The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Star Wars: Visions, season 1

TV #5 of 2022:

Star Wars: Visions, season 1

This anime series from last year is an anthology of short films (13-22 minutes each), from a variety of different Japanese production studios, with no particular plot or character links between episodes beyond a weird shared fixation on kyber crystals. It’s been getting some rave reviews, but I personally haven’t cared much for the experimental diversion away from Star Wars in its more usual form.

The creators have been given pretty substantial liberty to remix and reinterpret the canon, which could potentially be exciting but in practice simply reminds me again and again that none of this can be understood as taking place within the established continuity of the franchise. It’s not even a tangential spin-off like the Star Wars: From Another Point of View books or Marvel’s recent What If? show that’s designed to probe interesting hypotheticals to deepen an appreciation of the familiar either; with one exception these tales are set on unknown worlds with all-new casts. There are Jedi and Sith and an Empire by name, yet they are operating under rules so altered that you’d be hard-pressed to ever justify why.

The scant length cuts against the effectiveness of these pieces too, as even at their strongest they tend to feel like a simple proof-of-concept rather than a satisfyingly complete presentation. (Do you remember that Flash animation of Genryu’s Blade that went viral in the early 2000s? It’s basically a whole string of quick offerings like that, except with nominal trappings of lightsabers and such.)

Part of the problem is presumably that I’m not a big fan of this medium to begin with, and I will concede that the visuals here are generally quite striking. If you’ve been dying to see Star Wars rendered as an anime, this will probably scratch that itch! But as with the novels that retell the movies in faux-Shakespearean language, it just seems like a hollow gimmick in the end. Only “Tatooine Rhapsody” — the sole effort to incorporate any preexisting narrative framework or individuals, detailing a rock band’s encounters with Boba Fett and Jabba — and “T0-B1” — an Astro Boy riff about a droid who wants to learn the Force — really work for me; the others I’d call empty spectacle at best.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Hollow by Agatha Christie

Book #11 of 2022:

The Hollow by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #26)

Also published under the title Murder After Hours, this is one of the more fun Hercule Poirot mysteries, since so many of the suspects seem to have a clear motive for offing the murdered man, with convoluted romantic entanglements straight out of a Shakespearean comedy. Appearing in the vicinity of the crime scene at a remote country estate are the fellow’s wife, the woman he’s cheating on her with (but refusing to divorce her for), the man the girlfriend is in turn rebuffing while hung up on her adulterous beau, the childhood friend interested in him, and the resurfaced ex-lover from the dead man’s youth who’s angry he won’t leave the other women for her. Phew! Our diminutive detective is there as well, having been coincidentally — perhaps! — invited around for tea just in time to catch the victim’s dying words.

The dialogue is pretty amusing too, even by author Agatha Christie’s usual droll standards. I’m a particular fan of this line, spoken about the possibility of the widow as a suspect: “If she did shoot John, she’s probably dreadfully sorry about it now. It’s bad enough for children to have a father who’s been murdered–but it will make it infinitely worse for them to have their mother hanged for it. Sometimes I don’t think you policemen think of these things.” It all reads as a bit of a lark — although see my note below — and the solution has a clever twist to it beyond the simple whodunnit. It’s the delight of finding a volume like this that reminds me why I’ve been going through the whole series in the first place.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, suicide attempt, and gun violence.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Proposal by K. A. Applegate

Book #10 of 2022:

The Proposal by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #35)

This is ghostwriter Jeffrey Zeuhlke’s second and final contribution to the Animorphs series, and I must say, I like it a lot less than his previous outing, #25 The Extreme. The best part is the focus on a crisis in narrator Marco’s mental health, and while the inciting incident isn’t especially major from a narrative perspective — just the fact that his not-actually-widowed father has begun dating again — the title eventually gets around to expressing the insight that it’s the cumulative weight of things crushing the boy, not this particular development by itself. I love the callout of stoic masculinity expectations, and how Cassie encourages the protagonist to open up and talk about his feelings with her or another teammate, since he can’t go to a proper counselor.

On the other hand, the manifestation of his trouble is in random outbursts of ordinarily-impossible hybrid morphs, which feels like a poor repeat of Rachel’s crocodile allergy from #12 The Reaction. There’s even the similar larger plot concern of a celebrity publicly endorsing the Yeerk cover organization The Sharing as the background mission of the day! Having the villains try and fail this same move now makes them seem pretty incompetent, and the heroes’ plan to bait the famous Controller into losing his cool in public, thereby causing his fans and sponsors to abandon him, is not exactly their finest moment of strategy either. Not to mention, this whole storyline is weaker for Marco’s morphing issue being a one-off deal that never comes up before or again, despite the stress that all of the kids are under. (And for the detail that it’s basically solved via a quick pep talk from Jake at the end, as well.)

