The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

Movie #4 of 2023:

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

Another rollicking cosmic thrill ride, and one that doubles as an apparent farewell to this creative corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Never say never where comic book characters are concerned, but with visionary director James Gunn now working for the DC competition, this sure feels like the intended finale to its loose trilogy.) With that in mind, the film expects the audience to have done their homework coming in, remembering not just how this ragtag crew joined into a found family and their subsequent exploits together, but also the details of how Peter left earth in the first movie, how the team set up camp in the floating skull Knowhere in the holiday special, and how there’s a variant of Gamora who doesn’t really know the others running around now, having hopped over from a separate timeline in Avengers: Endgame. It can be a lot to keep track of, especially if you haven’t seen some of those older features in a while.

And yet the main thrust of the script is wholly original, smartly filling in the backstory of Rocket the talking raccoon, a figure who had previously been used largely as comic relief. If you think it was a risk for Marvel to make a movie featuring this character so prominently back in 2014, the choice to raise his profile from sidekick to full-on protagonist here might surprise you as well. But in practice, that transition reads as perfectly natural, and his arc — the most dynamic one in the movie — generates great pathos as we learn more about his painful origin and see him finally stop fleeing from it.

Structurally, the story plays out along twin lines, intercutting scenes from Rocket’s heretofore-unseen past with his friends’ efforts in the present to find a way to save his life while he lies convalescent. To do so they need to clumsily break into a secure alien facility, bicker constantly, and ultimately face off against the animal’s twisted creator. The plot may be a tad overstuffed, but it has all the things we love about this team’s previous adventures, right down to the classic music drops, wisecracking banter, splashy color palette, and comedically inventive combat sequences.

Besides Rocket, the Guardians aren’t necessarily faced with the most meaningful personal conflicts, and I specifically dislike the pushy Nice Guy vibes of Peter insisting to the new Gamora that she could grow to love him like her other self did and the times that the narrative seems to validate him for it. Certain departures at the end strike me as poorly-motivated too, for while the team isn’t disbanding after this, some of the individual members voice their decision to step away, and not all of that registers as actually driven by the heroes themselves rather than the studio and/or the actors. (Although as a Doctor Who fan, I guess I should be used to those cast change moments sometimes coming out of left field at a story’s end.) If there ever is a Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 4 in the MCU, it will likely be with a distinctive new roster, somewhat analogous to the turnover that the Avengers are currently undergoing back on earth.

Overall this is probably a bit less fun than the first two films, especially given its darker themes, but it’s a welcome bounce back from the empty spectacle of the Disney+ holiday special, which I felt revisited the IP without managing to say anything new with it. That installment from last year could be safely skipped at the cost of only some slight disorientation here, but if you care about these characters and what they mean to each other, you should definitely catch this follow-up.

[Content warning for gun violence, alcohol abuse, animal biomedical experimentation, genocide, body horror, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers

Book #68 of 2023:

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers (Zamonia #1)

[Updated version of my review from 4/23/2020]

I absolutely adore this wild and whimsical adventure novel, detailing the tall-tale nautical escapades of a talking blue bear. (Life inside a stable tornado! The famous dueling liars of Atlantis! Impressment on the biggest ship in the world! Microscopic mini-pirates!) The tone is somewhere between The Phantom Tollbooth and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — including quirky cartoon illustrations like the former and the latter’s gimmick of regular encyclopedia entries interrupting the narrative — and author Walter Moers displays an endlessly clever inventiveness both in the outrageous situations that Bluebear encounters and the hilarious puns and other gems of wordplay that populate the linguistic landscape of this setting. Translator John Brownjohn also deserves a shout-out here, for finding so many English ways of channeling that spirit of fun from the original German text.

