The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Hocus Pocus

Movie #14 of 2020:

Hocus Pocus (1993)

I think this may be a film that you have to have seen as a child to fully love, and my shameful millennial confession is that I never did. Absent any nostalgia factor, it’s pretty solidly okay for an evening’s entertainment, but perhaps not the defining Halloween feature that it’s sometimes held up as. The performances, atmosphere, and general concept are hokey without ever quite hitting the delirious heights of camp, and the humor gets tangled up in plot holes like exactly how much of modern America the evil Sanderson sisters understand from scene to scene. There’s also a heaping dose of toxic 90s masculinity, and no particular acknowledgement that the Salem witch trials targeted, tortured, and killed innocent people rather than these cackling villains who gleefully feed on children and call Satan their master. (I’m not saying witches should be off-limits in spooky fiction, but setting a story amid historical slaughter carries a certain obligation to the victims that isn’t remotely met here.)

Is Hocus Pocus fun? Sure! Especially for kids the age of the high school protagonists or younger, I would expect. It has a few good lines and interesting acting choices, as well as a showstopping musical number that again doesn’t make much sense in context. I can see why y’all like the thing, even if it’s not going down as one of my favorites.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Iron Heart by Nina Varela

Book #257 of 2020:

Iron Heart by Nina Varela (Crier’s War #2)

I still have mixed feelings about the first volume in this YA duology about intrigue and rebellion amongst cyborg overlords, but I am happy to report that the sequel is a big improvement, with a faster-paced plot and a less problematic love story. Ayla is no longer an indentured handmaiden in Lady Crier’s household, which removes the coercive power dynamic between the two girls, and they are both better developed as independent characters by spending half of this novel apart. The action has also picked up since the last book, and I really enjoy what author Nina Varela has done with the zombie-like robots who have devolved into a feral state and now roam the countryside at large. The series won’t go down as one of my favorites, but it leans into its strengths for this conclusion and so I do recommend seeing it through to the end.

This book: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Individual rankings: 2 > 1

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Movie Review: The Princess Bride

Movie #13 of 2020:

The Princess Bride (1987)

This beloved film lives up to my memories and its own reputation, offering thrills, laughs, and emotional stirrings in equal measure. (I legitimately teared up at the last scene tonight, perhaps because my wife and I have each lost a grandfather this year.) It’s a feel-good movie for the whole family, packed with endearing characters and eminently quotable lines, as fun for the quasi-historical main narrative as it is for the cheekily meta interruptions from the storybook framing device. A modern classic, through and through.

It also doesn’t come anywhere near to passing the Bechdel Test, and its vision of an idealized Europe offers no hint of racial diversity. In one early scene, the protagonist rants about the duplicity of women and threatens to strike his love interest. The title figure herself is fairly passive throughout the tale, functioning more as a damsel in distress than an active hero like the swashbucklers around her. Physical deformity is used as a shorthand for villainy, and suicide is spoken of lightly.

I raise these faults not to condemn the work, but merely to observe that they stick out a few decades after the fact, and different audiences — those from marginalized backgrounds and/or without a fond childhood attachment to it, for instance — may justifiably be less charitable in their opinions. It is not a perfect film, as much as I may personally enjoy it, and when later writers regularly turn here for inspiration, I hope they are drawing on the elements noted in my first paragraph rather than my second.

★★★★★

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Book Review: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Book #256 of 2020:

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

A difficult read, full of brutal details drawn from the first-hand testimony of enslaved persons and their enslavers alike. Each new specific abuse — each beating, each rape, each division of families — is gutting in its own particular way, and for readers who can stomach that, I think it’s important to periodically take in reporting like this to confront the awful unsanitized truth about American slavery.

This title adds to the existing scholarship by illustrating how white women in slave-owning households were not passive participants or demure followers of controlling men, but rather active and enthusiastic torturers themselves. Exhibiting a surprising degree of agency in the patriarchal antebellum south, these ladies purchased black slaves at auction, signed prenuptial contracts preventing their husbands from selling them off, and took an active hand in administering corporal cruelties for the slightest perceived infractions. They also trafficked in breastfeeding black women as wet nurses for their children — a domain the menfolk largely ignored, and another topic that had received little scholarly attention before author Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers dug back through the archival records.

A groundbreaking work like this deserves to be discussed widely, and I hope it won’t fuel misogynistic criticism that downplays the male role in perpetuating the institution of slavery, as it should obviously go without saying that that was far greater. (I’m very aware that I’m a man listing out the faults of women in this review, for instance, which is not exactly a good look.) But there are countless human horrors here that demand our attention, and it serves no one to go on believing that half of the perpetrators were innocent.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl

Book #255 of 2020:

Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl

For the first 10% of this YA novel, it seems like it’s just going to be the tale of a college freshman reuniting with her high school friends to get closure on why they fell out and see if anyone knows the truth behind her boyfriend’s mysterious death last year. Then the five teens have a car accident of their own and become stuck in a time loop of the previous eleven hours, which they are told will go on forever until they can agree on the one person to survive. Then halfway through the book, the group discovers that they can move the loop around in time and space, allowing them to revisit scenes from their past and talk to people who would otherwise be impossible to reach within a single cycle.

