The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Barbie (2023)

Movie #5 of 2023:

Barbie (2023)

Heartfelt, hilarious, and swathed in a vivid color palette — this movie about the titular doll isn’t really meant for the kids young enough to play with her, but it is very much a feel-good female empowerment hit for the rest of us. In this story all the Barbies live in a placid plastic wonderland, but when one of them starts having thoughts about death and similar existential crises, she must travel to the real world to find the person inadvertently sending those feelings her way. The result is a fun fish-out-of-water adventure — my mind kept comparing it to Elf, perhaps due to the presence of Will Ferrell — followed by a surprising ‘Scouring of the Shire’ pivot when the protagonist returns to discover how Barbieland has changed in her absence.

There’s also some frank discussions of how hard it is to navigate society’s conflicting patriarchal expectations of women, a touching mother-daughter relationship, a scathingly funny takedown of bro culture and its touchstones, and a great message about finding your own path rather than settling for someone else’s idea of your happily-ever-after. The film threads a careful needle between celebrating Mattel (who of course co-produced it) and calling out the company for the ways in which their products haven’t necessarily always helped the feminist movement. The nostalgia factor is important too, with genuine discontinued models and accessories like Earring Magic Ken adding nice specificity to the humor of the piece.

The production could probably stand to be tightened up or revised in a few places. I think the biggest misstep is the treatment of Mattel’s corporate headquarters and employees, which are rendered in a comedically heightened style that doesn’t fit with the rest of the “real world” and weakens the implicit clash between Barbie’s reality and ours. The script also sometimes loses track of this element, checking in on the bumbling CEO and his underlings after far too long has passed with no indication of what they’ve been doing in the meantime. Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling’s Ken is also a bit ill-defined — I like his arc and where it eventually leads, but it’s odd to me that he’s already so uneasy at the start, before the inciting incident that sets Margot Robbie’s Barbie in motion. Barbieland is initially presented as perfectly static and pleasant, and while I appreciate how the ending winds up returning and critiquing that, I’m not sure it’s thematically coherent to have one of the Kens there in a quiet crisis even before the main Barbie.

All that having been said, I had a good time with this one, despite presumably not being quite in the target audience (or caring about the memes linking it with Oppenheimer, the Christopher Nolan biopic that happened to hit theaters around the same time). And although I roll my eyes at complaints that stories like this are too woke or man-hating or whatever, I do wish it could have veered a bit more away from the gender essentialism, wherein all the Barbies and Kens fit squarely in those separate tribes without much in common across them and the heroine’s big closing moment of self-actualization is — spoiler alert — related to her reproductive anatomy. Still, perhaps the flaws are only fitting for a movie whose ultimate moral is that it’s okay to be a little imperfect among life’s messes.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman

Book #95 of 2023:

The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman (Blacktongue #1)

This 2021 fantasy debut has all the gore of the grimdark subgenre, but it skillfully avoids the cynical nihilism that I’d consider typical of such properties. Instead, the tone here is more akin to The Lies of Locke Lamora — archly comic and creatively profane, but deeply rooted in the vulnerable heart of the protagonist, an enterprising thief who’s just too clever for his own good. The wry inner voice of that title figure is a continual delight, and I appreciate that while the plot around him has the general shape of an epic quest, the narrative is more interested in the relationships that are building up among the characters and unafraid to pursue a few extended side adventures with them. The resulting rhythms are somewhat like those of a tabletop roleplaying campaign, which may be a sticking point for certain readers but strikes me as a refreshing and engaging choice.

The worldbuilding has some interesting cultural details and background flourishes, like how humanity barely survived a string of bloody wars with the goblins, an often-comical species that have never been more terrifying than they are here. Amid that setting, the hero attempts to waylay and rob a stern paladin, only to find himself dragged along on her mission to restore her queen to a far-off throne, under secretive orders from his powerful guild leaders who plainly have ulterior motives in facilitating the journey. They acquire a blind cat and other further companions along the way, not all of whom survive the experience, and the overall novel feels self-contained in how its story resolves, yet has been marketed as the first in an eventual series. I know I would definitely return for a sequel or two.

