Books:
Stormsong (Kingston Cycle Book 2) by C.L. Polk
This is the second book in a fantasy trilogy set in a world that resembles Europe after WWI but with magic and I basically enjoyed it as much as the first one. The story picks up directly after the first book only told from a different POV. Without spoilering, the essence of the story is about a class-driven society where magic is used and manipulated in ways that benefit the country (and the wealthy) though with horrific and hidden consequences. The first book unwrapped part of those consequences and the second continues with an effort to fully find out what’s going on and, if possible, undo it all. The strength of these books is in the characters and conflicts. People behave, often badly, like normal human beings within the context of their world and it keeps things unclear (in a good way) how the plot will resolve because - again, being vague to avoid spoilering - the characters are complicated enough that they could shift the plot one way or another while still making perfect sense as people. The society kind of lifts from typical 19th century kingdoms so there’s a familiarity there with some of the politics, financial motivations, and sexism though again all played out in a fun and entertaining way that manages to remain pretty light while still focusing on some darker issues of how people treat each other. As with the first, the writing is really good, the characters are well-drawn, the story just whizzes along, and the author clearly thought out the world and the logic and how things should unfold leaving me with every confidence that the final book in this trilogy will pay it all off (KNOCK WOOD!!).
TV/Streaming:
Ted Lasso (Seasons 1-2):
If there were a shark for this show to jump, it jumped it this season, though really it was right on the verge of that in its first season but managed to rein it in due to one thing, a thing all of us learned in, say, junior high which is: drama is conflict. In season 1, there were several throughlines pulling back the cloying downhomeiness and translating that into charm. The lead, Ted, was an American football not a soccer coach so didn't know what he was doing plus he didn't realize his move to the UK would mean the end of his marriage; his boss, Rebecca, was trying to sabotage the team - meaning effectively undermining Ted’s effort - in order to get back at her ex-husband; the two lead soccer players were at each other's throats. Conflict, not like interplanetary conflict, but still enough to keep things grounded. Plus there was relatability to characters’ internal states, i.e. we could understand everyone’s motives because we can all understand impostor syndrome, vengefulness, jealousy, self-sabotage, etc. And, because it was a sports show, there were stumbles and uncertainty around how the games would play out. All of that served to offset Ted's relentlessly upbeat attitude and made the fantasy-world look-at-the-American-in-wacky-foreigner-land OTTness bearable. The characters and setting weren't remotely realistic but the underlying internal conflicts were and that pulled the show into being a highly watchable delight, at least for this Janice. As noted previously, I refuse to buy into the marketing BS put forth by streaming companies that don’t allow third-party audits of their data, so while Apple and all the ostensibly journalistic print media that simply blindly reprint press releases would have us believe, it wasn’t just this Janice who enjoyed season 1 but rather most of the Apple-subscribing/torrenting planet, I am unwilling to speak for anyone other than myself in terms of its popularity until I see the real numbers (which, since Apple controls them, I’m pretty sure I never will).
Well as season 2 displays, this show has totally lost the plot both literally and figuratively and has moved on into unbearably unwatchable drek. There is absolutely nothing resembling an underlying plot, no conflict, nor even any sense of the episodes being connected into a coherent season-long story, which is especially egregious given that this is, as noted, a sports show where, ya know, the character lives are also supposed to integrate into the tension around where the games are going, games that in this season are just exterior locations rather than anything meaningful to anyone in the show. Everyone is nice and wonderful and good-hearted and open and well-meaning and, due to the total lack of conflicts, NAUSEATING.
