Books:
A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
This fiction novel about a male cryptosexual grifter who latches onto a book author to launch his own career is godawful for many reasons not the least of which are the relentless non-Janice reviews saying the exact opposite. Here’s the thing: the ‘80s-Berlin-set novel, all other literary aspirations aside (and it has plenty, many about the nature of writing which, given that those are written by the person who wrote this novel, in some ways tells you why the book is so boring and in others make you - me! - wonder why the author didn’t follow his own advice), is ultimately written as a form of noir, and the author completely failed to make even a remotely plausible character setup for that genre of mystery. In noir, where there’s generally a scam of some kind underlying everything, the essential element which IJHO distinguishes noir from its mystery brethren is that much of what allows the grift/scam to occur at all - and which is often the source of later twists - is a deep-rooted complex psychology on the part of the griftee, one in which the character is in a circumstance where they’re open to being grifted and where their psychology changes - or not - over the course of the book and where it’s the cat-and-mouse-but-wait-which-is-cat-and-which-is-mouse-now-ness, i.e. the power dance between the lead characters as a plot unfolds around them, which distinguishes the genre. I’m not saying the book author was trying to write a noir but rather that what makes noir work was precisely what was missing from this book and which is what made it not work - the characters are bluntly-written bores with A-to-B psychology (and this is definitely trying to be some form of high-lit psychological thriller (which fails on all 3 words)). The lead is a sad, gay author; the grifter is a younger guy trying to use the sad, gay author’s connections to launch himself. The end. See what I mean? There’s no texture, there’s no back and forth. The grifter is so obviously a user that no matter how much pagetime is devoted to the griftee’s yearning/interest/backstory, it never makes a lick of psychological sense as to why he’s involved with this guy other than the most generic reason possible - he’s old, the guy is young, and isn’t that flattery nice? In other words, far from anything resembling even a vague mystery, what you have is a self-deluded fool being manipulated by a not-that-subtle-or-clever user and, well, a few hundred pages later some unmotivated plot manipulation to make it look like something actually happened even though it didn’t. I genuinely have zero idea why anyone thought this was a good book. The characters are dull, the plot verges on non-existent, there’s nothing in there about the nature of writing that isn’t completely obvious, and the whole thing read incredibly slow to boot. If that’s your thing, go for it. Otherwise, avoid (and honestly the writing was so boring that my plan is to avoid the author entirely though I give myself permission to retract everything I just said if I wind up reading some future book of his (unlikely admittedly at this point) and end up loving it).
TV/Streaming:
The Other Two (Season 2):
This show remains as not good as it was season 1 and I will likely have the exact same review when I watch season 3, the combo of which - kind of thinking it sucks but watching it anyway - is more or less the review. As a reminder, the show is a very OTT and broad sitcom about the late-20s siblings of a teen pop phenomenon who are trying to use his fame to claw their way into the industry. The jokes are very rat-a-tat and pretty gay/Hollywood-focused and the show doesn't pretend to be anything other than completely absurd... except when it does which is partly what I can't stand about it. I mean on the one hand you have an entire idiotic episode about one of the leads taking a picture of his butthole and sending it to someone on Grindr which then gets passed around and becomes a whole Twitter cause celebre and then we're supposed to feel the moment of pride and difficulty-of-struggle when he gets a real acting break (kind of) as a result of all the Tweestorming at the end episode. To me, it's either asking too much of my viewerdom or doesn't have the writing talent to make that work. Everything is very one-note so if you find that one particular note to be funny then you'll probably have a better reaction to this show than I did. I sat through it because some of the quips were funny if also fairly obvious with regards to its Hollywood-ness/gay-ness and... oh wow, self-observation: I guess I hate-watched. Yep, there you go. I hate-watched this thing for the reason I often hate-watch - vague amusement at the show itself combined with a deep feeling of superiority to all the writing staff - and that's what happened here. It's really annoying with a lot of obvious jokes that don't land and with relentlessly one-note performances or, if you're not hate-watching, a hilarious delight (unimaginable)!
Severance (Season 1):
This is a show designed exclusively for people who enjoy watching other people wander through white halls for like 40 minute stretches interrupted and/or punctuated by stilted, character-less office talk written by people who think they're making hilarious commentary on the blandness of corporate-speak but who really just subjected the viewer to, oh, 9 hours of blandness plus 1 scattered hour of unrealized teasing plot potential instead. If that's you, you will LOVE THIS SHOW. If not, well.