[Content warning for cannibalism and threatened / implied rape.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Secret Invasion, season 1

TV #38 of 2023:

Secret Invasion, season 1

This latest Marvel series, set in the modern-day but picking up plot threads from the 90s-set Captain Marvel movie, is a tediously dramatic and joyless affair (with Olivia Coleman’s cheerfully ruthless British intelligence commander providing the rare bright spot). It starts with a bold premise: the shapeshifting alien species the Skrulls have grown their population on earth to a million, all posing as humans and thoroughly integrated into our society, and a new radical leader among them is pushing to wage war and overthrow us. I’ll even give the show credit for largely avoiding the antisemitic implications of the lizard-people-secretly-running-the-world angle, and at its best, it dabbles in the paranoid conspiracy genre that Marvel already perfected back in the HYDRA takeover of 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where any apparent friend could in fact be a hidden enemy operative.

The execution here is miserable, though. Two recurring characters from elsewhere in the MCU do turn out to be Skrull imposters, but we never learn how long ago they were replaced / whether the earlier adventures we’ve seen were really with them or not. Three other figures from previous titles, all women, are brought back only to be ‘fridged’ — unceremoniously killed off seemingly just to further a male associate’s angst — though one of those is later revealed as a feint and reversed.

The plot itself revolves around Nick Fury’s personal history with particular Skrulls, but much of that happened off-screen, which dampens the impact of developments here. The inclusion of a handful of flashbacks and a whole lot of exposition gamely tries to fill in the backstory, but it feels like a simple highlights reel rather than a meaningful segment of the narrative. And absent that weight, the actions of Nick’s adversaries and allies alike in the present have no clear gravity of their own. That’s even setting aside the villain’s bizarre scheme to turn himself into a Super Skrull with “Avenger DNA” — as though all superpowers reside in one’s genetic code, or as though unpowered people like Tony or Clint would have anything special in their biological profile as well — or the laughably random writing choice to have this antagonist use DNA from Groot and Thanos’s servant Cull Obsidian when the Avengers macguffin is initially out of his reach. I can handle a degree of technobabble hand-waving in my superhero stories, but everything about this element is silly and inevitably reduces to the standard CGI slugfest.

But that’s reflective of the scripting on this miniseries overall. There’s also a lengthy subplot about a certain Skrull infiltrator trying to mislead the White House into launching nuclear weapons, but never any indication of why the president himself couldn’t be captured and replaced. Or why professional thorn-in-the-side Nick Fury couldn’t, for that matter. With such a vast army of potential perfect duplicates at his command, why is Gravik wasting any time trying to trick specific humans into doing what he wants? The writers don’t seem to know or care.

Much of this could have worked, in theory. Samuel L. Jackson makes the most of his material, which is the meatiest he’s gotten yet for a role he’s played since 2008 and finds Fury scrambling without his customary easy answers. Emilia Clarke seems to be having a good time in this new franchise too. The story around them could have been a tight thriller that asked relevant questions, in an age of deepfakes and alternative news, about how we can ever trust what we see and hear. Instead, Marvel went with an AI-generated intro sequence and apparently put just as little effort into developing the rest of the show.

[Content warning for gun violence, racism, torture, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 1

TV #37 of 2023:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 1

This 2017 launch is the first of the ‘new Trek’ shows, bringing the sci-fi franchise back to the small screen for the first time in more than a decade since Enterprise ended. It’s a somewhat mixed result, but largely a rollicking experience, with a very propulsive serialized plot to keep viewers engaged. I believe I called every major twist except the identity of the emperor well in advance, but I appreciate that the narrative was built around those pivot points, which are still fun to watch play out even when predicted correctly. And the new characters are generally fine, with Michael Burnham — played by Sonequa Martin-Green, the first woman of color to anchor a Star Trek series — a particular standout. (Any discussion of Discovery’s on-screen representation is going to need to grapple with the program’s penchant for killing off its minority roles, however. At least some of them get to pop up again during a delightful extended stay in the classic mirror universe.)

