Books:
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner
I am once again baffled at all the non-Janice adulations - and maybe even a Pulitzer or National Book Award or some other medal I'm too lazy Google? - for this non-fiction book about an American woman living in Germany in WWII and her Nazi resistance efforts. It's not that this book is the worst thing ever or anything like that and perhaps my review would be more of a meh/kinda boring/it's okay review if I hadn’t found out about this book from other reviewers lauding its awesomeness and I'm telling you it is decidedly not anywhere close to awesome. It's fine. You've read this story a billion times. Look I totally get why the author wrote this book as she's related in some way to the American woman and so went off and found as many first-person accounts as she could and traced what happened to her relative. The writing... well it's very particular. It's written in third-person present-tense (the author makes a point of telling you she's not inventing anything meaning if someone's feelings are discussed it's because she has a document saying so) with crazy-short chapters as in some of them are one sentence long. I'm thinking she used chapter breaks instead of paragraph breaks because otherwise this would've perhaps been long essay length rather than book length. Or maybe she just liked seeing one sentence a page. Often. I don't know. Maybe the real reason she did it that way and which is my real critique of the book is that the lead character is just... some person who got upset with Hitler's rise and formed a circle of resistance that - no spoiler here since you're told this upfront - fell apart and got her killed. There just isn't all that much there. The American woman, well I'm assuming she did all this out of some kind of moral stance though honestly the more interesting character beats, like why she stayed in Germany when she realized how lethal Hitler was, whether or not she thought she'd ever be caught and how she'd deal with that, the internal stuff which perhaps (though I'm really not sure) could have been interesting simply wasn't present because the woman - Mildred - I guess never recorded those thoughts nor discussed them with anyone who also kept a document of it. So the author pulls in the thoughts and actions of a bunch of other people in Mildred's close circle as a means of filling out how resistance grew in Germany and how Russia tried to turn people into spies and stuff but, like, that's not a story. Which is what this was being sold as. It's just a digested primary-document historical account of individuals in that era that adds up to nothing, or at least nothing more than you already know right now just having read this review. In other words, the author is recounting something that happened TO someone but can't, because of the constraints of not wanting to invent (which is fine and I get that), recount a story of something happening BY someone. So you instead hear about this event and this person and that person and then they were caught and then there was a kangaroo court trial and then they were executed, which, as noted, you know from the preface. So what's the book? The reason I picked it up was because I thought I'd be getting a story about a foreigner who takes up a foreign cause and dies for it and understanding that person from beginning to end, and that seemed interesting. This was not that. Nuff said.
TV/Streaming:
Life in Color:
This is one of those generic-until-it's-mind-blowing David Attenborough nature shows and it definitely, especially in the final episode, delivers on the mind-blowing. The series is about how animals and plants use color and much of it is on the generic side, meaning it's interesting but nothing you haven't either seen or couldn’t infer from other nature shows, i.e. stuff about camouflage and mate/poison signaling, things like that. But at some point in the show, and this was mostly in what I'm calling the third episode (of three) though I'm not 100% that I watched them in any particular order, the show examines advances in optics technology. This episode initially seems to be highly generic - for example showing us tigers sneaking up on deer - but then goes into this crazy stuff around, in that example, why are tigers reddish? Well apparently because scientists discovered that deer and many prey animals can't see red light. And then someone developed a camera or a filter to show us tigers as deer see them and it really shows the power of evolution because, as it turns out, tigers look green to deer meaning they literally completely blend in to their surroundings meaning deer and most prey animals go through life knowing there's something they can't see and will never be able to see that's out there trying to kill them and the way they shoot the show makes it very easy to imagine if that were our species and there was something - like in the movie Predator or pick your horror movie - that could be 10 feet from us when we're out walking in a park or sitting on our couches or OMG IT’S IN MY APARTMENT but due to evolution all we saw were bushes. I gotta say the combo of showing us seemingly very familiar nature-show stuff combined with these advances in both physics (to figure out what animals are detecting at all optically) and camera tech (to show us) gets nuts in the best way of these shows. To hardly mention if you have an OLED screen cum moi, the visuals are amazing. If you like these sorts of shows, I'd say this is a good one if you haven't seen it as, especially in the one episode I basically discussed this entire review, it shows some stuff that's truly amazing.