It didn't start off this way. The setup - and it's revealed in the first episode so not a spoiler - is that we're in a world exactly like today's except people can get an operation where they can sever one part of their brain from the rest; they severed self has no memories of the regular self and vice versa meaning someone could work at a top secret office but legitimately remember nothing that occurred there when outside the office - which, since in this show the severing device is turned on and off via an elevator to a basement level office, is what I sort of assumed it would be. It starts off seeming like it's going to be good, interesting, etc. but by like episode 3 this sinking feeling starts setting in that it's going to go nowhere and be more of the same and losing itself in its own sense of quirkiness and quote unquote mystery but actually going absolutely nowhere and, yeah, that's exactly what it is.
The only severance in this hunk of garbaaaaaaage is the writing’s severance from anything resembling plot, mystery, character, logic, or even marginal interest for reasons to follow and, if I sound annoyed, it's because I am; I wasted like 10 episodes wading through this junk hoping it would get better, hoping the vague promise of the first episode would actually go somewhere but... no. In fact, even worse, it wasn't until literally the final episode - the shortest of the bunch I'd add which tells you how little the writers had up their sleeves for a finale - that anything happened and even then not much. I won't spoiler but if the 10th episode had been the 2nd episode then maybe this could've been an interesting show about people effectively split into two via severing and those different parts having and developing different agendas with each trying to figure out what the other was up to and with one undermining the other. That wouldn't have been bad necessarily, right? That is not this show and here's why.
By the fifth episode you should surely know WHY the company the severed are working for want them severed, like what's happening on that floor that they don't want people to remember in their normal lives or what's the company's larger agenda or why literally ANYONE working there who's not severed (not all employees are) feel okay about the process or what they want out of it. Or anything. But you don't. There's literally nothing going on. Mostly people stand around talking to each other. Okay fine so maybe it's some kind of human experiment with the workplace as the way to get them to participate. In which case, you should have at least a vague idea of what this experiment it, why they set things up the way they did - like there's an entire episode devoted to the severed touring a museum of the corporate founders and like why? (I mean other than that the writers had zero clue what do with their own concept) - why really anything is going on, why they're being observed, why they're "punished" the way the are sometimes (vague to avoid spoilering), literally why anything. But there's nothing, zero. There's people standing around in a really cliche stark white-walled maze-like office area gabbing with each other. For hours. Episode after episode.
Also the characters become complete idiots when they’re down at work. Like even if they've been cut off from their normal selves, surely they'd be reacting to the fact that they're doing absolutely nothing and no one's there but them more or less. Yet they act as if doing this drone non-work isn't out of the ordinary which really begs all kinds of rules questions as in: how much does the severed self actually know or not know about the real world because the show acts as if it's just personal memories that are eliminated yet that clearly isn't the case. So what, exactly, is being severed? No idea. At the very least they'd notice all the desk are jammed together, they're on astroturf, and the computers are from the '80s yet no one says a thing. Other than for style reasons - cliche style at that because we've seen this white-walled retro thing like a million times before (the non-severed bosses have the same stuff so it's clearly style not function) - there's no reason given.
Another example of why this show is bad. There's basically a lead character with little more than an occasional glimpse at the side characters on the outside though equal split inside as if they're riveting on their own (they're not - if you watch, see what you think of the endless hours spent with John Turturro's character to hardly mention the time wasted with him in the final episode). So... why is the lead character so important that Patricia Arquette is living next door to him, going through his stuff, stealing his mail, and pretending to be a latching nurse for his newly-mom sister? No idea, never explained, nor is Patricia Arquette's rabid devotion to the company explained in any form nor why she seems to work 24/7 for nothing. I think the writers meant for this to be tense and creepy like ooooh look at Patty infiltrating the lead’s life but because there's not even a hint as to why she gives a shit about him as opposed to, say, literally anyone else who works there, it just plays as dumb, unrealistic, and contrived.
There's a cult-like nature to how people talk about the company within the company and it goes on FOREVER; there are entire episodes devoted to people going to the museum noted above and talking in worshipful tones about the company founders to hardly mention the episodes devoted to watching people read aloud from a self-help book - are we supposed to believe this is real in any form, like what world are we in and why did anyone at Apple think any viewer would want to be there for more than 4 seconds? I think the people who wrote this show literally have no clue about corporations other than, maybe, watching the movie Brazil or skimming through headlines about them on their news feeds. And, in the big picture, no amount of talking about wanting to shut down your brain for x hours a day can overcome the fact that literally no one would put themselves at the mercy of all these other people - a corporation - without some basic checks and balances to make sure you weren't, you know, assassinating people or a sex slave or being tortured nonstop. It's the equivalent of spending all day in an office you've never been to with people you've never met and deciding the best way to do all that would be roofied for years on end. It's so dumb!
