Books:
Blood of the Chosen (Burningblade & Silvereye #2) by Django Wexler
Well this second book in a fun fantasy series was as good as the first which gives me hope for the third. As a reminder: this is a fantasy series about an estranged brother and sister on sort of opposite sides of both politics and magic systems who are brought, via plot, into each other's spheres after being separated in childhood and the uneasy alliance that results. I call it an uneasy alliance but both books keep the characters separate for a satisfyingly long time and craft essentially two worlds and magic systems, meaning the books are interweaving plots that eventually come together and hats off to the writer because I found both storylines to be equally strong and never minded going back and forth between the two as I do in some books with a similar structure. The author's also been pretty good about filling in side characters in both plotlines and giving some decent reasoning for why these two are on opposite sides of the political spectrum without anyone being so doctrinaire that it seems impossible they could see each other's POVs. In some ways, these books are Robin Hobb lite - not an insult - in that they intertwine character, politics and relationship minutiae with a larger story that leads up to some huge action set pieces. In fact the last, I don't know, 20% maybe of this book pulls all the plot threads together for a big screen-tapping (or page-turning if you're going old school) bang with a setup for the final book which, while I could kind of see it coming, was also earned, meaning the characters weren't fools but rather behaved the way did for comprehensible reasons (vague to avoid spoilering). I think fantasy's a tough genre to write because it can all feel very same-y to other fantasy books and characters often seem more like cipherish plot conveniences than people, and I think the author has managed to rise above that for two books so far and present a world and characters that, yes, have a somewhat same-y and blunt feel to them, but are written in such a way that the whole thing is really engaging. For me, the author has now delivered some solid entertaining fun across two books - I did not feel any middle-book-sag here at all (well maybe with one of the main romantic relationships but it wasn't significant enough to matter) - and am looking forward to the third.
TV/Streaming:
Atlanta (Season 4):
The tl:dr on this season despite the promise of the first and to an extent the second season is: awful. This show is bad at a level that makes me kinda, well, not angry but yeah maybe a little angry because it initially acted like it would deliver something interesting but instead was just a boring time waster. The third season definitely had elements of this for huge chunks of it, but it also had several episodes - maybe it felt like half? - that were interesting enough little seen perspectives on race, the commercialization of race, and a lens on a certain kind of rags-to-riches story which was not at all about that journey but rather the somewhat mundane aftermath of simply having money but being unsure what to do next. Isn't that all interesting? Sadly, the incompetence of the writing staff, or, no, maybe that's the wrong phrase (but I'm not deleting it because it's also the right phrase), the refusal/inability of the writing staff to tackle the hard part of writing is what sunk this show. Here's what I mean. The entire season, and this was absolutely present previously but here it was nonstop, is more or less absurdist sketches about nothing. For example, there's an entire episode devoted to the lead character - he's a talent manager now - trying to sign the artist D'Angelo and the only way to do that is... to enter a fast-food restaurant which turns out to be a cement room with a guard and sit there for 4 days where there are prison-like scratches denoting other people who'd done the same then eventually crawl through a tunnel in the wall to meet a D'Angelo impersonator or somesuch and then talk to that person and then eventually leave. Or how about the episode where the lead rapper character spends the entire time on his country farm trying to drive a tractor and prevent a feral pig from eating all his weed. I could go on but it's all just so boring. Absurdity is SO EASY to write because you don't have to make it make sense. You don't have to have character, it doesn't need to relate to anything that came before or after, and it has the added bonus of being able to pretend it's about something substantive, like the D'Angelo thing is a metaphor right? For, I don't know, I honestly don't know, but I'm sure someone made something up that made it sound like that episode was about something and same with the tractor episode and every other episode, all of which were about zero and written by people who were incapable of doing actual writing. "Actual writing" means a coherent story with consistent coherent characters who are in an ongoing drama across the season and which thematically pays off in some way. That's hard. That is actually really really hard to do and, frankly, it's even harder to do while keeping a show light or maintaining network TV standards or the like. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but go watch ER or The Good Wife if you want to see a show with actually competent writers even when constrained by length, format, and censorship. That's writing. Anyone can come up with an absurdist sketch and drag it out for the required show length or intercut it with another absurdist sketch with some other character and then call it a day. This is neither writing nor even, per Truman Capote, typing but rather is something akin to falling asleep on your keyboard, proclaiming the resulting gibberish as a potent and hilarious statement on whatever dropped out of your mouth in the moment of speaking, then just shooting that.
Movies:
Upgrade - This is a surprisingly entertaining near-future action movie about, without spoilering, a guy who winds up with a computer chip implanted in his brain and what happens as a result. Yes I know incredibly vague, but I knew nothing about the movie before watching and seeing it unfold probably added more interest than I might otherwise have had thus I'm leaving it the same way for you. It's not that there are massive surprises or anything like that but rather I wasn't totally sure where the film was going and I liked finding out in real-time as opposed to knowing up front (though if you read a description somewhere it'll still be fine for you). It's a small movie so even though there are some fun fight scenes and whatnot, it's all pretty low-budget meaning a lot of the drive comes (vague to avoid spoilering again) from the interior state of the character and how that all's played out and that was the surprising part to me - it worked. I mean there are fairly long stretches without a ton of action and with the lead character trying to figure out what to do next and those were engaging because of the way the filmmaker introduced certain plot components. Is this the vaguest review of all time? Really it's not that these points are crazy spoilerable; I mean I could mention them all and you wouldn't feel that something had been taken away from the film. Rather, it's that not knowing upfront allowed me to appreciate some of the craft in the writing and directing which I might not otherwise have noticed. For example, there's a longish setup, then some action, then some more setup and, because I didn't know where the movie was headed, that second chunk of setup was interesting because I understood the lead's internal state and what was happening in the outside world but wasn't really sure how those two things were going to meld. This is largely why I try to avoid spoilers in these reviews and why, when reading non-Janice reviews, I skim the plot description. I mean it only seems fair, right? The film was made under the presumption that you were experiencing the plot in the real-time of the movie and shouldn't that be what I'm judging? By that metric, this was a pretty fun action movie. You have a guy in a particular circumstance trying to unpack what happened to him when something else comes along and then those two components intersect and drive the movie forward. For me, all that worked and it would definitely fit the bill for a fun movie night or group-watch and is the kind of film where you actually won't be playing on your phone/tablet the entire time because, if you're like me and didn't read much about the film beforehand, you'll be interested to see where it all goes and honestly what more could one ask for in an action movie, indie or otherwise?