As for the negatives, sometimes this show moves so fast that it doesn’t have time to establish its settings, conflicts, or relationships to any meaningful depth. The decision to write this as a prequel ten years prior to the start of TOS is rather baffling, too. The technology is all wrong, for starters — while modern effects could of course go further than those of the 1960s in portraying alien species and space battles and whatnot, it seems a significant continuity error to populate this period with more advanced Starfleet tech than has ever been shown before, without any explanation on-screen. Are we supposed to conclude that holograms and spore drives and such were available in Captain Kirk’s time, and just never used or mentioned for some reason? It’s bizarre, and quite a turnaround from Enterprise, which for all its faults did aim to portray its own prequel era as less technologically-developed.

The payoff for setting a story in this specific moment is unclear as well. Burnham was raised as the Vulcan Sarek’s ward — and thus an adopted sister to the unseen Spock — but that seems like a retcon for its own sake and perhaps indicative of a lack of faith among the production team that their work could stand independently of such explicit fan-service. A lot of this debut season is spent on Klingon politicking and that species warring with the Federation, but those events could have happened at roughly any point in the established canon. If anything, it feels implausible to squeeze them in here, when we know that a cold war between the two galactic civilizations will be in place just a short while later.

I’m aware that that’s a little nitpicky, but I think the concerns are merited for a production like this, which could have easily been written as either a distant sequel or an altogether original sci-fi piece to avoid all those considerations. The producers instead specifically chose to position it as a prequel within the existing IP, and that comes with certain obligations to respect what’s gone before and explain away any apparent contradictions. Based on its initial year, Star Trek: Discovery is so far failing to meet that goal.

But again I come back to how entertaining this title is from scene-to-scene, especially if you can shut off that fannish part of your brain clamoring for explanations. (The entertainment value of that time loop episode alone is top-notch.) It taps into the core themes of the franchise, like a hopeful and inquisitive outlook on the future and a belief that diversity is a strength, and it’s a well-crafted genre vehicle with a solid cast. Ultimately I’m comfortable giving it a rating of three-and-a-half stars rounded up, with the wish that the writers would try just a bit harder on the remaining seasons ahead.

[Content warning for gun violence, genocide, torture, cannibalism, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Flux by Jinwoo Chong

Book #94 of 2023:

Flux by Jinwoo Chong

This sci-fi novel gets stronger as it goes along, yet it’s still weirder and more confusing than it needs to be. The full premise isn’t nailed down until fairly late in the text, but generally speaking, it’s the story of a queer Asian American whose amoral employers are doing something to make his consciousness come unstuck in time. The main narrative repeatedly jumps months ahead or backwards and repeats entire scenes with minor variations, which successfully disorients both narrator and reader alike. There are also two other protagonists we split focus among — one a young boy and one an older man — and you can probably already guess how the three of them are related. This is a book about time-travel, after all.

Ultimately I like the result more than I dislike it. Using the genre trappings to explore childhood trauma is a major strength, and I also like the running element of the old ’80s cop show that looms large over the lives of fans who remember it (and who later have to grapple with #MeToo allegations concerning its star). There’s a fun Theranos vibe to the primary hero’s shady workplace, and some interesting plot twists, especially near the end. Yet overall, I think this title would have worked better if debut author Jinwoo Chong had constructed it in a more straightforward fashion that didn’t keep us in the dark on key pieces for so long.

[Content warning for gaslighting, suicide, and death of a parent.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

Book #93 of 2023:

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

I only learned after finishing this 2019 horror novel that it’s a loose sequel to Arthur Machen’s 1904 story “The White People,” and I wonder if some of my frustrations might have been mitigated by that additional context. As is, this later work has a solid setup of a protagonist going through the house of her recently deceased hoarder grandmother and discovering uncanny happenings in the woods nearby, but the execution here strikes me as more silly than scary, especially as the narrator keeps ominously repeating the phrase she’s seen in her step-grandfather’s feverishly scribbled journals, “and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones” (which again, apparently comes originally from Machen). What little tension would remain is thoroughly punctured by the irreverent comedic tone adopted throughout, which seems a poor fit for the plot at hand.

