Books:
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
This book didn’t start off as a rage-DNFing abomination. It actually started as something I was super engaged by. The basic plot (I thought) had to do with an event that happened outside of Kamchatka serving as the backdrop for an interesting unfolding seemingly criminal drama. The writing was good and I was into the story and then got to chapter two which had a different set of people in a different, also interesting, but completely unrelated drama also with the same background event which served as a cue that the events in this chapter were concurrent with the prior chapter. And then chapter three came around and same thing, and at this point I was looking, as I believe any rational Janice would, for some sort of overlap or linkage between these stories. I was waiting to see how they would relate back to the crime, even though I knew I was in the fiction and not mystery genre, because clearly somehow these stories would interlink in a satisfying way, right? I mean they all had the same exterior event marking where people were and what they were doing at a certain point in time and surely SURELY everything would connect because this was sold as a novel and not a short story collection so of course because it’s a novel it’s going to tell a coherent story as kinda by definition a novel is not a series of otherwise completely unrelated and unfinished short stories loosely linked by a repeated background event but rather a complete thing in and of itself… right?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!
The adulations for this book are beyond this Janice’s comprehension; the book was atrocious not because the writing was bad but because the author only knew how to set up events but not how to pay them off so, when she got to a compelling point in her narrative but clearly had absolutely no fucking clue how to finish the interesting story she’d established… she just started a new chapter with completely different people then did the same thing again. I am at another level of baffled at the praise heaped on this buttmud and literally every non-Janice reviewer who failed to call the author out on her inability to finish anything she’d started should think about self-flagellating for a while then donating the cover price of this book to a good cause.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
This book is a mashup genre - memoir (I think)/fiction - in a mashup form - essay/novel (well, not really) about the author/fiction-narrator dealing with a friend’s suicide to which I had a mashup response - in and out of boredom/stuck with me. The author can totally write and the style of the book is a first person address to a second person “you” which - and this kind of encapsulates my overall experience of the book - feels simultaneously personal and pretentious. Its structure is a highly meandering series of thoughts which circle around how the shock of a suicide (not a spoiler - it’s the entire book) re-colors everything you thought about a person, and the book is a present-tense explication of the process of comprehension, e.g. here’s a long chapter about some non-event that happened between the two of them and what the narrator thought was going on but now the narrator’s questioning everything, etc. Whatever the genre, the entire book is inside the narrator’s thought process as she tries to understand her friend and their relationship through the lens of where it ended and figure out if she missed clues about his depression or why he did what he did or what certain minor events may have actually meant given his suicide. Her thoughts dart here and there and sit for a while in one spot then eventually another, and the journey of the book is that it starts where it starts and ends where it ends (like Life itself hmmm) rather than having a cohesive plotline of any kind. Thus your feelings about this book are going to depend on the degree to which you click with someone trying to absorb and sort out their own experience. Like I said for me that wasn’t the spot I was in when I read it so I found myself drifting in and out, but I can also appreciate why someone who connects with it differently might find it to be very powerful.
TV/Streaming:
Hacks (Season 1):
I thoroughly enjoyed this show about a highly successful standup comic and her combative relationship with a young Gen Z writer she brings on to help with her act. There are certainly flaws in it - the Gen Z'er is brought in as a writer but then morphs into some kind of generalized assistant which renders her somewhat aimless and ambitionless and it begins to make less and less sense why she's there or what she's doing (which I don't think was the intention of the show); also the last few episodes, which try to create emotional betrayals, felt pretty contrived (like family crisis suddenly clashes with big professional event and oh no); the management team shared by both comic and writer are characters from a completely different cartoony show entirely with a lot of OTTness that felt like some Hollywood writer commentary on manager cliches. I'm noting these flaws these as they registered as places where the show let itself down because it was otherwise so thoroughly entertaining. It's a relationship show about two curmudgeons who slowly come to connect with each other and that part - which is really the meat of the show - is so well done and fun and entertaining that the bits I noted above were relegated to minor irritants. It's 10 30 minute episodes of well-acted and well-written entertainment and a total pleasure to watch plus it both wraps and sets up the next season exactly the way you want.
