Books:
The Thursday Murder Club (Thursday Murder Club #1) by Richard Osman
A fellow Janice rec'ed this mystery and, while I'd heard of it and avoided it because I didn't think it would be in my wheelhouse (seniors solving mysteries blargh), well that turned out not to be true so thanks for the little shove, Janice! This is a very amusing somewhat gentle (which isn't to say it doesn't have some bite just that the tone is easygoing) mystery about four senior citizens in a high-end senior community who form a club to solve cold cases until a murder occurs in their town and they decide to try to solve that instead. What makes it all work is that it's very Murder, She Wrote in that there's a lot of snooping and plotting and, in the book, a lot of jokes around seniors and tech but essentially what you have are four very capable people with differing skill sets with a lot of time, even more nosiness, and that shield seniors have where they can do and say things which, if done/said by someone younger would engender a really bad response but, because they're older, they can basically get away with, something which applies primarily to their relationship to the local police. As with many mysteries, the crime and its investigation are really just the motor to stick the characters in various situations which in turn create more mysteries until it all eventually wraps up with an explanation, i.e. the explanation is never really satisfying (to me at least) so the pleasure (or not) of the read is in the process by which the characters arrive at it and this book definitely delivered in that way. While it's somewhat character-driven - all the POVs are relatively fleshed-out though they're also pretty simple or one-note or, in some cases, somewhat ridiculous - I'd say it's more tone and writing driven in that it's fun to read the author's descriptions and interior character monologues and how everyone winds up being manipulated by the four leads, manipulations usually with cake and tea which is what I mean by it's all very gentle. Yes, there's murder and whatnot but you know the leads are never going to be in any real danger and that's not the point of the book. The point is to craft these characters' interactions with the world at large but done from their own very specific way based on their age and use the various parts of their investigations as a means to make entertaining commentary about people and the world and in that way it totally succeeds - kind of (if you can imagine such a thing) Last Tango in Halifax by way of Carl Hiassen - and I will definitely be reading the sequels.
TV/Streaming:
The Great Pottery Throwdown (Season 5):
The tl;dr on this review is that this show, a British competition reality show about amateur potters, remains as good as in prior seasons. Here are the things that make it super appealing: first, it has that somewhat sluggish, gently jokey, cheerful while taking it all seriously tone that so many British competition shows have and which, if you're more into the hysterical Gordon Ramsay tone, will definitely be nap-inducing because the show focuses on the work and people but isn't there to make anyone feel bad or get all up in the drama - so fair warning as the tempo of this show may not be for you; second, pottery's hard! I mean it's both art and engineering and not only do the two often collide but a disaster in the engineering side - like a humongous crack developing in the initial firing due to how moisture escapes from clay - adds its own interesting drama because the potter then has to figure out a way to work with glazes and whatnot in the hopes that the art will overcome the engineering which to me makes the craft itself more interesting. Plus of course most of us use ceramics every day (please tell me you're not having your morning libation in something disposable - stop that immediately! (says the person blowing through an entire electric plant's worth of power output for TV/Streaming alone)) so we're definitely in a position to judge, which also makes it interesting because even though it's not all mugs and plates we've seen enough ceramics in our collective day to determine if we like something or not. Also - and this I think is the real pleasure of this show - because different clays have different properties combined with the challenges - make a sculpture but using a clay that has an amazing end result but can become very mushy when overworked - combined with the vagaries of the process (things are dried then assembled if necessary then bisque-fired then glazed then kiln-fired all of which present opportunities for things to go wrong) the outcome is often a surprise as literally no one involved knows if the object will survive or what it will ultimately look like meaning it's impossible to tell if something’s going to wind up a disaster, a meh, or a mazing. You're watching people do physical hands-on work to create art and get judged for it on both a technical level as well as an aesthetic level in terms of what the potter was trying to achieve as opposed to judge personal-preference and, if you're interested in that kind of thing and don't find the aforementioned pace and tone to be snooze-inducing, this show has been very consistent season to season and definitely fits in the Great British Bakeoff/Baking Show pocket though with nothing edible unless geophage is your thing in which case yum.
ER (Season 7):
While I wouldn't say this was the best season of the show so far - its side stories, particularly one involving a priest, were kinda draggy - it's still so far above other dramas that it really doesn't matter. I mean I think this season is over 20 years old at the time I watched but, other than lack of cell phones, it 100% holds up today and doesn’t have a remotely anachronistic feel. Or perhaps that’s a sad statement on how little we’ve changed as a culture? Or an empowering statement on our stability? Hmm. It's really a testament to the writing that the medical drama, which I think is by far the hardest part of this show to write because it's so repetitive (patient in crisis, doctors trying to resolve it, repeat), remains engaging even 150 some-odd episodes later (with about that many more to go). The early seasons relied more on medical mysteries - the kid's not sick rather the mom has Munchausen's By Proxy!, that kind of thing - but the later seasons kind of fold the medical stuff into the character drama, like a sick child is stolen from the hospital or a frat hazing goes bad across the episode with the same characters showing up with escalating problems. Even though some of the overarching storylines didn't grab me this season, it really didn't matter. The actors are appealing, the characters have an interesting complexity to them - many of them are actively awful as people which makes them very watchable as characters - and the plots move along at a zippy pace. I know I have 8 seasons left and at my pace will probably take me as many years to get through them - and I'm delighted! Really, if you’re looking for a good drama and either resisted this one when it first came out or have an allergy to watching older shows, I’d say force yourself to move past all that because, seven seasons in, this one’s still really good and, if you end up loving it, you have 15 seasons so go enjoy.