On a similar note, much of the middle section of this text consists of a) the heroine reading from b) that relative’s descriptions of c) a book he half-remembers about d) a girl who recounts e) spooky stories she’s heard from her nursemaid… and so on and so forth. The core concept of a fairyland that’s outlived its original inhabitants and is now occupied by their mindless creations could be interesting, but by the time we get there we’re nested so deep in that recursive structure that it’s hard to appreciate any meaningful stakes to the overall affair. I’m pretty underwhelmed by the piece as a whole.

[Content warning for body horror and gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: The Shield, season 7

TV #36 of 2023:

The Shield, season 7

The penultimate sixth season of this police drama was its weakest in my opinion, and this final year takes a little while to shake itself back into gear. Early on, there’s a continued focus on the macguffin of a blackmail box (or as I kept mishearing it, “black mailbox”) that improbably contains dirt on a wide range of L.A.’s elected officials, which is a bit abstract of a threat concept to be worth investing our energies in. Luckily things take a turn about midway through, and from there on out The Shield is as thrilling and compulsively watchable as it’s ever been. The ultimate fracturing of what’s left of the Strike Team has been a long time coming, and while none of those gentlemen exactly deserve a happy ending, there’s still a tragedy in the dissolution of their former bonds, as well as the question of how many innocents they will manage to drag down with them.

So many great moments come in the last few episodes of this series, from Vic’s underhanded deal with ICE and overdue admission of his crimes, to the ironic twist of his eventual fate, to Shane and Mara’s increasingly desperate attempts to get away from it all and their own heartbreaking last scene that gives the finale its title. As ever, the anti-copaganda stance of the program is clear: these particular abusers were enabled by the power of the system, as we see in the immediate difficulties they face when some of them have to start operating without a badge, but their less corrupt peers are no heroes either. The whole department is ineffective, self-serving, and complicit in racist violence, and we have no reason to believe that Vic was the bad apple that made them that way, or that they aren’t representative of similar forces across America. In the end certain perpetrators are brought down, but there’s no sense of justice in any of it — just a lingering bad taste and a feeling that no meaningful problems have been solved or progress made. A powerful, sad, and bitterly funny thesis statement, bolstered by some of star Michael Chiklis’s best acting work yet. I don’t know that I would ever be drawn to watch this show again, but this was a phenomenal endgame for it.

[Content warning for racism, gun violence, gore, torture, rape, suicide, drug abuse, domestic abuse, and death of a young child.]

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 5 > 1 > 7 > 4 > 2 > 3 > 6

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 6

TV #35 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 6

Another season that’s entertaining on the surface, especially with the built-in viewer investment in these characters, but frustrating in terms of underlying logic and plot structure. Certain choices feel like they’re being imposed externally by the writers, rather than arising naturally from the individual personalities on screen, which… obviously is the case for all such fiction, but the artificiality is generally masked better than this. Rory drops out of Yale and goes to live in her grandparents’ pool house, Luke delays marrying Lorelai and insists on keeping some pretty big secrets from her, and none of it quite matches the folks we’ve spent years getting to know by this point.

A few developments this season scream of a desperate ploy for wider audience appeal, too. Lorelai adopts a dog with absurdly wacky behavioral issues! Luke finds out he has a kid who’s coincidentally like a precocious preteen Rory! You can almost see the network notes being handed down here, and would-be major moments like the titular pair of protagonists reuniting after so long apart land hollowly, since their separation was so poorly motivated in the first place. Another theoretically triumphant scene shows the younger heroine somewhat annoyingly wearing down a newspaper editor to give her a job — which she’ll somehow manage while also restarting her college career and participating in the school paper? — only for that side hustle to never again be shown or mentioned.

This was the last year of the show’s original run helmed by creative team Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino, forced out during negotiations as the WB became the CW, and conventional wisdom holds that the following season was a weaker echo of the program’s early strengths. But in my view on this rewatch, the decline in quality started well before then.