The titular proposal is strange, too. At the start of this novel, we learn that Marco’s dad has been seeing his son’s math teacher for a few months — which seems like quite a conflict of interest, but alright — and then later he mentions that the pair of them “have been talking about getting married.” Two weeks after that, we’re at the wedding! That sort of accelerated timeline isn’t necessarily unbelievable, I guess, but it’s too fast to be satisfying in a work like this… and not a sign of a parent who seriously cares about his child’s stability, although the text isn’t remotely interested in exploring that angle. We could have had this romance with Ms. Robbinette develop slowly over multiple volumes, with the strain gradually building to a pressure point for her future stepson, but the matter is distractingly episodic and easy to ignore when it’s all forced into a single book.

The character dynamics and discussion of therapy save this from being a complete misfire. Ax and Marco are a reliable comedy duo, and they get plenty of fine moments here, including some fertile ground for shipping when there aren’t enough chairs at a banquet table and the human says, “It’s okay, we’re very good friends” and yanks the morphed Andalite down onto his lap. But the main action is somewhat tedious and poorly thought-out, and the cliffhanger ending suggests that this entire story exists as mere setup for Visser with the return of Marco’s mom ahead. Yet even in that context, the prelude could have been a lot stronger.

[Content warning for body horror, violence to animals, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong

Book #9 of 2022:

Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong (These Violent Delights #2)

I was on the fence between a three-star and four-star rating for the first volume of this YA duology, and since I rounded up then, I suppose I’ll go with the lower score for this sequel, which I haven’t enjoyed quite as much. The loose Romeo and Juliet retelling continues to distract more than inform an understanding of the characters and plot in my opinion, and a lot of the specific story beats feel like hollow repetitions of the previous novel. I’m also not a fan of how the workers rioting for higher wages and better working conditions are generally positioned in the narrative as a mindless mob of communist dupes, whose violence is somehow shocking to our gangster protagonists even in the face of their own steadily-rising body counts.

On the plus side, this remains an interesting historical fantasy take on 1920s Shanghai, fleshed out with the #ownvoices perspective of author Chloe Gong, who was born there at the turn of the following century. Readers who are particularly invested in the central ill-fated romance will likely appreciate how it evolves further here, with the young criminal exes irresistibly drawn to one another despite their family feud, their mutually-harmful past, and the city going up in flames all around them. I’m ultimately a little lukewarm on that element, but I could see this title (and its predecessor) landing with a sharper impact for a different audience.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, self-harm, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2

Movie Review: Encanto (2021)

Movie #5 of 2022:

Encanto (2021)

Disney’s 60th animated feature is a real breath of fresh air, breaking from the studio’s usual patterns in a few startlingly welcome ways. The heroine doesn’t just have two living parents: she has a whole household full of siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins too, a rowdy ensemble where everyone has their own magic powers and big personalities, including the casita itself. It feels straight out of a Diana Wynne Jones novel, right down to the protagonist with no special gift of her own who ends up having to save them all. There’s no hero’s journey, however; this is a domestic drama that barely crosses the boundaries of the home — although granted, that’s an enchanted space where the rooms are bigger on the inside and some of them Mirabel has never explored at all.

The Colombian setting, Latinx cast with a range of skin tones, and catchy Lin-Manuel Miranda soundtrack add further distinction to the film, but the best part may be the thematic focus on the intergenerational trauma of family secrets and overburdensome expectations. No one is an outright villain; they are simply people inadvertently hurting each other in their inability to recognize pain beyond their own, and the major threat of the building cracking apart and taking the enchantments with it is as neat a metaphor as you could want to get audiences of any age thinking about how this might relate to their own lives. The key to salvaging the Madrigal house is literally to shore up the foundations of trust that have eroded between its various occupants, letting each speak their truth and acknowledge one another’s in turn. Hatchets are buried, new leaves are turned over, and I’ve cried, unabashedly.

Disney could use more movies like this. Honestly, we all could.

★★★★★

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

Movie #4 of 2022:

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

Finally decided to rent this one, since I still hadn’t seen it and at this point it doesn’t seem as though it’ll ever make its way over to Disney+ with the rest of the MCU. It’s fun! The explosion-y climax goes on a bit long in my subjective opinion, and I like the humorous beginning a lot better than the more serious back half, but overall it’s another rousing adventure with the franchise’s youngest cinematic* hero. Although the title is a bit odd for a European school trip after the teenage webslinger has literally been to outer space in the Avengers movies already.

*My apologies to Cloak, Dagger, and the Runaway kids for excluding them on a technicality.

