And, yes, I watched the whole thing and not in the background (though maybe high).
...Well I'm back from Wikipedia and, nope, that's not gonna help. I mean it's not that I don't remember everything Wikipedia wrote; it's just that reading about the show I saw typed out in sentences explains nothing. I got the uploading thing right - there's an evil consciousness-uploading company - and there's a bullied girl who reconnects online with her dad whom she thought was dead but discovers was uploaded - nefariously maybe? - instead. I definitely remember that plotline. And there's another plotline involving a teenage boy who, well either he's completely electronic and lives in a computer-generated world OR he, as with Pinocchio (kinda), is a real boy trapped in an experiment where the evil uploading company has hired his parents, friends, etc. to train him to do something neither I nor Wikipedia seemed to have a clear sense of and he and the bullied girl connect online where they somehow bond over their efforts to discover the truths of both of their situations.
Is this helping anyone understand the plot because there's more? So there’s an entire other person, I think she's real and not uploaded?, who works for another company that's maybe into brain-uploads or maybe not? I don't know. And I'm not super sure how his plot exactly crossed with the two teen plots which also didn't really seem to cross which each other in a comprehensible way to either moi or Wikipedia.
So, yeah. That's the plot of the show. Or it’s not. Either way, I was never bored though as you can see I equally never understood anything and Wikipedia is making me feel like it's not just me, which is soothing. If anyone else is remotely intrigued by this review or whatever we're calling this groping effort to articulate the incomprehensible, go watch and please feel free to tell me what the hell was going and maybe update the Wiki page for future readers because like [confused shrug emoji].
Movies:
Dark Waters - This is a Very (self)-Important True Story Mark Ruffalo cinematic Oscar bait release from a few years ago about Dupont poisoning water and the legal battle to make Dupont pay. You've seen this Erin Brockovich-y movie a million times. Something bad happens; there’s denial, payoffs, legal fees, and a coverup. This is the first, say, quarter of the movie where we meet the downhome folk who are the victims of corporate money-grubbing and then watch them try to convince our hero lawyer to take the case. After s/t/he/y reluctantly does, the remaining 75% of movie is essentially an office caper entirely focused on trying to generate drama from paperwork - “The court closes in 5 minutes!” shouts harried attorney while veering through traffic like they just realized their kidney’s on fire before skidding up in front of the courthouse, shoving a manila envelope in the hands of the assistant/sometimes-love-interest in the passenger seat who then runs up the stairs and, on the way back down after a breathless sigh of assurance to the fretful attorney behind the wheel, usually intersects a traffic cop writing said attorney a ticket for illegal parking but s/t/he/y doesn’t care because t/s/he/y’s so relieved and it’s so exciting for us that the brief was filed in time! Or going through reams of discovery documents with time lapses, pizza boxes, office cleaners, “you been here all night?” asks sassy assistant the next morning, then the aha moment of finally finding the smoking gun and push in on attorney… intently reading. THRILLING! Then, because there’s literally nothing else to do in the film, there’s a courtroom scene of some kind in which everything we’ve already heard is now reiterated but this time while pacing in front of a judge/jury with a lot of objections and pleading your-Honors, outraged your-Honors, disbelieving your-Honors, exasperated your-Honors, alarmed your-Honors, basically any your-Honoring the writer can think of - plus maybe a “sidebar!” or “I’ll see both of you in my chambers!” for some extra excitement - in an effort to infuse a riveting sense of ping-pong-y who’s-gonna-win-ness to what’s basically a few people in a room asking questions. And then oh such tense moments while the jury or judge deliberates and then more paperwork as a verdict is glanced at before the judge hands it to the bailiff for some more stalling so the bailiff can hand it to the jury foreperson who reads it and text crawl over black giving us the somber wrapup and, boom, 2.5 hours of your life have gone by for what was essentially a 3-minute newsfeed toilet-skim (after which you played Scrabble, Wordle, and Knotwords for like 10 more minutes before reluctantly getting on with your day).