Media Report

Nona the Ninth, The Sopranos S2, and more!

Books:

Nona the Ninth (Locked Tomb Series #3) by Tamsyn Muir

Well this is a fantastically great third book in what I gather is ultimately going to be a quadrology (quadreno?) and is absolutely on par with the the prior two. "Par" in this case means character-driven plot with a sense of humor, a fully-realized (though perhaps not fully understood by me) world, and a clear sense that it's all going somewhere. The author has now written three books from three different character POVs and I have to say it's really impressive how drastically different the characters are while still keeping the same underlying authorial voice and plot. As a reminder: this is a fantasy? sci-fi? combo? series about, well OMG I can't even imagine how to begin describing what it's about because, like, its taken the author three books to do so, but in a nutshell: the first book was about two very different women - one blunt and physical the other cutting and intellectual - who hated each other and were forced to work together for a much larger plot... thing and told from the POV of the blunt/physical one; the second one (I don’t where that review vanished off to but I loved the book) picked up directly after the first and, plotwise, built on the consequences of what had happened in the end of the first book while expanding the world in a much more complex and broad way and was told from the POV of the cutting/intellectual one. This third book, which picks up directly in the aftermath of the (mega-ending) of the second book is, without spoilering, told from the POV of a character with basically no understanding of what's going on but with her own bubbly, often rude, and oblivious personality and surrounded by some people from the prior books who do know what's going on and who are protecting her for reasons I won't spoiler. Look, the depth and complexity of the world - by which I mean the overall rules of the universe and how everything that happens interacts with everything else and the players on seemingly opposite sides of some larger conflict - sometimes goes right past my grasp. Like I know it's there and I see it sometimes and sometimes really get it in a satisfying aha way but am often somewhat at sea about everyone's motives for what they're doing and how they interact with each other. Meaning in this third book, the main character was just like me and that POV, of someone who really didn't get the implications of what was going on yet, via the way the character reported those implications made ME better understand what was going on, was just really satisfying to read. The book takes a bit to rev up plotwise (deliberately btw) but once it goes, it really goes. However, as noted, what really makes this book work is the very narrow lead POV which is basically that of a sweet yet often snarly tween with WAY more power (sometimes) than she should have and with extreme quirks due to the spoilerable nature of what's happening to her and her extremely narrow lens on what's important. And what's so great about this book is that right up to the very end, that focus, the one where there's, I don't know, an enormous argument between two people but the tween is focused solely on their cool sunglasses, really makes this book a step above others in the genre and I plan to read everything this author writes.

TV/Streaming:

Louie (Seasons 3-5):

This series has been shockingly amazingly consistently great and these final three seasons - sad it’s over! - have been no exception. For those who don't know: this is a slice-of-life pretty brutal and I'd say almost existentialist comedy about the life of cancelled though maybe now uncancelled (?) standup comic Louis CK. Basically the entire series, aside from some pretty hilarious standup, is about minuscule life moments taken to sometimes almost absurdist extremes but not in a way that feels ridiculous but rather in the way that a neurotic overintellectual/emotional person can take minor events and blow them up to mega-levels of importance only for them to vanish into their initial unimportance followed by the cycle yet again. I'd say this is a somewhat polarizing show in that there's definitely a version of watching this where you don't get it and are kinda bored and really it's that thing with humor where no matter how hilariously genius I think this show is, it just might not be for you. In fact, part of the reason I didn't wind up watching it until now, long after it's been off the air, is that (I think) I tuned in back when season 1 first aired, couldn't get into it, and moved on. My advice if it doesn't immediately grab you is give it a few episodes. In the early seasons they're fairly disconnected so you can (more or less) watch in any order but from like season 3 onward there are ongoing season arcs and really they totally play like drama with a dark, character-driven comic edge. I'm legit sad this show is gone because it managed to find humor in otherwise dank depressing topics - aging, failure, insecurity, poor handling of relationships, etc. - and turn them into something, to me, brilliantly funny.

