Books:
Speaks the Nightbird by Robert McCammon
You may remember Robert McCammon as the poor man’s Dean Koontz aka the poor man’s Stephen King (though I know at least one Janice who will be outraged with that ordering and am steeling myself for said Janice’s fury), and this book, which came out about a decade ago, was his attempt to transform himself from a doorstopper horror/supernatural schlock writer to, presumably, given the length and quality of this book, just a plain-old run-of-the-mill doorstopper schlock writer. Look, I get it; it’s tough being the poor man’s poor man and I imagine one must constantly ask oneself in the Early Modern English irritatingly peppered throughout the book, “Is there no one poor enough to aspire to be I? Am I at bottom of the poor man ladder?” Regardless of the answer, this mystery set in the 1600s about a traveling judge and his law clerk is so atrociously overwritten with such cartoon-ish OTT characterizations that this Janice can only assume his editor took one look and went, "Fuck it, I'm not reading this shit; we'll just publish it as is and hope his name carries it to the bestseller list" - which I think actually worked btw. So not such a poor man as it turns out after all, and let that be a beacon of hope to all ye poor zies of poor zies aspiring to the same crap achievement.
The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr
This is a nonfiction book that tracks how food gets from the farm/ocean/wherever to the grocery store - not in a Michael Pollan way but in a logistics way - and, trigger warning, the latter part this review, to hardly mention big parts of the book itself, is not for the squeamish. The book starts as an overall history of grocery retail (the first 15% or so is basically the history of Trader Joes) before going into a full-on investigative and often funny exploration of how food makes it to the shelves by tracking various people involved in different aspects of food production - a long-haul trucker, someone trying to get a new food product into a store, etc. The part of this book that chronicles a first-person account of Thai aquaculture slavery is really tough to read and, if that's not bad enough, the part explaining how shrimp went from being a luxury food - remember how expensive it used to be like lobster and now it’s cheap like chicken? - to being an inexpensive commodity involves the side effect of an observation made by someone who had crammed so many shrimp into an aquaculture tank that the shrimp swimming at the outside edge had their eyeballs rubbed away by the friction against the plastic and said de-eyeballing set off a series of still unexplained hormonal effects which are the basis for that reasonably-priced shrimp you’re no longer thinking of grilling later. I guess we all kind of knew that seeing how the literal sausage is made wouldn’t be pretty, but if you’ve ever had any curiosity about how the system really works - and who isn’t curious what with all the supply chain madness these days? - and if you can stomach the ugly parts, this is a fascinating read.
TV/Streaming:
Perry Mason (Season 1):
Full disclosure: I've never seen the original Perry Mason in my life, not even by accident after school while flicking through channels trying to cram in reruns of The Brady Bunch before anyone noticed the TV was on, nor do I even understand its precise genre (is it noir?) or pop culture meaning, like Perry Mason’s symbolically what exactly? I know he does something investigative - in this show he’s a PI and/or a lawyer and maybe in the original he was both too? - but I can’t say for sure if he’s the one in the wheelchair though I know he’s not the bald one or the one with the wacky eye and I know he’s not bionic because if he were I totally would’ve tuned in. So this show - is it a remake? I don’t know! - is like many of its peak TV brethren, i.e. very glossy with a draggy meandering story and lots of navel-gazing as a substitute for character development… yet I watched the whole thing. It is really not good at a core level, like it completely forgets its own plot - a murder investigation that the writers introduce in the first episode then totally space for like the next 3 eps - and spends an enormous amount of time in character “darkness” (peak TV translation: seeming eons of the lead character drinking and/or locked in intense gloomy conversations with side characters for half of an episode in lieu of, ya know, anything happening) yet, and I repeat, I watched the whole thing. It picks up in later episodes but overall it's bad except for Juliet Rylance and honestly they should've made her the lead because her story - a not-so-closeted lesbian trying to scrape by in 1930s LA - was something I hadn't really seen before and thought was fairly interesting. So I guess my review is that watching Perry Mason is like that thing where you’re a few miles from where you’re supposed to meet friends and you have some time to kill and it’s nice out and you think maybe you’ll walk and as you’re walking you’re thinking maybe I should just Uber because it’s hotter out than I thought but then you’re like am I really THAT lazy I mean it’s just another thirty minutes but you’re getting kinda sweaty and you don’t want to show up with armpit stains and then you get distracted by an idle thought you need to immediately Google only it’s so annoying because you can’t see anything due to the glare plus you’re trying to get a good angle by weaving in and out of shady spots which you know is really irritating to everyone on the sidewalk so you’re trying to look up and down and thumb type then backspacing over your stupid typos and it’s taking forever and in the midst of all that excitment you suddenly realize you’re at the place maybe even a little early and look at you you didn’t take the Uber. It’s that, which isn't to say I won't watch season 2.