Structured like a short story collection, albeit with continuity of protagonist and some delightful eventual callbacks, this book is really just such a joy to read and reread. It’s technically a spinoff prequel of the title character’s appearances on a variety of children’s television shows (presumably constituting the remaining 13½ lives, as we’re told here that bears like him have 27 in total), but I’ve never seen any of those and I still love this volume to pieces. If it’s an origin story, it’s one focused on our hero learning valuable performance skills from a succession of eccentric teachers, which stands just fine on its own as an offbeat bildungsroman.

I’m not as enamored of the later installments in the series, which follow different individuals in the wider world of Zamonia without much of a common plot, but I’ve come back to the ursine captain time and time again. It’s a little disappointing on the current passthrough to realize how male-dominated it is, with even the minor background figures almost inevitably described as men, yet I can’t help but give the work my highest recommendation regardless.

[Content warning for fatphobia.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories by Garth Nix

Book #67 of 2023:

Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories by Garth Nix

Overall I would say that this book of short fiction — most but not all of it situated in either fantasy or an adjacent genre — is a success. The strongest piece is probably the novella that opens the work and gives it its title / place in author Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series: “Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case,” which follows the character through an adventure back home in the non-magical country of Ancelstierre after the events of the novel Abhorsen. I don’t have much patience for Nick in that book or its predecessor Lirael, where he’s under a bewitchment to be the unwitting dupe of the villain for the majority of the plot, but this slimmer installment redeems him as a hero completely, presenting him as tireless, brave, and endlessly resourceful as he attempts to stop a rampaging monster from wreaking greater havoc. He’s different from the necromancer protagonists we’ve seen tackle these problems in the past, with no enchanted bells or other tools beyond his quick wits. I almost wish we could have gotten a story like this before his introduction in the main saga, to better establish (and underline the loss of) who he is outside of Hedge’s control. If you’re a fan who’s never read this one, it’s well worth seeking out.

The remaining contents are shorter and not quite so striking, in addition to being unrelated to the opening ‘tale of the Abhorsen.’ But generally they’re still enjoyable, and the volume as a whole doesn’t feel as uneven to me as the writer’s later collection To Hold the Bridge. I’ve even had fun mapping out all the possible branching pathways of the comical choose-your-own-adventure game “Down to the Scum Quarter,” despite its tongue-in-cheek tone not being my favorite approach to this kind of thing. So although the primary appeal of this book for most readers is presumably the Old Kingdom tie-in which takes up the first third of the text, I’d recommend sticking around for the rest as well.

[Content warning for right-wing extremism, child endangerment, gun violence, gore, and sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 4

TV #21 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 4

I think this is where Gilmore Girls turns a corner for me in terms of my appreciation versus enjoyment of the characters and the ongoing slice-of-life narrative around them. It remains a strong series, and this year in particular does a fine job of navigating two big changes for our two heroines: Lorelai opening up her own inn and Rory going off to college. In fact, there’s an even bigger plot of alienation and anxiety surrounding the younger woman, although it’s deployed gradually and skillfully enough that it’s easy to miss the signs until you remember / realize where they’re inevitably heading — with her back in the arms of the exact wrong guy.

That arc is honestly an excellently written tragedy in miniature, as is her mother’s doomed romance with Richard’s business partner Jason (whose fussy peculiarities are a delight and mark him as the latest figure on this series who’s undiagnosed but probably on the autism spectrum, even if he doesn’t quite seem convincing as her type). I get why Rory would retreat towards the perceived safety of a former boyfriend; the scripts succeed in making that register as a believable choice for a person in her position to make. But I don’t like it! I don’t like him, I don’t think it’s a smart or healthy decision for her, and I join Lorelai in feeling disappointed in her daughter over this development that closes out the season finale.

To the extent that we’re rooting for these protagonists and not just being entertained by their foibles, it’s a letdown and a fairly big change for a program that’s previously seemed built around either celebrating Rory’s achievements or else commiserating when things don’t go her way. We’ve seen her face setbacks before, but there’s a new strand of self-sabotage here that’s truly somewhat unsettling. I don’t think it’s a flaw in the show per se, and maybe a move like this was even necessary to keep it from growing too stale. It certainly adds dimension to her character, and will be important for understanding her path going forward. Yet it puts the viewer at more of a distance from the Yale freshman as well.

