Books:
Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1) by Caz Frear
Well I 100% totally enjoyed this mystery about a Millennial junior detective with a big family mess that completely unravels due to a murder case she's investigating. While I read a fair amount in this genre, I'm also somewhat black-or-white with mysteries/spy thrillers/etc. because the plot, which I know is sort of the centerpiece of this genre, is in some ways the least important component for me as long as it makes basic sense. I don't really care about the whodunit; rather, that plot aspects serve as a mechanism to propel character - this is why I love the Joe Ide I.Q. series so much (here, here, and here) in that I can't really say whether or not the plots are gripping or convenient or contrived or whatever just that they put characters I'm interested in in places where they're forced to use the essence of who they are in order to get themselves out of danger and where the process of unraveling a crime goes hand in hand with their character journies. Plus fun snappy dialogue. This book is all that. I'm not going into plot really for spoiler reasons but it kind of doesn't matter. The lead - Cat - is a somewhat self-absorbed rogue with an extremely conflicted relationship with her father due to something spoilerable she witnessed when she was younger and which she knowsish she may have misinterpreted due to age but is also convinced she's totally right, and the plot is how the case she's working on may or may not tie directly into all that, meaning she's using the real investigation to do a private investigation and keep one from the other because, if she's found out, she'll be removed from the case or perhaps fired. Yes, I know, vague but that's the gist and the two-faced nature of the lead sets up a lot of plot motivation that keeps everything clipping along. The other reason I'm not going into plot is because with crime books like this - well-written with characters I find engaging - I don't really get all that hung up on the plot meaning I'm okay with coincidences or whatnot because I'm enjoying how the plot details bring out character. I say this not because I think the plot is bad or anything just that in general police investigations always wind up on the same trajectory in crime fiction - there's a setup, some forensics, some gumshoeing, not much happening, a break in the case, a runup to the end - so it just didn't feature in my enjoyment of the book though that may be different for you so just noting it. Really what I liked most about the book was that I bought the character; I bought her relationship to her older (male) partner, to her (female) boss, to her father, to her sister - I mean that's four solid relationships plus all the mystery plot and, in my experience, that's not so easy to pull off. The author wrote a character I'd like to see again with writing that was clear and amusing in a plot that ticked along and kept putting the character into situations where she found herself being tugged between the two opposing forces of family and job. If you enjoy mysteries for character and writing - think a snappier and shorter Tana French - then I'd say give this a shot.
TV/Streaming:
RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 14):
Well, fine, I was totally convinced I'd be done with this show after the abomination that was the - well my - last season of All Stars but okay this season was entertaining enough that I'll keep going. For those who haven't watched, this is a reality competition show in which drag performers do stupid skits and model outfits and are judged for that. As I've mentioned before, the series is basically a personality competition because the skits are uniformly dumb and while the makeup/wig/look can sometimes be interesting (or variants on the same each week thus boring), I literally never have an interest in watching someone walk down a runway wearing something they bought because while countless modeling competitions would have us believe it's very difficult to walk while simultaneously making a surly face, I'm gonna put that at the same skill level as, say, emptying the dishwasher, using Venmo, or sitting quietly in the back seat of a car. Thus the enjoyment of this show is 100% cast-based because the entirety of the show, in a way, is the various drag... not queens because so many now are trans (or are they still queens? is there non-gendered royalty come to think of it?)... drag... rulers no too boring, drag... crowned thangs, hmm I don't think that'll catch on, drag... drag, well maybe I'll do that thing the Japanese do where they put several unrelated English words together and leave it at that like 50 Family Pimple Boy National Forest (I certainly hope that actually exists), thus I'm gonna go with drag happy delicious. Anyway, this show is primarily about the various drag happy deliciouses sniping at each other both in person and to camera and so if there aren't a lot of witty ones or if the wit is all of the same sort which sadly it kind of is - and even worse the judges make the same sorts of boring comments the whole time as well and I think they need some better writers there just sayin' - then the show is dull. This season had better casting than the past few because several of the drag happy deliciouses had their own somewhat weird and particular comic styles which also applied to their looks and thus all that added an element of interest even when the jokes didn't land. Plus there was a quantity of snarling at each other that I haven't seen on the show in a few seasons which also made it more fun. To be clear: this show is background noise. There's nothing about it that demands undivided attention nor even watching an entire episode at once, like 20ish minutes is fine thanks. But under those conditions, this season wasn't bad and if you haven't watched and have been curious, this is a perfectly fine season to start with.