For example, instead of plot or conflict, the writers did things like this (and, as really nothing in this season could be spoilered since nothing happened, it’s not a spoiler): for absolutely no reason out of nowhere and completely disconnected to anything else, they decide to have Ted suffer from a mental health issue, which they later wave a magic wand over and make it go away the way one does with mental health - as far as the writers of this show are concerned, all one need to do about one’s crippling depression is believe in oneself! One would think that a depressed and panic-attacky head coach would go hand in hand with a plot, a conflict, something affecting the team but, no. Not at all. Instead, we get numerous episodes spent on side characters - like a player’s niece suffering from halitosis, like the secondary coach who’s only there as a prop joke basically doing who-the-fuck-knows-what in a relationship that's absurd to begin with and no one (okay I) couldn't care less about, like some random incredibly contrived fake-assery in a relationship between the lead soccer player and one of the staff (I'm not spoilering but for those who've seen: I mean both of those atrociously fake relationships, the one that forms during the course of the show and the one that goes to its idiotic conclusion out of writer contrivance rather than stemming from literally anything that came before in the entire season) - to emphasize how little the writers understood their show. Truly abominable, really, is how they force-contorted one of the characters into betraying others (avoiding spoilering but honestly it really isn't a spoiler at all) out of, again, nowhere, just inventing a personality change that has zero impact in the season; I mean I could live with the fact that that person’s feelings are sui generis but not with the fact that nothing happens as a result until the end.
And I gotta say, re the above stuff I mentioned with Ted and his depression/panic attacks, this show rode the ragged edge of some straight-up mental health shaming here and while it was vaguely addressed, I found it to be really strange; it's weird that the show would have a newspaper print a cover story about a soccer’s coach’s panic attacks; it's weird the way the show had people give Ted side-eye after reading the article; it's weird how it all just went absolutely nowhere storywise. NOWHERE! I don't know when this season was written - the '70s? - because in today’s world, we all know how the press and the planet actually deal with athletes publicly facing mental health issues since that's been in the news so much - Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles spring to mind - and it's not at all the way this show did. Oh did I forget to mention the random WTF Santa sled (don't ask)? I can’t even. Ted Lasso went from being an amusing many-fishes-out-water show with a lot charm into a plotless, charmless, sugary pablum that, to this Janice, is once again utterly baffling as was there literally no one from the writing room up through all the Apple executives saying ANYTHING about the total lack of plot? I find it so strange because, yes, writing is hard and following up a surprise hit is hard to top, I get it. But that's the incredibly well-paid job. And is it honestly that hard to come up with a conflict? Here - and Apple, feel free to send me cash for this amazing idea I came up with one hot second ago - how about if, instead of the nothing that happened this season, the soccer club board members decided, because Ted's coaching in season 1 had downgraded the team to a B league, that they were bringing in a new head coach above Ted and Rebecca had secretly voted for that as well and was hiding it from Ted? See? There's some conflict right there! New coach to do some undermining, Rebecca keeping a secret - look at that, all conceived in real time as I’m typing this sentence and far more plot than this last season had. I know there are people out there who will violently disagree with me on this (I'm thinking of one Janice in particular actually) because, while they will perhaps have noted these problems, the overall niceness of the show will be enough. I get it and not condescendingly I really do, sometimes you just need the adult equivalent of Davy and Goliath (wait was that condescending?). Hopefully the writers work it out for next season, but really there’s nothing in this season to back that hope.
Corporate (Seasons 1-3):
I'm deeply saddened that this, the world's most perfect gummy show, ended, sigh. It had it all – 22 minutes, deep weirdness, and a fearlessness about going wherever it was it set out to go. When I first started watching, I thought it would just be just some lame cliché The Office parody, but it turned out to be something hilariously genius in its own right. Though it kind of is that for the first few episodes - two extremely lazy and self-absorbed lowish level executives at some mega corporation making observations about the corporate culture they’re trapped in. But then it decides to do this thing where seemingly microscopic throwaways become the entire show, like some big horrible national event occurs and the entire episode is about everyone competing with everyone else to come up with the most weepy corporate marketing tweet. What impressed me over and over with this show is, much like with What We Do In the Shadows, the clarity of writer vision to relentlessly go straight down a very specific rabbit hole and spin a seemingly endless series of amusing events out of something pretty simple. Broad City did something similar, especially in the later seasons, and maybe I just have a soft spot for this kind of humor, in part because I think escalating a single joke across 22 minutes is more complicated than other kinds of humor which I therefore admire in the writing, but mostly because it’s like listening to someone’s obsessive diatribe where even though both you and they know they’re going on too long they can’t stop themselves and you kind of don’t mind. If you like your humor intensive and specific and you haven’t seen this one, I’d say go for it - I gets stronger and weirder as it progresses and ah well bye, Corporate, weep.
