Book reviews for December 2022
Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) by Michael Connelly
3/5
JUDAS 62 by Charles Cumming
4/5
No Plan B (Jack Reacher, #27) by Lee Child
3/5
The Maze (John Corey, #8) by Nelson DeMille
3/5
I Thought He Came With You (ITHCWY) is Robert Ellison's blog.
Reviews for June 2023
Spoilers!
Movies
I See You
A small town where kids mysteriously vanish. This is quite clever in how the story changes perspective a few times before being resolved.
John Wick 4
Very pretty, but also very flabby.
Knock at the Cabin
Sophie's Choice, set in an Airbnb.
Scream 6
Gory, not clever, not sure why I bothered.
The Last Sentinel
Should have ended: "What did the cats, the horse, the swallows, and Rob do to deserve this?". Reasonably atmospheric in places but ultimately not that good.
The Wandering Earth 2
I very nearly skipped this because the first movie was action trash, like a Chinese take on the indecipherable Transformers movies. The Wandering Earth 2 is a prequel, about dueling visions of how to escape the imminent demise of the Sun. Option 1 is attaching thousands of engines to the Earth and moving it to a different solar system (you can guess this is what ends up happening). Option 2 is digitizing people. It's never made entirely clear where the digitized people would live once the Earth has been engulfed by the Sun, but you're not going to enjoy this movie if you stop to think about any part of it for too long. Like why does a space elevator use rockets? Despite all this it's really good and has the Liu Cixin vibes that I missed from the first film.
TV
Anatomy of a Scandal
Anatomy of a Scandal has shades of the original House of Cards but without the dark humor. It keeps the pace up and the revelations coming, pretty good overall.
Beef
Beef is a Korean-American focused comedy about a parking lot altercation that rapidly spirals out of control. It's outstanding.
Succession Season 4
This ended as well as it could have. Roys, you suck but you will be missed.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
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Reviews for May 2023
Updated on Saturday, May 27, 2023
Spoilers!
Movies
Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves
Exactly what you'd expect. Fairly funny mostly good spirited quest adventure that is over-reliant on one gizmo that makes this more like Portal: The Movie.
M3gan
It was clearly the weekend for AI children. After The Artifice Girl I decided I needed to watch M3gan, a horror take on the same sort of topic. The Artifice Girl is thoughtful and quietly disturbing, M3gan has a traditional horror vibe and explores the topic of turning childcare over to technology a little bit before just jumping to killing people. The robot is very very creepy which is good but also you wonder why anyone would trust the thing in the first place.
Polite Socity
Polite Society is a pleasantly bonkers tale of a girl trying to save her sister from a semi-arranged marriage in a British Pakistani community.
The Artifice Girl
The Artifice Girl looks like a three act play turned into a movie. It follows the evolution of an AI girl who was accidentally developed to ensnare online predators. The first act is hugely compelling and the second two can't quite hit the same level, but it's definitely worth watching.
Music
Where's My Love
I wonder how much of the rise in depression can be chalked up to this one painful but beautiful SYML track? It's melancholy just listening but the video provides maximum bleakness.
Podcasts
I'm Not a Monster Series 1
I listened to this the wrong way round, starting with the second series on Shamima Begum. The first is the story of Sam Sally and probably due to having listened to the second series so recently it failed to grab my attention in the same way. It's not exactly the same story, but just how many women ran off to join Islamic State only to discover it wasn't a super empowering society?
The Coldest Case in Laramie
There really should be some naming convention for investigative podcasts that indicates if the case was cracked or not. This is one of the many disappointments that leaves you none the wiser. The highlight is some real insight into just how manipulative the police can be when forcing a confession. Regardless of the crime or level of guilt you really want a lawyer in the room with you.
The Political Party
For UK politics The Political Party has got the goods. Matt Forde interviews anyone who is anybody and quite a few fascinating people who aren't. Even though his politics are not subtle he draws great stories and insights from across the political spectrum. The live shows usually start with some stand-up as well. One of my favorite shows each week.