Other love stories at this juncture are hit-or-miss. The conflict between Richard and Emily after everything falls apart with Jason is interesting, not only for rocking what’s heretofore been a happy marriage but also for Emily’s stubborn streak in not deigning to explain herself to Lorelai despite clearly being in the right. Luke’s decision to finally pursue his own longtime romantic interest is heartening, and will obviously be pretty relevant next year. On the other hand, Lane’s boyfriend being long-distance all season — sometimes mentioned but never seen — plays weirdly, and while I understand that the actor had other commitments as the star of The O.C. and that the Gilmore Girls producers were likely hoping that he could eventually return, it’s a disservice that leaves her a little adrift. Still worse is Paris’s relationship with a professor — which Rory objects to, but only on the grounds that he’s too old and that she’s initially cheating on someone else to be with him. There’s no effort to square that last part with Rory’s own later actions or confront her with her hypocrisy, and no judgment whatsoever of how unethical and abusive it would be for a tenured professor to date a college freshman. Paris is instead positioned as the weird and inappropriate one in their dynamic, and that’s a really frustrating writing choice.

Kirk also gets a girlfriend this year, which… sure, is fine. He’s still the sort of breakout character who works best in small doses, and you can sometimes feel the writers straining to come up with reasons to include him in a script that will justify his place in the main cast. But he’s not too obnoxious overall.

I could nitpick some more — I don’t think Jess is well-used this year, especially when he’s been such a strong foil for Dean in the past — but in general, I’m not unhappy with this season of Gilmore Girls. The story is going to some exciting and/or upsetting new places, while remaining true to the heart of its characters. I might appreciate it more than I’m enjoying it at this stage, but I can’t deny that it’s a quality piece of serialized entertainment.

[Content warning for underage alcohol abuse.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 6

TV #20 of 2023:

Classic Doctor Who, season 6

The end of an era for the show, in several different ways. This 1968-1969 run is the final year to be aired in black-and-white, and from a modern perspective, it contains the last episodes that are missing from the BBC archives, with only the audio recordings remaining: 2 out of 8 installments of the Cybermen serial The Invasion, which is generally pretty excellent regardless, and a whopping 5 out of 6 from the space opera-y story The Space Pirates, which feels so visual-dependent that it’s hard to fully appreciate today. And of course, this is the final outing for the Second Doctor, along with his returning companions Jamie and Zoe.

While the series had already gone through one such recasting of its central character back in 1966, that had occurred mid-season and retained the other main cast members at the time, as well as the overall structure and appearance of the program. Patrick Troughton may have taken over as the Doctor, but his subsequent adventures were more-or-less in line with his predecessor’s, piloting his TARDIS time machine to some predicament in the future, past, or present at the top of the serial and then departing once the crisis had been resolved. And although that general plot pattern would eventually return, it’s brought to a halt here in the magisterial finale of The War Games, which finally reveals details about the hero’s people the Time Lords amid the Doctor’s abject terror at having to call on them for support. For his nobility he is punished with a forced regeneration and sentenced to exile on earth, where next season would find the Third Doctor in full technicolor supporting the UNIT team against the invading baddies of the week. It’s the biggest upset yet for a show that by this point had already established a reputation for surviving change both on-screen and off.

