Books:
Mine by Michael Heller & James Salzman
So I'll just say I unconditionally loved this nonfiction book about the meaning of possession in the law as in how the law defines ownership. Because when you get right down to it, what does it actually mean to "own" anything other than that we have a system set up to say you do? Ownership is a function of our belief in ownership as anyone knows if you’ve ever had your bike stolen (twice!! and yes I know for a fact that the amazingly brilliant, hot, delightful, and just all around number 1 person that happened to had securely locked it both times). You “own” nothing; we just have a system for decreeing something yours - like the deed to “your” car - and consequences for those who breach the ownership decree, other than to those abominable bike thieves who suffered nothing! But the book really winds into much more interesting places than physical possession. As an example: all of us likely think that, if nothing else, we own our bodies yet, because ownership is purely a product of law, that's not the case as we know not only from debates around abortion but also things like breathalyzers where the state can take ownership of our exhalations in certain circumstances. Or fights over ownership of frozen embryos during divorces. Or, if your blood is used in a successful drug trial, who has ownership rights to the drug? Innnnnnnnnnnteresting, right? This kind of thing is totally up my alley and I was glued to this book from start to finish.
City of the Lost by Kelley Armstrong
This book, a crime thriller about a cop who becomes part of the police force of an off-the-grid town where people go when they want to disappear, is just atrocious, and I DNF'ed somewhere around 30%. I debated even writing about this one, but I know there are some trash-loving Janices out there - in fact at least one Janice I know (two come to think of it) has multiple shelves filled with trash the likes of which this Janice didn’t think could exist in such quantities let alone be read let alone be recommended (you know who you are, W’itch-recommending Janice!) - and I need to warn them: this is a romance novel, not a thriller no matter how it’s been marketed. I can't tell you how irritated I was to discover that. The cop is female and, since this, as it turns out, is a straight romance, the male is the current sheriff of the town noted above, the sullen uber-masculine type with a shell that will be oh so satisfying to crack, that cliche thing; staunch male defenses whittled away by female. Ugh. Honestly up until the point that I realized this wasn't going to be a crime book at all, I was able to deal with the blah writing and characters. In any event, this already has more Media Reporting space than it deserves and I'm just noting it because, unless you're into a billion pages of sex scenes with a few crime bits (and dumb ones at that btw - did I mention there’s cannibalism?) tossed in, then I'd say avoid.
TV/Streaming:
Love Island UK (Season 7):
I did absolutely everything in my power to make it through more than 8 or so episodes of this abomination but I couldn't! Well wait a minute: by “couldn’t” I mean I watched all 60 some-odd episodes of season 5 before the above occurred but still I’m pretending I DNF’ed immediately for the sake of my self-image. Which tells you how bad this show truly must be given the depths of my standards for dumb reality shows. This show, if you're not familiar with it, puts a bunch of straight not-entirely-but-a-lot-of White British hotties in a big house and forces them to "couple up" by playing various stupid games with the viewers getting involved and voting people off. Like basically all of its ilk, it’s 100% reliant on the personalities of the contestants because there's nothing happening other than contestant jealousy, rage, undermining each other etc., especially so in this show which airs 5 days a week for an hour, most of which is spent with people lying by a pool. Spoiler alert: these contestants are unbelievably boring. Via my season 5 viewing, I can attest that watching hot people sitting by a pool and gossiping about each other and trying to steal each other's b/gfs can be entertaining when the contestants are unable to control their emotions even in the midst of clearly trying to control their emotions. Look, they all just want Insta followers or whatnot for post-show glory, I get it, but for it to be engrossing as a show there needs to be some real something that can't stop itself from coming out beneath all the fake. Also, it's really weird to watch shows that are such straight-havens, especially with GenZers whom we know will bang basically anything as long as they can later cover the experience in stickers and turn it into a TikTok story. I understand why shows like The Bachelor/ette could conceivably (barely) make a case for casting straight people (not, clearly, that that's who's being cast but whevs) but what’s this show’s case? I mean isn't it more interesting if some guy is gay, comfortable with it, but hiding it from the other contestants just to win the money (did I mention there's a money prize at the end for the audience favorite couple?) and hope the audience keeps voting him in because they like his deceit? Why are the producers still even bothering to pretend that these relationships are forming for anything more than cash? It's just weird to see it, as if this show is locked into a cultural space of over a decade ago which, btw, is why I've now decided to go back and watch those from earlier on and see if they're any better.