TV
Mrs. Davis
In Mrs. Davis a nun tries to kill a powerful Artificial Intelligence. This involves finding the Holy Grail and at one point the Grail is in a sperm whale. I really wanted to like it, and while it started off well it got somehow worse with each episode and the whimsy outweighed anything else that might have been going on. Not worth the time.
Perry Mason Season 2
I never watched the original, but Perry Mason on HBO is a fun trip to an alternative reality LA in the 30's.
Star Trek Picard Season 3
For Season 3 Picard stops showing us retirement projects and reunites the crew of Star Trek Next Generation to fight the Borg and some Shapeshifters in a cunning plan to overthrow The Federation that somehow only affects The Youth. I'm all for it. This was the Star Trek cast that probably had the best chemistry and it's amazing to see them together again. The plot just takes a very long time to get going and the final battle involves thousands of starfleet ships that can't quite overpower one aged space dock. Worth it for some quality Worf and Data lines though.
The Bay Season 4
The Bay, from ITV via Britbox in the US is a police procedural set in Morecambe Bay. Although it centers around the family liaison officer it's still a very standard but entertaining whodunit.
The Night Agent
I wasn't expecting too much from The Night Agent. It presents as a formulaic network FBI drama, but its sense of humour is far darker and it has a real edge to it. Based on a book so I'm going to go out on a limb and say any future seasons will be trash.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
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Reviews for April 2023
Updated on Sunday, April 30, 2023
Spoilers!
Movies
The Thing
I caught the 2011 prequel on Netflix which I completely missed when it came out. The setup was pretty great and then it all got fairly boring once the killing started. As a prequel it's set in the 80's and it's really hard to tell that this is true. There are no cell phones, but then you probably don't have any signal in Antarctica. The vehicles are old, but how often does a Norwegian research station swap out its snow-cats anyway? And everyone is wearing what you'd probably always wear to such a cold destination. It was pretty average horror and I wish I hadn't bothered.
Music
Raw Raw
Nice new K.Flay track.
Podcasts
A Very British Cult
A Very British Cult investigates a life coaching outfit called Lighthouse which seems to be very very expensive and for some reason brings some sort of cheap UK Scientology to mind.
Any Questions
Every so often I'll review a podcast that is a regular listen rather than a series. It feels odd to call Any Questions a podcast as I grew up with it on the radio, but that's what it is to me now.
Any Questions is a long-running comedy panel show in the mold of Just a Minute. Politicians have one minute to talk about a subject without answering the question. As with many BBC panel shows there are many long running gags and in-jokes, like asking for more houses (just not in the community where the program is being hosted this week!), or any question involving HS2.
I went to see it live once but didn't get my question picked. There is a companion program called Any Answers which is less comedy and more care-in-the-community for people who decide to phone in.
I'm Not a Monster Series 2
Series 2 of I'm Not a Monster is The Shamima Begum Story. Begum was stripped of British citizenship after joining IS in Syria as a teenager. The Home Office believes that she is a terrorist and others that she is a victim of child trafficking. Regardless of the truth this didn't turn out well for her and it's hard not to feel some sympathy.
TV
Euphoria Seasons 1 and 2
Euphoria season 1 answers the question: what if Bret Easton Ellis had written Beverly Hills 90210? It's unflinching and hard to watch, a crazy mix of every horrible story about what the teens are up to these days. It makes me want to move my kids to Norway and home school, although I can't due to Brexit. Season 2 answers the question: what if Bret Easton Ellis quit and they had to go with a committee instead. It's initially gratuitous and then gradually becomes boring and self referential. I don't think I'm up for Season 3.
I downloaded this to watch on a flight and all things considered it's probably good that it didn't work. But HBO, really. I've been paying you for years and using the same phone and account for years and the second you don't like the look of my IP address you bail on me? For travel only Netflix really gets this right and works pretty consistently. Every other streaming provider seems to fail horribly at the slightest sign of travel.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
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Reviews for March 2023
Spoilers!