The Restaurant aka Our Time is Now (Seasons 1-3):
I have no idea why there are two English titles for this Swedish import but, that aside, if you like Downton Abbey-type shows, this will be right up your alley. It's set at a high end restaurant in Stockholm in the ‘50s and the 3 seasons cover a twenty year period focusing on three siblings, family, changing social mores, upstairs/downstairs love affairs, etc. The pacing is pleasingly moderate (or excruciatingly dull if you don’t like these sorts of Masterpiece-y shows). I'd say it's a solid B due to some predictable beats and characters, but had enough variety, Swedish eye-candy, costumes, and amusing family squabbles that I enjoyed it all and while season 3 started to spiral a little bit out there, the writers really pulled it all back together and delivered a nicely satisfying ending.
For All Mankind (Season 1):
So I dodged this show - an alternate history of what would've happened if the Russians had beat America to the Moon - for a while because honestly does anyone like alternate histories? At best they’re somewhat turgid thought exercises but usually they’re simply all the fact-spluging snooziness of actual history but filled with “see how everything’s changed - do you see, do you see?!?” social transformation spotlight that manage to add irritation to the boredom. Man in the High Castle was originally a short story for a reason, case closed! Please peoples, just make these things SF(ish) like Connie Willis’ awesome book To Say Nothing of the Dog or the un-awesome series version of Handmaid’s Tale (though make it non-repetitive and non-characters-infuriatingly-and-constantly-undermining-their-sole-stated-goal-to-the-point-where-this-Janice-can’t-watch-it-for-one-second-longer while you’re at it) or really Bridgeton which took the trappings of a (an?) historical era and then just did whatever it wanted.
Thus everyone will be completely delighted to know that it was not, in fact, the alternate history component that created the mixed part of this mixed review. In fact, the Russians beating us was not only super easy to believe but also everything that happened after - America scrambling to keep up, the politics, the military, etc. - also seemed right in keeping with what would happen. Plus it's set in the 1970s and while certain historical facts change, the show hewed pretty true to the sexist/racist culture of that era meaning it felt real other than a few minor details. The buggy part is that the show interweaves personal drama - someone wants a promotion, that husband’s cheating and the wife suspects, etc. - with high stakes action, and the drama part was lethally dull. It was written pretty dull, but the acting made it noticeably worse. It's not that the acting was bad - though my actor friends may say that what I'm about to say is actually the definition of bad acting - it's that it was so bland, I mean life-suckingly boring, about on par with a Passover seder being read entirely by 7-year-olds. If you’ve been to such a seder or its non-Jewish equivalent, you’ll know that reading out loud isn’t acting, and, even worse for most of the cast, their dull choices are highlighted by two of actors (Sobotka from The Wire and Sonya Walger) who created real characters with parts that are equally as on-the-nose and blandly written as everyone else's parts but the show comes alive when they're onscreen and then goes back to sleep when they leave.
However, when it's not all that, it's pretty engaging, and that's about 50% of the show. I mean the action part, the stuff where technology fails or they have to think on their feet due to a crisis or because the Russians do something and political machinations force them to react, all that The Martian stuff is actually really good and really well done. Look if the bland acting with the predictable character story beats don't bother you, you'll probably really like this show - I liked the action parts enough that I'm planning to watch S2 at some point - but be warned that, if you're me-like, parts of it, especially a few episodes late in the season, will be a real trudge.
Movies:
Honeyboy - this is the fictionalized (I think) Shia LeBoeuf origin story and I don't know - I read somewhere he wrote it right out of rehab and while I'm sure it was very purgative for him, I was less clear why I was sitting through it. I mean psychologically abused child actor grows up and spirals down into rehab is, like, the pre-credit sequence of every VH1 celebrity dating show ever made possibly? It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen but it was a combo of predictable and just weird (like WTF with FKA twigs’ character). Also it was either all adding up to something obvious - down the hole then back out again - or nothing and I couldn’t tell, i.e. was it boring because I’d seen it all already or boring because it was going nowhere? I watched the entire thing, and I guess my hesitation on a total Janice pan is that I could feel that Shia LeBoeuf’s intense need to make this film and communicate… something, and, even if I didn’t entirely understand, enjoy, or stay off my tablet during all (maybe any) of it, I can’t really 100% diss a movie that has such an urgent underlying compulsion to communicate regardless of my personal opinion about what, if anything, is actually being said.
Toni Erdmann - this is a 165 minute (!!) German film about a father who sees his daughter being ground down by her high-powered consulting job and shows up at a business event wearing a wig and false teeth in an effort to get her out of her rut. If you read the non-Janice reviews you'll see what I just described called a "practical joke" with allusions to how out of control hilarious this practical joke gets. It isn't that, and per uzh I have no idea what movie the non-Janices watched because, while the film is amusing, it's far from uproariously funny or cringe-y or anything like that. It’s really just a father, persistently and sometimes goofily, trying to give an emotional boost to his daughter. What's odd though is that I really didn't mind it even despite its crazy length. I mean, there's character stuff there in the basic story and kudos to the filmmaker for keeping it going for so long. It feels to me like the kind of thing that you'd go to when you discovered that the indie you actually wanted to see was sold out and this was playing at the same time so you figured what the heck and it turned out to be not as bad as you feared.