BTW the plot NEVER picks up - the second episode from the end it's exactly the same idiocy as the first episode with elliptical statements and people standing around talking at some stupid fake office party. Much of what makes this show bad is this: without spoilering, we see the lead character both at home and at work meaning we see both halves thus while a thrust at some point in the show is for one half to discover what the other knows (not exactly honestly but close enough), we the audience already know everything. So who cares if some severed half figures something out about the other half? While no doubt riveting for that severed half, it’s completely boring for everyone else since WE ALREADY KNOW. Some free advice for writers (well actually you can go ahead and Venmo me some cash for this one): audience discovering what character knows = interesting; character discovering what audience knows = boring. Of course all this also points to what this show COULD have been: one in which we, the audience, only know what the severed ones discover or one in which we have limited views on both halves of the characters' lives and make discoveries along the way, you know a mystery as opposed to watching people read out loud, go to museums, wander white-walled halls, talk about nothing, do nothing, have fake office parties in which we're supposed to believe that everyone will be all excited to have disco music turned on and be given fruit and, aargh, you get the gist.
Perhaps it all wound up this way because Apple outsourced all the writing on this show - and given the caliber of Apple’s prior offerings perhaps all shows - to the slave labor they use to build their I-devices at Foxconn though if so they may want to think about running these things through quality control. Or perhaps the people who wrote and financed this were severed, if not from their mental faculties then at the very least from an understanding of plot, character, story, rhythm, logic, coherence, or anything remotely resembling interest.
Movies:
Wild Mountain Thyme - Begosh and begorrah, this is quite possibly one of the worst celebrity-packed Irish romcoms of modernity on me tod I say! The film is a throwback to an earlier era, one in which studios released abominations like this which tanked at the boxoffice and were then sent directly to cable, post-midnight network viewing, or videostores to live out their lives in shame or, if blessed with the luck of the leprechauns, word-of-mouth stoner viewing. I think in its mind this movie was trying to be an Irish Moonstruck (itself a movie that managed to elude the above film-shaming for reasons that equally elude this Janice given the beaver-dam-level of scenery gnawed through and inhaled by Olympia Dukakis but I digress) and perhaps, given my parenthetic, it achieved that. The gist of this film is two star-crossed 30something single straight White Irish farmers who can't see the love that's right in front of them, her because she thinks she's a swan and him because he thinks he's a honeybee and please don't delude yourselves into thinking I'm making this up solely for the review as - spoiler alert - at some point about 50 days into the 8-month experienced running time (of what I think was actually a 90 minute movie) we see her - that would be Emily Blunt - one morning while the Swan Theme from Swan Lake plays in the background, opening her shutters but with her feet moving in and out of ballet positions after which the camera pans up to her face where she speaks aloud to no one something along the lines of, "Today is the day!" after which we see a plane in the air, the NYC skyline and, later, see her sitting next to Jon Hamm (he's the American cousin of the honeybee), weeping at a production of Swan Lake. The movie is filled with character motivations like a frustrated Jamie Dornan aka honeybee, upset that he can't confess his love to swan Emily Blunt, going to a raven-filled tree on her property, shooting his gun in the air to scare off the ravens just as a storm is coming in then pulling out a metal detector for no discernible reason (she makes a reference to it later with something like, in an accent that’s the Irish sibling of Pepe Le Pew’s French or the Spanish/Mexican of Speedy Gonzales, "Hooowhy ya ouat there on soooch a day lookin' fer coihns?"), cut to a random ghost voice (I think? I'm really completely not sure) telling Emily Blunt to “find him,” which she does, they go back to her place as it's getting stormier, she invites him in, he refuses but stands in front of her door at which point a tank of water is dropped on his head, the storm begins, and he goes inside. The movie manages to be the classic awful-movie combo of atrocious, cliche, insane, boring, and, in this case, with a score that I'm pretty sure was made up solely of linked-together Irish-jig ringtones. Not to gild the shamrock, but did I mention Christopher Walken is in this thing with an Eire accent? Or that the movie title is sung in its entirety as a pub song at the end? All I can say to everyone involved is slainte!