Movies
Noise
This was a random preflight download for me from Netflix. It's about a Belgian influencer who loses his mind after the arrival of a child (and the soundtrack nearly made me lose my own mind - the baby screams for most of the film and is only interrupted by things like eating soft fruit loudly). It was OK.
TV
Mythic Quest Season 3
It's not quite as good as the first couple of seasons but still worth watching. I think this time around moving Ian and Poppy into their own studio was a mistake, but not as big as consummating the unconsumatable.
Poker Face Season 1
This is mostly talked about as a Colombo remake but I think Natasha Lyonne is channelling the Hoff because this really reminds me more of Knight Rider. Stranger comes to town, gets people out of jam, leaves. It's more about that vibe than the solving of any particular muder. Loved it.
The Last of Us Season 1
Having just complained bitterly about Dark Summer skipping the apocalypse foreplay I was happy to see The Last of Us revel in it. This is what a high concept zombie show looks like. I'm sorry, it's fungus rather than zombies of course. I never played the game it's based on but it seems like zombies? They bite you and you get infected. As bored as I am with zombies this was really good.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
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Reviews for February 2023
Updated on Monday, February 27, 2023
Spoilers!
Books
A Hundred Billion Ghosts
One day, for no reason, all the ghosts suddenly become visible. Hijinks, romance and too much detail about breakfast cereal ensue. Fun.
Children of Memory
This is the third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time space opera series. Children of Time is about spiders becoming intelligent, Children of Ruin adds intelligent octopuses, a simulated human that runs on ants, and some kind of brain occupying bacteria which all together substantially expand the Children of... universe. Children of Memory stops things down a bit an focuses on a single colony gone awry, being investigated by an Octopus, the ant-simulation (an instance on more conventional hardware, well eventually more than one instance), a couple of spiders, a super-bacteria host and some possibly sentient crows. I think that's roughly it, it's been a while since I started reading these books and my memory might be mixing up a few plot points by now. The crows are really interesting - probably not sentient individually but in pairs they probably are. This is quite a poke at the state of modern AI and maybe a spin on Searle's Room (which I hate). It's a thought provoking and sometimes exposition heavy look at the nature of consciousness taking place against the backdrop of a holodeck episode of Star Trek given a movie budget. It's a very unique series and I'd like another one please!
Movies
White Noise
I haven't read the book this is based on but maybe I should add it to my list. The movie is a gorgeously renditioned 80's meditation on the fear of death. It's mostly funny or willfully strange but has a touch of disaster movie in the mix as well. I quite enjoyed it.
Podcasts
Burn Wild
Burn Wild sets out to answer the question "How far is too far to go to save the planet?" and I nearly gave up halfway through as it seemed to be giving too much credence to the idea that as long as nobody is hurt, it's OK to blow shit up. In the end though it doesn't let anyone off the hook, and several people come to realize that they did no good and may even have done some harm. Worthwhile.
The Missing Cryptoqueen
I'd never heard about Dr Ruja Ignatova or OneCoin before listening to this podcast from Jamie Bartlett that makes the case that it's a ponzi scheme rather than a revolutionary crypto currency. She has been in the news very recently and so I'm expecting another episode or two soon.
Although, to be fair, crypto has always bothered me as a way to describe Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies. Crypto means hidden or secret. Blockchains by their nature are very open and not secret - that's kind of the whole point. A ledger that is not distributed is a database, like what a bank uses (or a ponzi scheme). So maybe she has a point.
TV
Black Summer Season 1
My favorite part of any apocalypse drama are the moments when civilization is just starting to fall apart. Like some anti-Gibson, the end of the world is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Black Summer just goes straight to the biting. No foreplay.
Why make yet another zombie show? Couldn't it be Mormans trying to fill the book of the dead a bit faster? Or environmentalists trying to slim the population down by seven billion people and you get infected by podcasts? Netflix, call me.
I loved early Walking Dead, and I think it was mostly the dialog. Those scenes where the cast is strolling through Georgia, on the way to some salvation that won't pan out and shooting the shit along the way. Black Summer probably has five lines of dialog in total. As if it realizes it has nothing to say the runtime reduces with each episode - 44 mins at the start, halved to 22 mins by the finale.
