The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007)

Movie #16 of 2025:

Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007)

“Movie” is probably a bit of a misnomer here, as this title wasn’t initially intended to constitute a standalone feature at all. Instead it would be merely the first installment of a new Babylon 5 series pitched as an anthology of smaller-scale stories, in contrast to the original program’s heavily-serialized arcs. Unfortunately creator J. Michael Straczynski reportedly wasn’t happy with the finished version, and so made the decision to cancel the planned line after this release.

And that’s a shame, because I think it’s actually pretty strong for what it is! Admittedly, this is Babylon 5 on an extremely-low budget: the effects are kept to a minimum, and most of the scenes are set in small rooms with a minimal cast, utilizing only around seven actors in total. It has a bit of a stageplay feel as a result, or perhaps an older television style like The Twilight Zone.

Within that framework, we get two sequential storylines that are each fairly successful at pitching their little sci-fi morality plays. On the Babylon 5 station itself, Elizabeth Lochley and a visiting priest confront a man who appears to be possessed by a genuine demon, which wants to be exorcised out of its host body. On a typical genre show like Star Trek or Doctor Who there would be some fundamentally ‘rational’ explanation eventually revealed behind the phenomenon, but here it’s played straight and we have to just accept the demonic as an element of the B5 canon now. Instead the twist is that the forces of hell are indeed bound on earth, and are scheming to find a way to escape their prison and travel the stars.

Then we cut to John Sheridan, who receives a prophetic dream visit from the technomage Galen informing him that the young Centauri noble he’s escorting will one day lead an attack to devastate the human homeworld unless our protagonist agrees to help kill him in cold blood now before he can. The script isn’t shy about identifying this as the old would-you-kill-baby-Hitler hypothetical, but it’s an interesting engagement with the idea that ultimately finds a satisfyingly heroic resolution.

The seams are there if you look for them, and the whole thing does sit weirdly as a part of this particular franchise. (One of the funnier aspects is that no mention is made of the global plague that was still raging when the spinoff Crusade was canceled, which has apparently somehow been resolved offscreen. But in my mind at least that’s balanced by the touching tribute to the characters G’Kar and Dr. Franklin, whose performers had both recently passed away.) It’s certainly possible that I wouldn’t like this nearly as much if similar shoestring productions had followed in sequence, but for what we’ve got, I’m calling it a win.

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Jason Bourne (2016)

Movie #15 of 2025:

Jason Bourne (2016)

The first Bourne sequel, 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, opens with its ex-assassin hero off the grid somewhere overseas, minding his own business until his former employers kill a woman that he’s close with, thereby bringing him back into the game and on the hunt for answers to a wider government conspiracy around his origins as an operative. With a few tweaks, that’s the same basic formula that’s followed again here, in what’s so far the latest installment of this globe-trotting shakycam spy series.

So yes, the action and the plot both feel somewhat rote by this point, and yes, it’s understandable but still a bit silly that there’s no mention of Jeremy Renner’s super-soldier adventures that happened offscreen in The Bourne Legacy (2012) during Matt Damon’s nine-year break from the series. And sure, it’s even more absurd to think that there are further levels of the Treadstone coverup that wouldn’t have come out earlier, like how apparently Bourne’s father was the program’s original architect and was then killed by his own forces to motivate his son to join up.

On the surface, of course, these cycles have to perpetuate in order for the producers to keep making the movies and giving Jason something to do. (For all the talk of well-meaning agents wanting to ‘bring him in,’ there’s no way he works as a character reintegrated into the system and taking orders from the establishment hierarchy — or as someone who finally does know everything about his past and all the puppet-masters who strung him along.) In the process, though, these films have created a deeply cynical subtext in which the U.S. intelligence apparatus just keeps training new black-ops killers at the command of an endless chain of corrupt officials, no matter how many classified files Bourne or his compatriots find and release to the public. I won’t say it’s unrealistic, but it’s arguably more interesting than the main storyline here.

At least Tommy Lee Jones makes for a nice new villain, as an opponent with personal stakes who earns a final face-to-face showdown with the protagonist. This round’s henchman asset has a grudge too — he was captured and tortured after the last leak, which he blames Bourne for — which offers their violent scenes together a little more texture. And then there’s Alicia Vikander and her distracting attempt at an American accent, playing the good cop to their bad ones as she fills the old Julia Stiles / Joan Allen role of the resident female sympathizer within the macho-posturing CIA*. (Nicky herself, unfortunately, is the one who gets fridged at the beginning of the film, in a subplot that allows the script to clarify its viewpoint that regardless of the sins they uncover, Edward Snowden-style leakers are unpatriotic weirdos only out for their own glory.)