Heartstopper (Season 1):
Philosophical question: if you're heartless can your heart be stopped? Regardless, I can assure you that pressing the stop button on my remote didn't interfere at all with my continued existence and in fact arguably made it better. If you read basically every non-Janice review (a theme I guess in this week’s Media Report) - which is how I came upon this series - you will see this show described in terms of pure elation, an 8 30 minute episode immersion experience in nonstop joy! And I imagine if you are in a very specific audience - a teenager struggling with your sexuality and/or gender and, after perhaps being bullied and/or just feeling awful about yourself, need 4 hours of positive affirmation that there's happiness out there for you - then that would be your response. And no Janice shade here, if you need that, this show is here. For everyone else, it's a DNFable snooze. Basically it's about the one out gay kid at an all-boys school and, to a lesser extent, a trans kid who used to be at the all-boys school and is now at an all-girls school, and their journeys to find love. This is not a textured show like, say, Sex Education which covers similar ground in a much more complex, human, and entertaining way; instead this is a show with animated stickers (think: the kid gets a text that makes him happy and there's a heart-fireworks explosion onscreen). For a show featuring non-binaries, it's insanely binary in that anyone who accepts everyone is a beautiful human sure maybe a bit flawed but just a lovely incredible person and anyone with any nuance around that to hardly mention a differing view is BAD! This is not a show for people looking for a fun teen romance like, say, the not-that-great-but-way-better-than-this Young Royals which definitely has parallels (gay kid at an all boys school) but is also a story. There's just no story here, by which I mean, no, nothing happens in episode one and even more nothing happens in episode 2 unless you count watching about 10 minutes of people texting each other with aforementioned animated feelies in the margins as something happening. As an effort to make teens feel okay about themselves and hopeful, great, more power to you, but this was marketed as, you know, a series - which would seem to indicate story, character etc - and not an 8 episode PSA. If you or someone you know is looking for the latter, well this is on Netflix. If you're looking for the former, look elsewhere.
Movies:
Coda - Well this was a totally delightful film about the only hearing child in an otherwise deaf family connecting with her love of singing and the conflicts that ensue as she pursues that. The family - mom, dad, bro, hearing sis - makes its living from fishing so not only is there an element of the daughter wanting to pursue a dream outside of the family business, but the added layer of the family's reliance on her as their interpreter as (I think) only the son reads lips and neither parent seems to have developed much of a mechanism for communicating with the hearing world. What makes this movie work is the characters are really vibrantly drawn, the mom and dad especially, and is more a movie about a family being forced to confront things about itself than being a movie about deafness. In many, perhaps all, ways the literal deafness equally serves as a valid metaphor for the non-literal deafness many parents face when seeing their children reach out for things foreign to the family dynamic, i.e. the story in this movie might have played out similarly if it had been a family of hearing fisherfolk and a daughter who wanted to ditch that and become a singer. This is really what made the movie so good, that it leaned into story and character with the issues around deafness and being the only hearing child serving as specifics of the world without being about deafness at all. I'm not giving much of a plot description because in some ways you know the basic beats of this plot but in other ways there are issues with the deafness that push it into interesting places which I don't want to spoiler. In the world of charming ultimately feel-good dramas with coherent specific characters in complicated yet relatable circumstances, i.e. the types of character-driven stories that tend to show up these days mostly in foreign series (Last Tango in Halifax, Bonus Family, etc.) rather than movies, this was a total pleasure. I'm sure there are flaws in it, maybe too much singing or whatever, but I really didn't care. I was immersed in these people and their circumstances from beginning to end and thoroughly enjoyed the entire thing.
Red Notice - This is a spectacularly dumb heist movie about competing high-end thieves that feels conceived, constructed, and written by a group of third graders who should be very proud of themselves! Clearly they just learned about the pyramids and thought it would be cool to have Egypt as backstory, one that's meaningless and goes nowhere (involving three jeweled eggs) but good on them for incorporating new knowledge into their idea. In the present tense, some oligarch wants the eggs stolen to give to his daughter which is the impetus for a jewel-thief battle, which I bet was completely fun and exciting to come up with in the pillow fort during the sleepover before mommy came in and yelled at everyone to go to bed. Character-wise, you have quippy Ryan Reynolds, quippy The Rock, and quippy Gal Gadot and the fact that there were three characters, even if they were all the same and always in the same situation (where the two boys break into someplace to steal something, snarl at each other for a bit, and then Gal Gadot comes, points a gun at them, and takes whatever they were fighting over) is still really really good work and everything was spelled correctly! And you had a third act plot twist that I bet all your 8-year-old friends didn't see coming! Anyway, you should be so proud of yourselves for what you came up with during the sleepover which, in and of itself, generated quite a bit of sleepovering as in sleeping over all the dialogue in this Janice. I hear there’s a sequel, and I can't wait to see what you come up with when you turn 9!