It’s easy to guess who the villain of the day will turn out to be, even if you don’t recognize the name from the comics, but I appreciate how that person’s exact motivation and methods nevertheless come as a surprise. The script is also pretty well thought-out, for instance showing us how the EDITH drones don’t have any safeguards in place to prevent killing civilians in a farcical early scene — there’s a danger, but we know Spidey’s not going to accidentally blow up a bus of friends with himself on it — so that the question doesn’t need to be addressed later when the technology inevitably falls into the wrong hands. (Now, the scheme to actually get that power from Peter is maybe a bit too simple to realistically work, but the film has a goofy breeziness to it that just about lets that skate by. Likewise how the protagonist just kinda recovers his offline Spider-Sense in time to get through the bad guy’s illusions without any particular effort or explanation.)

Anyway. This is not a tentpole feature by any means, and those plot holes stick out if you think about them too hard, but the personal stakes are significant enough for the story to matter, and the character dynamics evolve in some interesting ways. It’s always nice how Ned can be a comedic sidekick without anyone treating him as the butt of the jokes, and here he even gets a sweet romance with a popular classmate that’s only undercut by both parties being sort of weird folks in general. I’m more excited to (eventually) watch the multiverse-hopping sequel to this, but it’s a fine piece of entertainment in and of itself.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Eternals (2021)

Movie #3 of 2022:

Eternals (2021)

The very definition of a skippable MCU title. I suppose the visuals are striking, and the diversity of the cast is appreciated, but outside of Kumail Nanjiani’s quippy efforts, it’s altogether a dour film of people standing around proclaiming ominously (in between exchanging laser blasts and/or punches) with little of that familiar Marvel joy or apparent impact on the wider franchise continuity. This new group of immortal champions has been on earth all along, instructed only to fight their specific brand of monster rather than threats like Thanos or any of humanity’s own villains? Cool. They can keep doing that off-screen without us, much as the royal family of Inhumans can stay on the moon following their own ill-fated TV show.

Three stars because none of this is bad per se, it’s just sort of stiflingly generic. The ensemble is probably too big for this type of project, lacking enough specificity to distinguish the character personalities or lead us to care about the inevitable infighting and betrayals. It works in something like The Avengers where the heroes are returning from solo ventures with existing audience understanding and investment, but here they all seem somewhat interchangeable, to the significant detriment of the script’s effectiveness.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

Book #8 of 2022:

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

There’s a fine sci-fi premise to this 2020 French novel (released in English translation the following year), but I don’t know — something about the enterprise just leaves me cold. Partly the problem is that author Hervé Le Tellier takes far too many pages to actually get to the point, and when he does, it’s not an especially unique one. As is often the case when a “literary” writer dabbles in genre fiction, it feels a bit as though he’s reinventing the wheel, bringing up the same philosophical questions that have long been explored, without pushing forward to any new insight or noteworthy twist. A few of the political sections read as overly-broad satire, too.

At the risk of spoilers: 200 people aboard an ordinary passenger plane travel through a storm of unusually severe turbulence, only to be rerouted and detained by nervous officials. Once on the ground, they eventually learn that they are months later than when they departed, and that a version of their flight has already arrived on schedule. Everyone now has a doppelgänger, and the original set have continued to live their lives like normal. As they are brought together face-to-face, Le Tellier asks: who has a better claim to be the real ones? And how will each pair split their existence and belongings and relationships now? Scrape away the showy airplane details, and you’ll find the same concerns featured in any story about cloning or transporter malfunctions written over the past half-century or more. It’s competent, but seemingly content to rest where a Stephen King or a Michael Crichton or any writer on Star Trek could have carried the concept much further, at least in this reader’s opinion. Even the suggestion of a most likely explanation behind the anomaly, that the characters are all programs in an advanced simulation of reality, is delivered without particular follow-through.

The pacing is off too, as noted above. The entirety of Part I, which is almost half the book, is given over to a sequence of vignettes about these strangers, connected merely by the tenuous circumstance of having shared a bumpy jet ride back in March. When the duplicates land in June, we then follow up with them and watch as they’re presented with how their opposite selves have changed in the meantime. Some have found fame, others have kindled or lost a romance, and one has even committed suicide. That’s the most poignant aspect of the title, and why I’m rating it as highly as three-out-of-five stars, but it’s too bogged down in less interesting minutiae to soar as it might have if the plot had started at the landing.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, gore, homophobia, incest, and sexual abuse of a child.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Station Eleven, season 1

TV #4 of 2022:

Station Eleven, season 1

Nearly two years into a real-life pandemic — one which delayed this very production — it’s maybe hard to believe that a tale about that sort of devastation and its aftermath could register as remotely feel-good. And the general premise here, of a roving troupe of Shakespearean actors tangling with a cult decades after the world ends while nonlinear storytelling fleshes out their respective backgrounds, might sound a bit silly. But this miniseries, like the Emily St. John Mandel novel it’s based upon, is full of profound moments of human dignity enduring past apocalypse and personal trauma. Meditatively returning to lines like “I remember damage” again and again, it’s reduced me to tears of anguish and relief several times over the course of its moving ten episodes.