Movies:
A Quiet Place 2 - I'm not sure if this was the prequel or the sequel to the other one - really it could've been either plotwise and I am, as usual, too lazy to Google and find out - and in some ways that’s the review: it’s similar enough to the first one that if you liked that you’ll probably like this, though this one is weaker by comparison for reasons I’ll go into in a minute. First though the plot: aliens that are hypersensitive to sound landed at some point and ate everyone who made noise and now the survivors are trying to eke out an existence and figure out a way to get rid of the monsters. See what I mean by similar to the first one? The difference is that the first one was essentially a family unit trying to hold itself together and survive whereas with this one, well, the structure of the world (having to be quiet to avoid being eaten by aliens) really ended up limiting the nature of the storytelling as did the fact that there are so few people around meaning every plotline is kind of the same plotline - people walking and reaching for the things very slowly, whispering or signalling to each other, then frantically trying to maim or run from monsters. I'm not saying this was a bad thing necessarily but it meant that the plot was broken into three different plotlines - the mom, the daughter, and the son/baby - which played out basically the exact same way. Other than location, they were more or less interchangeable and were really about nothing - the daughter has an idea about how to get rid of the aliens and mom gets caught up with something else while trying to get the daughter back was basically the whole plot. Because of the split stories which were all the same, I guess the filmmakers tried to infuse a sense of what was happening in the world, only the they did it with these random hillbillies doing I couldn't tell what for reasons I couldn't fathom, i.e. that thing that happens in zombie movies were society breaks down and everyone becomes a rapist, but that didn't make sense in this world since, of course, the rape victim can just scream to get an alien to eat everyone which at least gives her a shot at getting away which of course the rapists know... so... those scenes just ended up feeling like fake tension filler. It's why this review is all so lukewarm. The movie is okay and fine enough but it kind of lacks a world logic or a new thought for what a non-zombie lawless world might look like where the threat is so much more powerful and overwhelming that something quite different needs to emerge, like a concerted team effort to figure out how to destroy the aliens while being stuck in a world where communication is thwarted and the price of a failed experiment is death. Wouldn’t that have been more interesting (first your Ted Lasso plot brilliance above, now this, you’re on fire, Janice!)? This series is, two movies in, already on the verge of devolving into cliche repetitive boredom. It's not there yet, though, and I liked this one enough to not totally pan it and, in fairness to the filmmakers, the final 20 minutes or so were pretty much nonstop tension so there was that.
Boiling Point - This verite-style real(ish) time movie about the chaotic opening hours of a restaurant actually managed to milk way more entertainment out the premise than I imagined it would. The basic plot picks up with a highly-addled head chef who, as we learn through bits of backstory, is stressed right to edge of his ability to handle it due in part to his personality and in part to having just opened a highly-lauded restaurant a few weeks prior and dealing with all of the attendant new restaurant growing pains. The movie splits focus with the other kitchen staff and some front-of-house people and the tensions that erupt between them - the manager is the daughter of the owner for example and doesn't really understand how kitchens work and this causes all kinds of problems. The movie starts about an hour or so before opening and goes through the middle of service and I thought the whole thing was surprisingly fun because there are all these mini-dramas that keep popping up, like there's something with an investor, with a reviewer, with diners who in varying ways create problems, with conflicts between staff and the head chef in the middle of it essentially doing everything except cooking while trying to handle these issues plus some offscreen problems in his personal life. It's certainly not perfect. I mean there are a few plot points that push the bounds and a lot of drama packed into a short timeframe (I think the movie is only around 90 minutes), but I enjoyed it and kind of wish it were a series because the energy was good as were the character setups and I could imagine wanting to watch them play out over a few seasons. The filmmakers managed to pull a lot out of a pretty small setting (we're basically in the restaurant the entire time) and piled on enough stress that I wanted to see where it would all go in the long-term. The movie is nothing mind-blowing or telling you anything you didn't know or suspect about restaurants, and some beats you can see coming, but overall it's a fast-paced backstage view of a particular world playing on the inherent fakeness of the service industry where the team has no choice but to present one outward face while having a real reaction privately and it’s certainly entertaining enough and isn't that all we - well me - ask for in film?