It's tense though so I'll probably still watch season 2.
Dark Summer Season 2
I tried. It's now winter (get it, the sequel to summer) and there seems to be a completely different cast. I wasn't that invested in the original lot, but I certainly don't even begin to care about these people. It keeps everything that made season 1 miserable but drops the tension. I made it to halfway through the second episode and then bailed.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
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Reviews for January 2023
Updated on Sunday, February 12, 2023
Spoilers!
Books
Borne
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer is a Ballardian visit to a ruined city where biotech from a mysterious corporation has spread out and taken over. Borne is a fast growing lump of said biotech, found on a giant flying Bear by a scavenger called Rachel. Then, things get weird. Excellent book, and there is another installment called Dead Astronauts which I will get to soon(ish).
Movies
Berlin Syndrome
Australian girl falls for the wrong German guy, much captivity and violence ensues. Meh.
Emergency Declaration
Emergency Direction is a Korean film where a hemorrhagic virus is released onto a plane. It's reasonably diverting although fairly predictable. What I loved about it is that the introduction banged on about what a big deal an emergency declaration was and that it was martial law for a plane and they could land with top priority anywhere. By the time the captain declares an emergency half the passengers are dead, everyone else is infected and at least two countries had threatened to shoot them down. But being the title of the film they linger on it like it's a big deal that will change everything.
Lou
Allison Janney plays Liam Neeson rescuing a kidnapped child. I enjoyed it a lot.
The Lost City
The Lost City with Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum and Daniel Radcliffe is trying to bring Romancing the Stone back. It's funny.
Troll
Roar Uthaug is the undisputed master of Norwegian disaster movies. Troll is less enthralling than his waves and earthquakes and tunnels though. There is a scene with some helicopters toting church bells that is worth the price of admission (free with Netflix) but the ending is very underwhelming. Also, a lot of it reads like a criticism of a multicultural Norway what with Christianity having driven the Trolls out to start with, and the need for church bells to scare the beast away. Then that plot is dropped and a Muslim soldier is introduced like some scriptwriters were fundamentally at odds with each other. Reasonably fun though.
Music
Habits (Acoustic)
I'm listening to a lot of Tove Lo at the moment, and this acoustic version of Habits is why YouTube beats the living daylights out of any Dolby Atmos enabled streaming service.
Podcasts
Crypto Island
Crypto Island from PJ Vogt barely got started and then slowly died with months between episodes. Vogt tells a good story so it was worth a listen when it occasionally appeared but it was hard to piece together. I'm looking forward to whatever he does next, and he's apparently working on something.
The New Gurus
New Year's resolution: write more reviews. I stopped using Goodreads for anything meaningful a few years ago but had integrated it into my blog CMS to automatically post reviews. As a result these have become a little sad. I've just whipped up a new review system that doesn't use Goodreads as motivation to both write more and to review things that are not books (gasp).
The New Gurus is a BBC Podcast presented by Helen Lewis that surveys all kinds of modern woo. From bitcoin to productivity via health scams and equity training. As a skeptically inclined person I loved it and binged the whole series over a couple of days. Helen concludes that the New Gurus are mostly men mostly looking to find the right path to masculinity. I think you always need to be looking for what they're selling beyond the obvious - if it's vitamin supplements or a political candidacy the cult suddenly makes a lot more sense. With only half an hour per topic I also found myself wishing she could spend more time on each - I'd happily listen to a series on most of the subjects covered here. Highly recommended unless you're a believer in which case it will probably make you quite mad.
The Reith Lectures
I always enjoy The Reith Lectures, it's what the BBC is for. They also have a massive archive which is fun to dig through. This year has four speakers covering FDR's four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Two standouts for me. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie covered freedom of speech, and in the sense that I understand it, which is that you might get offended. An absolute barnstormer of a lecture. At the other end of the spectrum Rowan Williams mounted an incredibly poor defense for the freedom to worship. His central point seems to be that we need to prioritize minority opinions (i.e. Anglicans) in order to make progress on human issues and to the best of my recollection religion has usually been dragged to the new consensus at the end rather than the beginning. He also cloaked this intellectual dishonesty in feminism and gay rights which is frankly offensive from the former leader of a church that won't marry gays and doesn't think women can handle the job. I loved both for very different reasons.