In the final analysis I think I prefer the original written version, but it’s clear early on that this adaptation is approaching the project with a somewhat different goal that undoubtedly makes for better television. On the page, Station Eleven is preoccupied with the unseen connections that bind us to one another unknowingly — a statement on humanity even before global communication networks break down in the wake of a near-fatal flu. The readers come to realize so many of those links that the characters never do, and yet “dramatic irony” seems too mean-spirited a name for the effect. We’re not sneering at anyone’s ignorance; we are pulling back to an omniscient view that reassures us of a deeper pattern of meaning to apparent chaos.

That might be difficult and too cerebral for a show to pull off effectively, and so instead those ties are deepened and made explicit on screen. In print, Jeevan and eight-year-old Kirsten have one brief encounter on the evening of the last normal day, when he’s an audience member trying to save the life of her King Lear costar having a heart attack on stage. They exchange a few words and then part, with the book continuing to check in on each’s subsequent journey. Here, he walks her home when no one else is available, and she winds up being with him and his brother as the epidemic rages across the land. Setting up strong pairs of characters is a recipe for good TV — I’m reminded of how Game of Thrones altered its own source material in season 2 to regularly place Arya Stark in a room with Tywin Lannister — and in the Jeevan/Kirsten dyad, Station Eleven finds its emotional core. Suddenly, the timeline of her grown self in the Traveling Symphony has an extra tension of poignant uncertainty to it: what could have possibly happened to separate her from him? In a neat reversal, the protagonists now hold key information that we don’t.

Perhaps the program goes overboard on those linkages. I’m not entirely sure I’m sold on our heroine eventually teaming up with the Prophet figure, for instance, and it does make the universe of the setting seem unrealistically small for everyone to already know each other, producing an insularity that doesn’t exist in the text. But the payoff of catharsis when absent loved ones reunite is worth the gamble, in my opinion. Likewise, identifying the adult Tyler, Elizabeth, and Clark with corresponding roles in Hamlet reveals a keen insight to unlock their previous dynamic in ways that Mandel has left obscure. (You don’t have to have read any Shakespeare to enjoy this series, just like you don’t have to have read the book first. But in both cases, it might help.)

I’ve simply adored this experiment so much, and even though it’s finished the story of the novel, I feel that these writers could easily expand the concept into future seasons. With the way the narrative weaves back and forth throughout time, there’s plenty that could still be told in every era: whatever follows these events, the days preceding the fall, and Kirsten’s childhood in between. I have no idea if renewal conversations are on the table at HBO Max or not, but I would return for another trip around the wheel in a heartbeat.

[Content warning for suicide bombings, amputation, and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

Book #7 of 2022:

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske (The Last Binding #1)

An utterly charming gay adult fantasy from debut author Freya Marske. Set in Edwardian England, the story follows a young baronet appointed to a seemingly meaningless civil service role, only to discover that its innocuous title masks a true duty of liaison with the nation’s families who can secretly do magic. Ordinarily his main responsibilities would be passing along strange occurrences for the other side to check out and keeping the prime minister informed of any significant wizarding threats, but before he can settle into all that, he is attacked by the same people who killed his predecessor. They’re after a powerful artifact that the former deputy hid, and mistakenly believe that Robin must have inherited knowledge of its location with the office.

Now suffering under a debilitating curse, he teams up with his more bookish and introverted counterpart to investigate the matter, which ultimately results in the two men growing close and falling in love. The romance is a major thread in this novel, and includes several graphic sex scenes and explicit acknowledgement of consent, but it’s a slow burn, with the pair unaware of one another’s orientation until almost a third of the way through and taking even longer to realize and act on their mutual attraction. Mostly this is a straightforward adventure of research and derring-do with occasional steamy breaks, and I’ve enjoyed the casual way that the worldbuilding unfolds through a newcomer’s eyes. It sets up the remainder of the series well, while still telling a contained plot here.

My only real complaint is a tedious interlude when a secret gets out and one lover retreats feeling betrayed, creating an opportunity for the villains to strike ahead of the obviously forthcoming apologies and reconciliation. It’s such an overdone beat of romcom-style miscommunication, and is the rare false note that seems imposed upon the characters, rather than arising naturally from their personalities and desires. But it’s a testament to how skillfully the writer has crafted the rest of the tale, I suppose, that this element sticks out so plainly as the sole exception to the high quality of the piece.

[Content warning for homophobia, torture, near-drowning, self-harm, domestic abuse, and gore.]

★★★★☆