Our taciturn lead ultimately gets to the bottom of all that, learns a few things, and crashes some more cars as he dodges the somehow-less-trained generation of spooks after him. There’s room for rumination on how the character isn’t getting any younger — would the agency even want to put him back in the field at this point? — but that’s mostly confined to close-up shots of a battered face that’s decidedly not as fresh as when he first woke up with no memories back in The Bourne Identity (2002). Nevertheless, he proves able to neutralize the current threat against him and walk away again, more or less intact.

Is this the end of Jason Bourne (the franchise and the character)? Never say never in Hollywood, especially in our modern era of legacyquels and whatnot. A loose spinoff TV show aired for a season in 2019, and as recently as August 2025 NBCUniversal renewed their license from the Robert Ludlum estate for a reported nine-figure deal, which surely implies they plan to do something further with it, Matt Damon’s increasing age to the contrary. But for now, let’s let Bourne stride off into the shadows where he’s spent the past decade, keeping his head down until someone else at his old workplace makes the mistake of poking him again. Cue the Moby soundtrack, one last time.

*This has already gone long enough and I don’t really want to unpack the gender dynamics at greater length, so instead I’ll just direct you to this queer reading here.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig

Book #161 of 2025:

One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig (The Shepherd King #1)

I’m digging the sinister vibes here, along with the general premise of a heroine with the voice of an ancient monster secretly living in her head, a la Vespertine or Venom. Even better is the fact that, although this is a romantasy title, the young woman’s love interest is not that centuries-old creature giving her its caustically sardonic advice, but instead a regular person closer to her own age and species.

Still, that other human is a little bland for my taste, and the dynamic between the two seems predicated on instant physical attraction alone, which isn’t my favorite sort of trope. (Say what you will about the Fourth Wing books, but that couple has serious emotional chemistry by comparison!) I also have issues with the magic and further details around the worldbuilding, which never quite coheres together into a believable fleshed-out system for me. That’s a problem when the plot largely concerns the protagonist keeping secrets from her new allies and tripping over a few predictable twists while they gather the right enchanted maguffins for whatever reason.

Overall I’d say the series concept is good enough for me to carry on with the sequel, but I’m not blown away by the execution of this initial volume.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Sopranos, season 3

TV #50 of 2025:

The Sopranos, season 3

I’ve long heard that episode 3×11 “Pine Barrens” is one of the best individual hours that this show ever produced, and having finally now seen the Fargo-esque caper for myself, I can’t really argue with that designation. Unfortunately, however, the season around it is kind of a dud. The biggest plotline, for example, involves Tony facing a loose-cannon underling who’s chafing at being passed over for promotion, and although Joe Pantoliano is fun in that role, it’s hard not to feel like we saw the exact same thing with Richie last year (and echoes of it again here with Jackie Jr.). Another major development concerns the protagonist starting a new extramarital affair with a damaged woman, which is similarly only a minor spin on a previous story. And while his daughter going off to college and finding romance at least offers more of an original arc, it also proves that this program was even more influential than I realized — as successor dramas like The Good Wife or The Americans would likewise struggle to provide engaging material for their own child actors as they aged.

This is moreover the first season to be filmed in the wake of actress Nancy Marchand passing, which leaves an obvious hole in the regular cast dynamics. Creator David Chase’s intent was always to depict a toxic mother-son relationship (modeled off his own experiences), and theoretically that could shift to explore the complicated feelings that linger after someone’s abuser dies with so much still left unsaid. But in order to get there, 3×2 “Proshai, Livushka” deploys dodgy CGI effects and generic cutting-room dialogue to give Livia Soprano one final scene, which absolutely does not work. In my opinion it would have been better storytelling and more respectful to the dead if the writers had just had her character die suddenly offscreen without all that.

Another frustrating choice is to have Dr. Melfi get raped in the parking garage outside her office in 3×4 “Employee of the Month.” The idea here is to present a neat little morality play: the therapist knows she has a violent criminal for a patient whom she could turn loose on her assailant for street justice / revenge, and though she’s tempted, she ultimately decides not to get her hands dirty that way. But that premise is already far afield from what we’ve been led to expect from this series, like when David on Six Feet Under is psychologically tormented for an episode by a gun-wielding hitchhiker. In both cases it’s a random attack that feels like it violates the rules of the narrative around it, not to mention substituting a cheap shorthand of traumatic assault for character development.