Fast forward… Well I wrote the above and then went back and started season 2 and not only was it no better (boring) but I ultimately had to DNF the season entirely and am making the definitive statements that I’m never watching this show again and I actually mean it (unlike when I’ve said before but without entirely trusting myself to follow through on the promise) because: the host of the show committed suicide; one of the contestants from season 2 committed suicide - then her boyfriend who wasn't on the show killed himself 3 weeks later; then a year later a season 3 contestant killed himself. You know, I'm all for wacky people on reality TV, but really I can't think of a show where 3 people have suicided (and another cast member attempted it) and it just makes you think that they're deliberately casting people who are so damaged that they can't handle what happens - the bullying, the nasty IG comments and tweets, etc. - and hey I like to OMG at reality contestant crazy people as much as the next Janice, but what keeps it in all the realm of entertaining rather than sad is knowing beneath the insanity they're functioning people who are in part out of control but in part emotionally stable, i.e. they're going to survive the show even if they come off as total wackjobs and get slammed for it. Because guess what? Watching people struggling with mental illness isn’t entertaining, and it's a pretty nasty group of producers, studio executives, and casting people who fail to vet the cast to make sure they can handle what's coming. I'm hard-pressed to think of another series with this many suicides and look I realize the producers et. al. aren't mind readers, aren't perfect etc. etc. but there's something wrong here. As I mentioned, the show is 5 days a week of people lying by a pool, and I think the way the producers tried to deal with the sheer boredom of that - as opposed to say, rethinking the entire concept - was by making the show into the Housewives, i.e. casting people who wanted to stir the pot and be the villain in order to get social media fame. Meaning you're left with a show that is either (a) filled with really damaged people or (b) filled with people doing anything for fame and are either of those anything anyone wants to watch? Well, not I. See the thing about a reality show is I don't actually want it to be that kind of real.
Sex Education (Seasons 1-3):
This show is just so so much better than its unfortunate wink-y, racy title would make you think it is. It’s a character-driven comedic drama set at a mixed-everything (race, income, etc.) British high-school and is essentially about relationships, sexuality, and discovering oneself. The title comes from the plot driver which is that one of the leads is the son of a sex therapist played by Gillian Anderson - who’s just great btw - and starts giving sex advice at school and winds up, slowly over the seasons, falling for his business partner, an impoverished tough but smart girl with a lot of family problems of her own. What makes the show so good is partly that it’s pretty funny but mostly that it allows drama to unfold in a way that feels naturalistic, meaning the relationships and problems move at a pace that’s engaging without feeling rushed - if you’ve watched (and liked) The Good Wife or Bonus Family, you’ll know the pace I mean. The show is a huge amount of fun and covers areas around family, love, friendship, race, and sexuality without ever feeling like it’s jamming anything down your throat. Having watched 3 seasons, I can tell you that the quality remains high. It’s a mix of dramatic and a bit goofball/OTT with some of the minor characters but it all adds up to something substantive and compelling. All the lead characters get their own fully fleshed out storylines that grow in interesting ways across the seasons. The humor adds some lightness to it and the drama makes it binge-y and I am delighted that they’re apparently making a Season 4.
Movies:
Captain America (Marvel Universe #5) - This is some straight up pure unadulterated madness right here in this movie which, as with all the Marvel Universe movies I’ve seen to date, represents a jingoistic cheerleading, or perhaps, a searing condemnation of racial power dynamics (yeah that was me being nice - it’s the former). This film is set in WWII where patriot Chris Evans finds himself incapable of joining the military due weakness/skinniness/medical issues, which we know because the movie does an effect of sticking Chris Evans’ face on some other actor’s skinny body which is meant to make him look like a 98 lb. weakling but really just makes him look like the cliche of every actor on the planet, i.e. short and super skinny with a freakishly huge head. Eventually Chris Evans manages to enlist because his relentless patriotic moral spirit, it turns out, is the key component for a government experiment to turn someone into a superhero via an injection of some sort, one we earlier saw German baddie Hugo Weaving consume as part of a larger and deeply unclear relationship to Thor - like I don’t remember Nazis on my Norse mythology test - making him the most mega powerful mega evil red-boned pale-skinned person of all time. Our equally pale-skinned hero Chris Evans (unclear about red bones (I’m struggling not to make a dog dick joke here and I hope someone appreciates my effort!)), body transformed into that of a hopefully non-suicidal Love Island contestant and with unspecified strengthy superhero powers to hardly mention a Nietzschean-level of patriotic do-gooder capital W Will, is sent overseas to undo whatever it is Hugo Weaving is doing in what appeared to this Janice to be a gimongous pale-on-pale battle between two different Birth of a Nation nations.
There's a love interest of some kind - straight and pale obviously - and action sequences that are nothing more than total and complete madness in which pale people battle other pale people in these crazy-ass ways with costumes and leather harnesses and Vita rays or something like that and duster-y jacket things flapping in escalating tit-for-tat ridonkness. The action sequences are completely nuts, yet, due to the fact that if you scooped up everyone in the film and asked Sherwin Williams to create a paint color based on combining every single person’s complexions - leads, extras, and we can even toss in cast and crew I’m pretty sure - the resulting shade would be "chiffon” or maybe as dark as “eggshell,” it becomes impossible by the end not write off the entire movie, all of it, the sheer breadth of the insanity you've been watching - the train battles, people being beheaded by shields, cities blowing up, mountains hollowed out and turned into lairs which are later invaded and shattered, bullets flying nonstop, all the monocles and dominatrix helmets, the tanks being tossed in the air, all this chaotic massive world-leveling destruction - with an "Mmmph," [shrug, eyeroll] "White people."