Like a lot of Troughton’s era, this year shows a certain predilection for the ‘base under siege’ plot archetype, and few of its serials stand out as highlights. The Mind Robber’s trip to ‘the Land of Fiction’ at least is weird and pleasingly meta, but not all of it works for me, as some parts are a bit ungrounded and silly in the Celestial Toymaker fashion. And The Invasion provides a great blueprint for those upcoming UNIT days (and why its commander, the returning Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, would be such a valuable friendly foil for the Doctor). But overall, this is just solid late-60s sci-fi with some interesting wrinkles around the edges. Some of these serials may seem to overstay their welcome at 8 or even 10 episodes — after this, the writers would never again stretch material for a single story past 7 — but the longer ones are also my favorites, so it’s hard to say that that was the wrong approach for them. If anything, some of the weaker tales this season might have benefitted from a little more time to flesh out their components into something more distinctive. Still, it’s not a bad farewell showcase for the Second Doctor and this wider paradigm for the series.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★★☆☆
THE SPACE PIRATES (6×29 – 6×34)
THE DOMINATORS (6×1 – 6×5)
THE KROTONS (6×19 – 6×22)
THE SEEDS OF DEATH (6×23 – 6×28)
THE MIND ROBBER (6×6 – 6×10)

★★★★☆
THE INVASION (6×11 – 6×18)
THE WAR GAMES (6×35 – 6×44)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

[Content warning for gun violence.]

Book Review: The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

Book #66 of 2023:

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

Early on, this novel carries some of the wistfully philosophical vibes of author Agatha Christie’s pseudonymous Mary Westmacott books, and although that tone is dropped as the story goes along, I think it still might have worked better if it had been published under a different byline. If you approach it as a Christie mystery, it’s a little unsatisfying: the major puzzle takes a while to come into focus, but essentially boils down to a group of people claiming that they can commit murder remotely via witchcraft / intense concentration. The protagonist is at first skeptical but then frightened and aghast, until the conclusion provides the fairly obvious mundane explanation and fingers the equally suspicious figure behind the scheme. There’s no detective work and only one real attempt at a red herring, which I personally haven’t found particularly convincing.

Now, the spooky atmosphere is nice, and I like the detail of the middleman who arranges payments for the assassinations insisting that his clients are merely placing friendly wagers that their intended victims will still be alive in a month’s time. But if you go into this one hunting for a culprit and a non-supernatural method of homicide, the ensuing plot starts looking rather thin.

[Content warning for racism.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders

Book #65 of 2023:

Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders

This short story collection feels less uneven than many of its ilk, but unfortunately, that’s because I’ve tended to respond to each entry with the same disappointed half-sigh. Most of them show an interesting spark, either of character, premise, or background worldbuilding! I especially love the ones that use the toolkit of sci-fi / fantasy to illuminate protagonists haunted by their past or their future, like the clairvoyant couple in “Six Months, Three Days” who fall passionately in love despite knowing how and when the relationship will end, or the woman in “Ghost Champagne” who’s been able to see the lurking apparition of her dead older self for her whole life, or the college sweethearts in “Power Couple” who agree to each take a turn being cryogenically frozen while their partner concentrates on pursuing graduate school. But these and the rest inevitably end abruptly as more of a sketch than a fully-realized vision, as though representing merely a proof-of-concept for some nonexistent larger tale. (Two of them literally are spinoffs of author Charlie Jane Anders’s published novels, and she introduces several others as having originally been intended as pieces of a greater whole as well.)

The most effective item is probably “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” in which the trans writer imagines a truly disturbing variety of dystopian conversion therapy, but even this seems ultimately truncated and incomplete as presented here. I suppose the lack of traditional resolution is an artistic choice, but it’s just not a style of short fiction that works well for me, and it’s regrettably on display throughout this text. While I value the creativity and commitment to queer representation across the stories, I’m simply lukewarm on the book overall.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Pines by Blake Crouch

Book #64 of 2023:

Pines by Blake Crouch (Wayward Pines #1)

I picked up this 2012 novel on the strength of author Blake Crouch’s later sci-fi thrillers like Dark Matter and Recursion, but this earlier effort isn’t really in the same league. It’s long on vibes but short on story, and although I haven’t seen the TV adaptation, I am not at all surprised to learn that M. Night Shyamalan was one of its executive producers. This first book in the trilogy builds to the kind of big absurd twist that the director is famous for, and while readers may not predict all of the details in advance, there’s not a lot of other plot concerns to distract us until the inevitable dramatic reveal.