Evil (Season 3):
Well okay WHATEVER! Though I hate-watched the first two seasons (with much more hate in season 1 than 2), I'm now, harrumph, kinda totally into this show. There I said it! As a reminder, this is a series about investigations by a Catholic priest, a lapsed-believer psychologist, and a non-believing tech nerd (actually am I allowed to say nerd anymore?) sent to assess whether various cases of demonic possession are real or hoaxes. The annoyances I had with the prior seasons - especially the nonstop screaming kids and in fact the entirely unbelievable family situation of the psychologist - still exist but honestly the plot has ramped up enough across the seasons and the writing and characters are fun and zingy yet also tense and weird enough that I really ended up enjoying this season. While there are weekly possession investigations, mostly the show circles around a multiseason plot, without spoilering, involving our good guys, a definite bad guy, and a few people with unclear motives and involvement on both sides and that ongoing story is really what drives the show. In fact the strength of it is that seemingly minor characters or events from prior seasons can balloon into real plot drivers in later seasons making your investment in the show worthwhile because everything feels as if it were deliberate and leading up to something. There is no getting around the horror/demon/religion aspect so if that's bothersome to you - and in all honesty it kind of was to me at the beginning - then you will never get into this series. In fact, I'd say while the skeptics in the bunch still have a meaningful role, the show itself is unabashedly non-skeptical as in it doesn't (well at this point - it did more in season 1) even pretend to have a balance between are-there-demons/God (and Catholic or at least Judeo-Christian demons/Gods at that) vs are there other explanations for what's going on. As far as the show is concerned, it's the former and a battle between Good and Evil and frankly Evil's better at it. In fact the skepticism of a few of the characters almost feels like an unfortunate holdover as in the writers sold the show as X-Files but with demons and now they feel obligated to keep playing the is-it-real-or-not beat rather than just saying screw it and having a big binary battle without questioning its reality. I mean, not that the skepticism stuff is boring because much of it focuses on very current tech and how it's manipulated to make the unreal seem real or at least posit how current tech could create deep fake hoaxes which is also fun to watch. But the heart of the show is a long-game for world domination by an enemy with no limits against a small group receiving at best minimal help from their magical (or whatever we might call white-light bring-on-the-castrati-choir religious intervention) side and how this seemingly uneven battle will play out in what I'm presuming will be a mega-showdown in the final season of the show whenever that is. As I said, there are definite annoyances in this series but clearly from the fact that I've complained about the show for three seasons now well there must be something else there right because I ain't shy about DNFing and what's there is really solid writing, a plot that pays off each season and builds to the next, and, while the horror-religion mashup really isn't my thing (I thought the Exorcist was boring for example), I'm finding myself looking forward to the next season. So if you're looking for a well-written fun genre show then I'd say give this a try even if you think you're not the biggest fan of the genre because it really is, I say grudgingly I guess, a lot of fun.
Movies:
Last Night in Soho - Why? As in why was this movie about a shy fashion student who starts having visions of a '60s aspiring singer and begins losing it/investigating what really happened made? Why as in why did a bunch of non-Janices adulate it? Why? No really in all seriousness: WHY!?!? It's atrociously dumb and, even worse, manages the dual feat of going nowhere while being about nothing which is a lot to pack into a 120+ minute movie. So the basic plot is this country bumpkin gets admitted to fashion school in London and she's weird and has cliche shy/weird things happen to her as in she's a complete shy weirdo around her partying roommate and they gossip about her etc. yawn so she decides to rent a room in a house in Soho (title!) from some elderlyish woman. In the meantime she keeps dreaming/getting-visions of a girl about her age in the 1960s who's trying to make it as a singer and there are all these men who want to take advantage of (read: bang) her and our fashionista is very very concerned about '60s girl and spends a lot of time in the present looking around frantically as a result. It's not even a ghost story or horror movie or anything. I mean I think we're actually supposed to believe that the fashion student is somehow swept into another time where she, for no reason I can comprehend, desperately decides she needs to spend her entire existence in present-day London trying to figure out what happened to '60s girl which results in her looking and acting completely insane - but also making a super cute dress at fashion school! - which is also how non-’60s-people treat her, and reasonably so I might add. See the thing is at first I didn't mind all this because I thought it was going to be a psychological thriller in the vein of Polanski's Repulsion where scary things happen to the lead but it's equally plausible that the lead is going nuts; in that movie you're watching Catherine Deneuve’s breakdown but in a really creepy and menacing way where her responses are totally rational from her POV but not so much to others, and I thought something similar might be at play here. But no! Based on the ending and where it all heads, absolutely not. Fashion student is actually being swept into another time and I was kind of jealous because I wanted to be swept into another time too, one where I hadn't started this movie and then kept watching to figure out why all those friggin’ non-Janices kept drooling over it. I’ll ask again in all caps again and maybe I’ll get an answer: WHY??!!? Where the movie goes is dumb like dumb as in DUMB, it's about zero, there's nothing visual in it we haven't seen before, and for the life of moi I have no idea why anyone would finance this piece of junk (to hardly mention why all the non-Janices acted like it was bring-on-that-castrati-choir-refenced-above level of glorious geniouahisty) as it's neither horror movie nor art film nor, its cardinal sin, entertainment.