Movies:
Top Gun: Maverick - I'm just going to begin at the beginning with this one which, because I saw it with - and at the suggestion of - a fellow Janice in an actual movie theater, the kind many (okay maybe just me) of us haven't set foot in in, oh, a decade because spending the equivalent of an eighth of the film budget for tickets and snacks plus waiting in line plus watching primarily the bright lights of a lot of people texting was somehow super unappealing even pre-bedbugs-and-COVID, began as follows (and I surely hope all of you streaming/pirating this get to experience the exact same opening). An extraordinarily pasty, skinny, and ill-lit Tom Cruise sitting in a screening room of some kind (I think) turns to us, his people, his ones, his billions of worshippers to hardly mention the extraterrestrials inhabiting some/all of us apparently so like double that number, to thank us for coming to watch the movie which I think was basically meant to show appreciation for people returning to theaters post-COVID though with a delicious self-obliviousness not seen since Marie Antoinette and cake or since a musician friend from deep in my past once suggested that the solution to African poverty lay in small appliances the notion being that Africans spent so much time cooking that things like Cuisinarts and toaster ovens would gift the people of that continent with enough free time achieve things such as... creating an electrical grid to run all of those appliances. This opener in which Zeus descended from Olympus to show his/their personal appreciation for each and every one of us for lining his pockets, where he posited himself not only as a toothy well-meaning rule-bucking-but-for-all-the-right-reasons maverick named, in this film and its title, Maverick also served to reaffirm his sense - and maybe ours and maybe he's right! - that he is the single-handed savior of the entirety of film production, distribution, and exhibition, the film industry's One without whom the entire grandiose experience of going to the movies would vanish. My fellow Janice and I spent much of the film's post-mortem discussing this as his character in the movie is literally, other than blowing things up (though this film arguably blew up the boxoffice so...), no different from his humblebrag-facade-of-a-real-self that preceded the movie and we concluded that other than Marvel (assuming you think of Marvel as a person and arguably it's at least as much of a person as Tom Cruise), he's probably right.
So by the time the movie started, we were fully primed to appreciate our luck that this wondrous being who lives for us and is like us but isn't us and we don't want him to be like us because if he's us he's not not us, would throw us a bone and gift us with the opportunity to spend $72.00 for two tickets and snacks at a matinee to witness him being the self we all want him to be and that I think he desperately wants himself to be? Or desperately needs our belief so he can be? Anyway all that but bronzed and with the absolute best makeup/face job/digital retouching that any Janice has seen thus far in the history of cinema. He glowed and I don't mean from within but rather with the glow that can only come from having the power to insist that the DP and entire production squad devote whole days to getting a backlit shot where the light of a setting sun etches a gorgeous outline of one spectacular cheekbone before diffusing in a golden haze across a rugged twinkly-eyed expanse of smooth lightly tanned skin.
The plot is precisely what it needs to be for a Tom Cruise panegyric (hagiography?): earnest, dumb, and led by a straight rugged caring heroic White-though-with-above-noted-spectacular-bronzing male. There are two whole entire women in it, both, like this film’s originator, from the '80s in character-trope if not reality. One is a sassy female marine/military person straight out of the Aliens movie to make at least a token nod to women in the Armed Forces, and the second is your '80s cross between Sharon Stone and Karen Allen - sexy, adventurous, knows what she wants, will wrap you around her finger and toss you away but will also captain her own yacht, one she acquired somehow despite her profession as a middle-class bar owner, in a blue and white sailing outfit with no life preserver to mar her rangy-feminine silhouette regardless of being out on windy seas in a boat listing at a 45 degree angle while standing at the helm gripping a steering wheel only marginally less tall than she is - Jennifer Connolly who, wavy haired with highlights, hands often in pockets, a laconic ambly walk, and the seen-it-all-been-there-done-that vocal rhythms of a '50s noir femme fatale, seriously couldn't have looked better.
Beyond all that, the plot is basically the first Star Wars (I keep doing this - "A New Hope") by which I mean the ending is precisely Luke Skywalker and the Deathstar though, in fairness, that's merely the beginning of the nonstop flying action sequences which follow all generated, as will come as no surprise, by a quote unquote conflict (emotional not actual) with a younger fellow pilot (I won’t even go into why, but it involves the years prior death-wish of Meg Ryan so make of that what you will) - and no this isn't remotely a spoiler since if you didn't see this coming from the first second the son of first-film deceased Anthony Edwards' (see how this all links to ER above?) character arrived onscreen, well then maybe this is literally your first time seeing a movie of any kind and hope you had fun! All the action prior to that (and in this instance inclusive of that) was, perhaps in an encouraging nod to STEM programs, almost exclusively based on numbers - countdown clocks, speed of various Machs, days or weeks left of training, how old everyone was, how much money to buy multiple rounds in a bar, time left before fuel runs out, before the bad guys show up, before Val Kilmer's character expires, how much a fighter jets costs, how old everyone is, what their dials display, how long before someone gets home, how many years have passed since the first film, since that picture was taken and, most importantly, how many times during the filming of the movie did world-renowned stunt-doer Tom Cruise endanger life and limb sheerly for my entertainment?
Meaning, the movie was ultimately saying, given everything he did for me, all his making this movie, saving cinema, and looking/acting so ruggedly exactly like he always has, surely the least I could do was pay rapt attention through the boring parts and give in to the worshipful awe of His Being without irony or self-examination. And, come to think of it, given that I spent the drastic bulk of this review talking about nothing other than mythic-Tom-Cruise, I think I just did.