The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★☆☆

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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.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Fringe, season 4

TV #3 of 2022:

Fringe, season 4

I didn’t have much patience for this penultimate run the first time I watched through Fringe, as the literal retcon of the rebooted timeline struck me as a lazy excuse for the writers to stop caring about continuity at all. They keep coy about everything that’s now different well into the season, and as a loyal audience member who believes in the dividends of investing in a serialized narrative, it’s hard not to feel betrayed and checked-out over that sort of treatment. Why did we watch all those episodes of plot development and character growth, if there’s no guarantee that any of it still happened that way?

And I want to preserve that reaction in amber, because I do think it has a degree of validity to it, but upon this rewatch, I appreciate this year so much better. Things are changed, yes, but at least we have Peter as a key perspective figure who remembers everything we do. (It hopefully shouldn’t be a spoiler that he’s survived getting erased from reality, given how prominently he appears in the promotional materials and Joshua Jackson’s name featuring in the credits during his initial absence.) Later, as the new Olivia starts accessing memories of her prior self, she joins him in that position, and since they’re our two central protagonists anyway, I can just about let it slide that our old versions of everyone else are irreparably lost.

Two other elements help bolster my newfound enjoyment of this era as well. First, the altered characterizations of Olivia, Walter, Lincoln, and the rest are pretty interesting, and although it’s frustrating to not know which of the familiar cases they’ve actually investigated, the people themselves offer rewarding contrasts to the situations we knew before. And that’s my second observation, that Fringe is in part a study of the gradations of variation: with parallel worlds, and biohacking, and cyborg imposters, and time travel, and post-death interrogations, the series continually asks how much a person can change and still be recognizable as an iteration of a common being. The displaced timeline simply adds one further fringe case to the existing collection.

With all of that said, the storyline has some issues. The season ends a lot weaker and I would even say sillier than it begins, and the threat of David Robert Jones in particular feels like too much of a retread without payoff. The human shapeshifters are a major concern early on but then get dropped entirely, while the business with the Ark shows up out of nowhere and ultimately seems a bit rushed. And the flashforward episode, much as it sets up the final days ahead, lacks any obvious justification for its inclusion and placement here.

So it’s a mixed bag overall, but between the ambitions that I’m realizing more today and how the wacky science of the episodic plots still tends to be quite fun, I would call this another winning season for Fringe. It’s shifted from what it used to be, but somehow remained itself.

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

★★★★☆

TV Review: ReBoot, season 4

TV #2 of 2022:

ReBoot, season 4

Oh, that wicked cliffhanger! 20 years later, it still stings that we leave Mainframe in such a perilous position, and that the eventual semi-sequel to this show, aside from being awful all-around, never even tries to provide any resolution to it. Like the teams on Angel or Animorphs, this 90s squad goes out fighting, although that’s less of a deliberate creative choice here.

But let’s back up a nano. In credit to the producers, ReBoot season 4 was conceived of as three separate movies, each of which would be broken down into four parts for transmission as TV episodes. The ending of the first storyline leads into the second, and in theory the third would have immediately followed that. Yet the order was shortened and the series canceled during production, and so there is no final film. Without it, we cut off right at a crescendo of tension that may never be resolved.

It’s frustrating, but mostly because this run is just so great overall. The initial block “Daemon Rising” follows up on that titular supervirus who was mentioned as having corrupted the Guardians and infected the Net back in the earlier “The Episode with No Name,” and is now attacking the protagonists’ system directly. Once she’s dealt with, we face “My Two Bobs,” a seemingly goofy concept — there are indeed two versions of the hero on the scene, one presumably a copy but both claiming to be the original — that develops real pathos and stakes as it moves along. The plot throughout remains as propulsive as it’s been since mid-season two, with no filler episodes and dynamic character arcs for essentially all the main cast. The continuity is expanded with flashbacks that further flesh out the backstory as well, finally answering many lingering questions about the general premise of the program.

The graphics get a noticeable upgrade too (although the current official streaming home on ShoutFactoryTV is hosting low-grade video files for some reason), reflecting the advancements from 1998 to 2001, and it’s hard not to wonder what modern technology would be able to make of a true ReBoot revival after another two decades. The humor and cultural references, long a sly wink for older audiences, are more daring than ever, and the gender equity demonstrates how far the scripts have come from when Dot was problematically positioned as the only girl around. The sole sour note I can report is the roller-bladed binome waiter at Al’s Wait & Eat, whose flamboyant gay caricature hasn’t aged especially well. Conversely, however, the pointed satire of washed-up “Neo-Virals” longing for the good old days in Megabyte’s army feels even more salient now.

The abrupt stop at a villain’s triumph is pretty jarring, and hardly a moment that we want to crystallize as the definitive statement on where this winding path has led. But it was a strong title all the way through to that bitter end, and one that still holds up as an animated classic today.

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 4 > 2 > 1