The protagonist is a federal agent recovering from an accident in a secluded small town, unable to contact his superiors or his family back home and increasingly convinced that literally everyone around him is in on the sinister conspiracy to keep him stranded there. And he’s clearly right about that — though it might have been a stronger work if he wasn’t, or if the text at least entertained the idea that he might be delusional and not just the victim of obvious collective gaslighting — which tends to puncture the tension of the piece throughout. There are a lot of unsettling happenings, but since we realize right away that nothing can be trusted, it all feels like idle wheel-spinning before the denouement no matter how injured and frantic the hero grows.

I won’t spoil the ending except to say that it arrives in a flurry of exposition and proves neither as original, plausible, nor explanatory as one might have hoped. I wonder if the narrative might have been better served by frontloading the concept as an open premise from the start, rather than adopting the Shyamalan model and hoping that audience gasps in the final sequence will make up for the somewhat tedious mysteries beforehand. If I pick up the sequel, it will largely be to explore that very question of whether a tale in this world could be more satisfying when it doesn’t have to strain to keep the readership in the dark for so long.

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

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 4

TV #19 of 2023:

Six Feet Under, season 4

For most of this season, I expected I would give it the same three-star rating that I’ve assigned to its previous runs, reflecting a series that is deeply uneven: an engaging family drama with some individual scenes that are affecting and periodically profound meditations on death and grief, riddled with frustrating characters and inane plot developments. Six Feet Under sometimes manages to get into a groove where it feels like the storytelling is finally improving, only to immediately derail again before the impact of the better stuff even arrives. And that remains true here, but the balance between good and bad seems to be shifting as the program ages, and not in the maturing way one might hope. Or maybe I’m just losing my patience with it.

Let’s check in on our major players. David is brutally tortured by a random stranger in an episode that’s so tense as to be nearly unwatchable. Nate spends the year obsessing over a certain spoilery development from season 3, and ultimately has his vague raving suspicions validated in an out-of-nowhere soap opera-y twist in the finale. Claire has what seems to be a promising arc exploring her sexuality, only to abruptly decide that she’s straight after all, blow off her ex-girlfriend and the rest of their friends, and hook up with the mentor figure who’s been inappropriately interested in her since she was in high school. Ruth watches helplessly as her new husband shuts her out emotionally and falls deeper into a paranoid anxiety about climate change and natural disasters. And Rico cheats on his wife basically out of boredom and then deals with the inevitable consequences.

It’s definitely not a great sign that I realized Brenda of all people has actually transformed during all this into a generally-compelling protagonist. She’s long been my personal bugbear of the series, an implausible chaos agent who’s stuck around for no clear reason past plenty of obvious exit points from the narrative. But with all the absurdities and pettiness that Nate and the other Fishers are now throwing around, for once she seems like the reasonable one in the majority of her interactions. It’s a strange feeling!

There are only twelve episodes left in the show, so sure, I’ll push on to get to what I’ve heard is a pretty good series finale. But this penultimate batch has really taken the program to a laughable new low.

[Content warning for drug abuse, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

Book #63 of 2023:

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

A fun little horror novella about a woman whose mom’s house is being haunted by the malevolent spirit of the protagonist’s abusive grandmother. It’s a quick read overall, but I think it stays a bit too long in the initial stage of the story where the characters are denying the genre around them and insisting that there’s a mundane explanation for the increasingly unsettling occurrences. There’s also a tonal shift near the end to extreme Lovecraftian weirdness, which is not exactly unsupported by the text but still lands a bit abruptly in its transition of the antagonistic presence from a ghost to the horde of a wizard’s otherworldly demon spawn. And despite such complications, the book feels relatively straightforward, with few relevant subplots or side concerns to help distinguish it from other similar(-ish) premises. I enjoyed the title, but would not necessarily recommend it as a must-read for anyone.

[Content warning for fatphobia, racism, cannibalism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