Tehran (Season 1):
This is a cat-and-mouse spy series about an undercover Israeli operative in Iran, who, in her compulsion to complete her mission, sows chaos. The show is told (more or less) from the POV of the the agent, the Iranis tracking her, and the Israelis running the mission. The show itself is… okay. I wouldn’t say there were any real standouts in the writing or in the characterization - really, I didn’t exactly understand the lead’s motives for, without spoilering, doing what she did in the kinda selfish/aggressive way she did it. I didn’t object to the motivation but it felt tacked in there because, without it, the plot would’ve gone nowhere thus the writers had her motor it but without really creating a fleshed out character. If you’ve seen Ozark, then you’ve seen how Laura Linney’s character both motors plot AND does it in a way that makes sense for her character. This show’s lead is not that. And while there was definitely some tension throughout, I wouldn’t say the plotting was super twisty - or rather it had the sort of predictable twists you’d expect from this kind of high-end type of spy show. I mean this show was no The Americans to hardly mention not even close to seasons 1-4 of The Bureau. The fact that I’m making comparisons to shows it wasn’t basically tells you where it sat - a fine but completely unmemorable, just sorta middle-of-the-pack foreign spy show where your interest will wax and wane but you’ll finish it because it’s only 8 episodes and okay enough to keep you watching.
Movies:
Iron Man (Marvel Universe #1) - I'm 99% sure I saw this movie when it came out back in the gogo '00s but I'm equally certain I wasn't all that into it. Why, one might ask, am I giving this another go? Because some Janice (oh all right my sister) said the Marvel Universe movies were dumb fun but more fun and less dumb than the DC Universe movies (as if I'm capable of making the distinction btw) so I decided, having not learned the lesson of either Star Wars or Harry Potter where I did the exact same thing (sigh), to watch all of them in release order, totally gummied obvs, and see how it all goes.
So this one is about a super rich Robert Downey Jr. and let's put a pin in the plot for a second as I just have to comment that I find it kind of difficult to watch RDJr. without pondering how truly bad it must have been for him in prison and not in a gleeful schaudenfreude-y (or, for some, porn-y) way but in a way where I don't look at most megastars and wonder if they ever had to smuggle a cell phone in the heel of their sandal in exchange for protection. RDJr. plays a bajillionaire because not only is money a metaphor in that RDJr.’s tasteful maroon iron casing brings to mind a similar metaphoric casing shielding the wealthy from the world’s travails, but, to we Americans, the megarich are superheroes just by virtue of their bank accounts. He’s a weapons manufacturer - we also love! - who, as with his iron casing, develops both a literal and metaphoric heart (his Iron Ziehood comes from some kind of radiationish powered mechanical cardio device) because, I guess, prior to almost being blown up himself in the early part of the film, he didn’t really realize his weapons could actually hurt people. But he does realize that now and he’s sad about it, and let’s face it: a redeemed missile-making billionaire who feels for the common people with his megacharged uber-heart and played by a recovering addict ex-con is an American superhero if there ever was one.
RDJr.’s newfound discovery that weapons can kill manifests in a decision to cease weapons production, which is understandably not met well by meat-hearted (for a while) jingoistic American money-grubber/Board member Jeff Bridges and, after a number of dialogue scenes, this conflict winds up generating the bulk of the VFX budget in what can only be described as a crunchy-sounding and metallic take on a classic Board vs. CEO showdown, the sort one imagines combative corporate leaders such as Elon Musk only dream of having with their management team. While no Powerpoints were involved to my knowledge, this epic battle between a bleeding-heart-if-his-heart-still-pumped-blood CEO and a money-grubbing Board Chair who puts profits over people results, as usual with these things, in the destruction of a city plus the deaths of countless innocents - but all in the name share price which makes the whole thing seem very reasonable.
Perhaps most importantly though, as that final battle demonstrates, only Iron Man can save we common folk from destructive forces, even if Iron Man actually created those destructive forces (though he really is sorry about it now); and, yes, of course it’s terrible that a city has be leveled and so many city-dwellers have to die for Iron Man’s noble cause of wanting to oust his Board Chair but the alternative - peacefully handing his company over to Jeff Bridges with absolutely nobody dying - is so much worse! Without Iron Man well who will protect America from the consequences of Iron Man’s decisions? Thus the only conclusion one can draw by the end of the film is that Reagan and his GOP successors were right: trickle-down economics really is the only way to solve all of America’s problems, as giving billionaires and corporations, clad in their iron tax shelters and with their cyber hearts pumping out and up stock valuation, free rein to do whatever they want however they want to whomever they want and removing any legal and financial barriers which would otherwise prevent them from causing all the death and destruction they deem necessary to achieve their personal ends is, as the final showdown in this film definitively proves, the only thing that can truly save us all. From them.