This repeated revising of the premise’s rules is frustratingly messy, and the characters never really engage with the full implications of their situation. The protagonist also mentions near the end that she’s probably spent about a century reliving this day — long enough to read the whole internet twice, apparently — yet her characterization in no way shifts to reflect that degree of age or experience. Overall I’ve found it too difficult to get invested in her storyline, and I doubt I’ll try anything by author Marisha Pessl again, given how I couldn’t get into her earlier Special Topics in Calamity Physics either.

[Content warning for suicide, drug and alcohol abuse including drunk driving, gun violence, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

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Movie Review: A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote

Movie #12 of 2020:

A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote (2020)

One part cast reunion, one part stageplay, and one part voting drive, this West Wing special is a bit of an oddity. It’s fun to see the actors reprising their roles 14 years after the show originally ended — with the excellent Sterling K. Brown stepping in for the late John Spencer — but since this is essentially just a reading of an old episode script, there’s not as much delight or pathos as is possible in true sequels like the pandemic video chat that Parks and Recreation put out earlier this year. (I’m also skeptical of the idea that anyone remotely excited for this program wouldn’t be an enthusiastic regular voter already, although hopefully the nonprofit organization When We All Vote received plenty of donations that they can put to good use.) A three-star rating seems fair for something that I enjoyed in the moment and didn’t find overlong, but know I will absolutely never watch again.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

Book #254 of 2020:

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

The pacing to this historical mystery is far too slow to be properly effective, and although the narrative spends a lot of time entertaining the idea of a demonic force plaguing the ship, it’s telegraphed very early on that this is more of a Scooby-Doo setup of human culprits using superstition to disguise their moves. The only real questions are which passengers are behind it all and why, which are not terribly engaging issues when the investigating characters spend so much time chasing after phantoms. The nautical setting adds a certain degree of claustrophobia to the affair, but the era has also licensed author Stuart Turton to write in some tedious nastiness in the interest of period authenticity. I’m pretty disappointed in the overall effort, especially after his genre-bending debut.

[Content warning for sexism, domestic abuse, rape, torture, witch trials, misgendering, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 4

TV #45 of 2020:

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 4

I’m glad that this Clone Wars season is presented mostly chronologically, rather than the nonlinear hodgepodge of years before, but the narrative is still more scattered than I think I would prefer, with mini-arcs and standalone episodes that don’t really build on one another into any larger plot. I’m also getting whiplash sometimes from this show’s shifting audience expectations, as there are some details that would seem to require a deep grounding in Star Wars canon to properly appreciate, yet others consisting of slapstick nonsense for the younger crowd that don’t make any kind of story logic.

(Most egregious this time: Count Dooku hiring a dozen bounty hunters, then putting them through an elaborate series of deadly traps until only five are left to attempt his real mission. Why would a serious antagonist act so absurdly? Does he really think this is an example of best practices for scouting new talent? How has the guild not blacklisted him as a customer yet? It’s all just filler to take up the extra half-hour that almost demands you turn off your brain for it, and that’s a frustrating writing choice.)

Am I enjoying this program? Sure, for the most part. My three-star rating again indicates that I probably like this particular season more than I dislike it, on balance. It’s cool to see a certain villain again, and the travelogue aspect continues to showcase neat settings like the underwater Mon Cala. But there’s a lot of potential for a series set in this era of the franchise, and that benchmark is only sporadically being met here.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Original by Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal

Book #253 of 2020:

The Original by Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal

This novella (currently available exclusively as an audiobook) is a thrilling sci-fi adventure, set in a society where most people take in regular doses of “nanogenes” that transform their perception, adding pre-programmed sights, sounds, and textures to an environment that would otherwise be largely stark white. Coauthor Brandon Sanderson performs his usual trick of finding an engaging story to showcase this worldbuilding, with a protagonist who’s had her filters disabled — because she’s actually the clone of the woman she thinks she is, and has been created by the government to track down her original self for the murder of her husband. The action that follows from this premise is imaginative and distinctive, and the narrative raises interesting questions of identity and technological ethics as it goes along.

In practice I can’t tell exactly which elements stem more from Sanderson or from his cowriter Mary Robinette Kowal, but I appreciate the more expansive conceptualization of gender than is typically present in the former’s books. The heroine has two dads, one of whom wears a skirt, and she expresses chagrin at one point for misgendering a supporting character who turns out to be nonbinary. On the other hand, there’s definitely some conservative ideology underlying the plot detail that suicides and unrest are spiking because people are too comfortable in a post-scarcity land of Universal Basic Income and free access to healthcare, and it would have been nice to see that brought out of the subtext and challenged. Absent that ideological false note that threatens to unsuspend my disbelief, however, this is a fun read / listen.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Floating Admiral by The Detection Club

Book #252 of 2020:

The Floating Admiral by The Detection Club

In 1931, Agatha Christie and a dozen of her contemporaries collaborated to produce this mystery novel, each contributing a chapter in turn but not sharing their theories of the case with one another. The result is more than a little disjointed, and it almost seems like some of the authors are throwing in new twists just to make it harder for whoever comes next. (Indeed, much of Ronald Knox’s late section consists of the shared detective hero sitting down to huffily generate a list of thirty-nine open questions, and it’s hard not to take his indignation as a bit of projection.) The final piece by Anthony Berkeley offers a reasonable enough solution to the whole affair, and I like how some of the writers have provided an afterword explaining what they were going for instead, but the talents on display are variable and the work over-long in consequence. I’m somewhat charitable given the ambition of the project and the constraints everyone was operating under, but there’s probably a reason most of these names are not widely remembered today.

[Content warning for racial slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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