The Sopranos (Season 2):

OMFG this show so crazy boring that it's incomprehensible how it became a hit - as opposed to the victim of a hit - after its first season let alone has since been elevated to some pantheon of best shows ever over the years. No. Just no. This is not the best show and not because it's old at this point. After all, I've been watching seemingly countless seasons of ER which came out well before this show and they've totally held up (a few prior season reviews here and here). Not with this but, really, let's just go back to when it first aired. What's so great about it? I've now watched two seasons (season 1 here) and here's all that happens: crazy cliche mafia stuff as in if you've seen Goodfellas (and clearly the showrunner had) you've seen everything this show offers but far far far better. Okay but maybe that doesn't matter because we're okay with goomba/mafia cliches because we (I'm not sure who "we" is at this point but I'm going with it) like that kind of thing and the best mafia show of all time - that would be Gomorrah - hasn't emerged yet. So fine. Italian Joisey guys eating pasta and shooting people and hanging out and talking about same. Livable if there are other things going on, but not super exciting or original right? I mean while you may not know exactly how person X is going to be killed you know it's happening at some point so it's not like there's some gripping twisty thrillery thing going on where you don't see plot moves coming (as in Gomorrah above). But whatever, it's TV-mafia comfort food. Fine. Surely if you're going dead center cliche with your mafia stuff you're doing something interesting in the other relationships right? I mean, you're not gonna have the dead center Hollywood cliche idea of therapy in there too are you? And by "Hollywood" I mean an entire season where the wears-glasses-to-show-she’s-smart therapist talks to another therapist about how the reason she just can't quit Tony Soprano is that she's basically hooked on binge-watching his therapy sessions, something absolutely no legit therapist ever thinks though clearly the Hollywood writer who wrote both Tony Soprano and his therapist and had one tell stories to the other so the other could tell someone else how riveting the stories are has other, completely self-ass-licking, ideas. So that subplot, which was dull and cliche in season 1, is even worse in season 2 since it's people, at best, sitting around talking about what we already know or inferred. But okay sure, mafia stuff and therapy stuff are cliche so there must be some riveting family life, right, like not some cliche Long-Island-y mafia wife who knows but pretends not to know and there's some male/female powerplay by which I mean highly gendered (in fact highly gendered in all the relationships (and, no, that's not a product of its time but rather a product of not crafting actual people)) and kids who are exactly what you'd expect them to be and a highly insular world where no one does ANYTHING. Really, the best these writers could come up with for Tony Soprano’s wife was: a season 1 quote unquote plot where she developed a crush on a priest all season long and a season 2 quote unquote plot where she... developed a crush on her wallpaper man all season long. There's just nothing here. Who cares about this season because it's the same as last season and I'm guessing that’s every season - cliche stuff acting like its revelatory. I seriously do not get what anyone saw in this show when it came out let alone why anyone still talks about it. Oh well, off to season 3 (now there's a plot twist, right?)!

Movies:

The Raid 2 - This is the sequel (kind of - you don't really need to have seen the previous movie for this one to make sense) to an action martial arts movie I enjoyed and this one is basically more of the same but longer and, frankly, kinda more boring maybe as a result of the length but I think mostly because of the plot. In the first one, the plot was pretty simple: two cops have to fight their way through floor after floor of a tenement building run by a drug kingpin and then get back out. While there were vague character bits and a side plot here or there, the first movie was set in one spot and what made it fun was, because the movie basically played like a video game as the cops leveled-up within the physical building, the seemingly endless creativity of the OTT action sequences. I think setting it all in one place with the same setup happening over and over forced the director et. al. to get very creative about how the fights would play out because those sequences were the only differentiators across the movie. And for an action movie, that's fun. I think they got a bigger budget or something for this movie because it had a much more expansive setting (or at least wasn't all in one building). The basic plot of this one is the cops from the first movie goes undercover as a criminal on behalf of internal affairs to expose police corruption at the highest levels. This seemed like a fine setup as they sent him to prison where, as with the first film, it's a contained environment so there was a lot of creativity in the fighting plus tension around the lead guy achieving his mission (to suck up to an imprisoned kingpin's son in order to infiltrate the family). The problem is the movie then cuts to two years later when he's released from prison and from there to the end it was a lot of talking and yes a lot of action sequences too but really in a less exciting way. They kind of became the same sequence after a while and the survival skills of the lead cop, always somewhat ridiculous (in a good way), ultimately became boring because he's the lead so you knew he was going to make it to the end but, I don't know, the one-man army against all the bad guys in non-constrained scenarios thing gets pretty tiresome in the absence of cleverness. I mean not that the first movie was genius in any way but at least each floor of the tenement provided something a little different where the cops had to use what was in front of them to try to survive. In this movie, it's more of the same fight but with slightly different weaponry and locations. So my review is meh. I mean the fights are still good but there was too much bloat - this movie is about an hour longer than its prequel - but if you like action it's fine though not as good as the first.