TV
Bosch Legacy
I enjoyed the Bosch series on Amazon Prime. I haven't read the actual Bosch novels (there are a lot, if I start I might ever end) but I have read the four that costar Renée Ballard and those are pretty good. So I had high expectations for this new series.
Bosch Legacy is not on Amazon Prime, it's on Amazon Freevee which Amazon somewhat confusingly describes as a 'premium free streaming service'. Sounds too good to be true, and it is. It's chock full of really bad ads. I pay all kinds of money to avoid ads but in this case you can't even buy the series on Amazon, you have to choke down those ads to watch it. It's not as clunky as Hulu, but it suffers from not having many advertisers and so by the time I've seen the same ad for the 50th time I loathe that company with a vengeance. I'll never buy their products in the future out of spite, and if I happen to have any in the house I'll use the ad break to throw them out. Also, after using Hulu once I never did again. I think Freevee is in the same category.
At least all those ads paid to bring Bosch back to the faithful, right? Well, yes and no. The core cast of Titus Welliver, Mimi Rogers, Madison Lintz are fantastic and the plot is there, but the production is cheap and shows it. Early on Bosch's nice house which must cost a few bucks to film in gets red tagged and he's forced to move into some generic office. And they can't afford many cameras or crew either, there are regular cuts that just look off (like in a conversation when switching between actors and the person is clearly not quite where they should be). Overall it was OK, but tainted by being too cheap and in a bad streaming neighborhood.
His Dark Materials Season Three
The BBC/HBO version of His Dark Materials wraps up with season three based on Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass. What a fantastic trilogy. And after the disappointing film this adaptation is a revelation. Pullman is going after the Catholic Church specifically and religion in general, but in a world of materialized souls in the form of daemons and actual angels. In the end the church is defeated and the multiverse saved by individual sacrifice more than the army assembled for the final battle. What a heartbreaking ending. Amazing.
Jack Ryan Series 3
Jack Ryan is back, thwarting an attempt to overthrow the Russian government. Right now that seems like it might be a good idea? Is he the baddie? This is very much Tom Clancy's and not Tom Clancy, but for Season 3 they've figured out that in a spy thriller the plot is of little consequence if it's happening with urgency against a backdrop of beautiful European cities and I'll watch that all day (or at least for a few nights). The main problem was watching this the same month as Slow Horses.
Slow Horses Season 2
I love Mick Herron's Slough House books and was very excited that Apple adapted them for TV. The second season just dropped, and it's even better than the first. Still very faithful to the book but the characters are more comfortable and distinct. I hope they start work on the Oxford Investigations as well (a different but also good set of Herron books). With the first season I was very unconvinced by Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb (in my head this role was played by Daniel Ryan). Oldman has managed to get a lot more Lamb-like for season 2.
The White Lotus Season Two
The second season of The White Lotus is good but not great. There is a moment when Jennifer Coolidge's Tanya McQuiod asks for an Oreo Cheesecake and it's such a devastatingly wrong thing to ask for at a hotel in Sicily but a humanizing moment at the same time. But this series is more of a murder mystery and less of a tone poem. It's just a little less lucious, and outrageous and funny and relaxing. Please stop now and don't make any more. We don't need to go to The White Lotus Rochester Parkway.
Treason
Treason on Netflix is a brief five episode double-crossing spy caper. It's a little soapy - sort of a Harlan Coben's Bond, if that Bond was stuck in London.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
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Book reviews for November 2022
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
2/5
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Missing, Presumed (DS Manon, #1) by Susie Steiner
4/5
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Book reviews for August 2022
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
5/5
Rising Tiger (Scot Harvath #21) by Brad Thor
2/5