[Content warning for fatphobia, racism, transphobia, and alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan

Book #92 of 2023:

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan

A scathing account of the abuse that runs rampant in the TV and film industry, drawing on hundreds of interviews across more than a decade of author Maureen Ryan’s investigative journalism career. Some sources have gone on the record for this book, but many remain anonymous out of a quite reasonable fear of reprisal. Likewise, the writer calls out plenty of serial harassers by name, but is forced to keep circumspect about the identities of others whose sins are not yet documented well enough to safely bring to light. Her main focus, however, is on the culture in Hollywood that not only allows such awful behavior to exist in the upper ranks, but often seems to even flat-out encourage and reward it. (The most infuriating element of this coverage is the revelation of how much has been public knowledge or an open secret among insiders for years, to no apparent ill effect for the abusers.)

It’s a book written by a media critic who loves her subject dearly, and who is righteously indignant over how many people have been hurt and cast aside in bringing those wonderful stories to life on our screens. She takes us inside the toxic work environments of shows like Sleepy Hollow and Lost, where even viewers who objected to periodic racist, sexist, or homophobic plot developments would likely be surprised by how much open bigotry was directed at the cast and crew members of the affected marginalized groups. She documents nauseating instances of Weinstein levels of sexual harassment/assault and bullying by top-level creatives, and how with few exceptions these men have been protected and promoted by virtue of producing box-office success. And in the closing chapters, she muses on the ways some individuals have started rejecting this system and offers concrete suggestions for how their peers could follow suit.

Little of this reporting is brand-new for this volume, but it’s effective — if incredibly disheartening! — to see it all laid out so clearly. Fans who can stomach it should read the horrid details for a beginning understanding of the human cost behind their favorite entertainments.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson

Book #91 of 2023:

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

The latest Kickstarter novel from author Brandon Sanderson falls somewhere between the last two in quality for me. I don’t think it’s as strong a story as Tress of the Emerald Sea — nor that it would work as well for readers unfamiliar with recent cosmere developments / revelations of ‘realmatic theory’ in the Stormlight Archive and such — but it improves as it goes along and is substantially better throughout than The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. I’ll give it 3.5 stars, rounded up.

Like Tress, this is a tale in the writer’s broad cosmere continuity conveyed to us by that rascal Hoid, an unreliable narrator and minor character in the present affair. Mostly the plot follows the two title figures, whose lonely souls somehow become entwined despite their living on apparently separate worlds. Yumi is a sheltered priestess of sorts whose position is exalted yet grants her no real control over anything in her life; the painter is an underpaid service worker who patrols the streets to guard against supernatural threats. Their respective magics seem unremarkable to each yet fairly wondrous to the other, and after their lives come crashing together, they learn to appreciate both whilst unraveling the mystery of their connection — which finds them taking turns being relegated to a ghostly presence no one else can see while the other one occupies their normal physical space.

As usual for Sanderson, there are some eventual twist reveals concerning the underlying worldbuilding and rules to the magical systems, but he also finds time to focus on mental health issues like executive dysfunction and ruminate in not-too-subtle subtext on certain contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence (aka, how art created by humans is more meaningful than anything formed by mindless machinery, precisely because people invest it with meaning). This isn’t the deepest of the writer’s own creations, but there’s an interesting pan-Asian feel to the narrative in the form of hot springs, chopsticks, ramen shops, and so on, and he acknowledges several manga and JRPG titles as among his influences in an afterword.

Because this is all being told to us by an in-universe character prone to embellishment if not outright dishonesty, it comes — again, like Tress of the Emerald Sea — with a notable asterisk for whether the events of this story can be accepted at face-value as canonical. At a minimum, it doesn’t seem like anything here will wind up important to the broader cosmere saga, but if you’re a fan of Hoid and his Cryptic associate Design, this is a fun side adventure in which they play a supporting role to the slow-building romance between the titular star-crossed couple.

[Content warning for those romantic interests pretending to be siblings at one point.]

★★★★☆