Mostly, though, this all seems like yesterday’s news. And I get it! Thematically, these characters are all stuck in their repeating patterns, like Christopher and Paulie wandering endlessly through the bleak South Jersey wilderness. Dr. Melfi even points out that Tony’s attraction to women like Gloria lets him reenact his old maternal conflicts, which I suppose is reasonable enough. But you can only underscore such cycles so many times before the text starts seeming redundant and reductive, and The Sopranos is well past that point for me. I’m ready for bigger risks and more forward plot movement, please.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Jaws of Jakku by Cavan Scott

Book #160 of 2025:

Star Wars: The Jaws of Jakku by Cavan Scott

I picked up this audiobook-only Star Wars title in the hopes that its premise — following Rey, Finn, and BB-8 on a soul-searching mission back to the young woman’s homeworld after the events of The Last Jedi — would help smooth the transition between that film and The Rise of Skywalker. Unfortunately, the story instead turns out to be pretty generic filler content of the Disney+ Tales of the Whatever variety, telling us little about the characters or this stage of their respective journeys. The most interesting thing that happens isn’t the heroine gaining a degree more control over her Force powers, but rather the droid temporarily getting overwritten by a virus that causes him to turn on his friends.

I would probably call it all inoffensive and award this a baseline score of three-out-of-five stars, especially given the relatively short length of the piece, except the colloquial childishness of the excitable alien narrating the adventure proved rather irritating. Here’s how the second chapter begins, for example:

“Okay, so Rey wasn’t a Jedi yet. But she wanted to be! She wanted to be a Jedi so bad. But being a Jedi is hard. It takes years and years of practice and training. Legend has it that the original Jedi, the ones before the Empire, started training when they were kids. Like, really little kids. And Rey? Oh, she had a lot of catching up to do. So she worked hard on her lessons day and night, first with Master Skywalker and then with his sister, Princess Leia Organa. I know! An actual princess. And a general, to boot. Leia is kind of a big deal, out there in the stars…”

A whole book of that sort of tone (four hours on regular speed) was really too much for such a thin plot, so I’ll adjust my rating accordingly.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Book #159 of 2025:

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (The Ripliad #1)

Tom Ripley, as depicted in this 1955 crime thriller, its four sequels, and their various screen adaptations, is a pretty great creation. He’s insecure and sociopathic, with author Patricia Highsmith painting him as almost pedestrian in his casual amorality and petty jealousies. He’s neither as smart nor as in control of his emotions as he’d like to think he is, and although his outbursts of violence can be shocking, the real surprise is in how quickly he starts fretting over the logistics of getting away with his impulsive actions. While many writers could tell the basic beats of this story with Ripley as the villain, it takes a true artist to force the audience to so neatly identify with his self-centered nihilism and to feel so dirtily complicit in his misdeeds and their elaborate coverups.

The plot is admittedly thin: our shady protagonist is approached in New York by the rich father of a distant acquaintance, who doesn’t realize he’s a low-level criminal scraping by on scamming people into paying him their supposed overdue tax fees. The son he barely remembers is lounging about in an Italian beach town on his family’s dime, so can Tom please go there and convince Dickie to return home? He’s of course happy to accept the free ticket, and to steadily ingratiate himself into the younger man’s carefree lifestyle upon his arrival. Things turn bloody when that chapter seems to be closing for him, and the rest of the novel finds the antihero scrambling to first impersonate the friend he’s now murdered and then defuse the suspicions of the local police.

When I read and reviewed this book back in 2018, I mentioned “some problematic queer-coding that implies a connection between Ripley’s ethical deviance and his ‘sissiness’ / potential sexual orientation.” This time through — perhaps influenced by the recent Netflix miniseries — I’m more sanguine about that element. Highsmith was known in her private life as a lesbian herself, and though her title figure denies it, he’s plainly not straight either, evincing both a fascination for male bodies and the sort of platonic masculinity he somehow can’t perform and a hatred of women and the idea of any conventional romance or sex with them. I no longer see the text as suggesting that that facet is a root cause of his dark nature, however, but rather that his repression has curdled into loathing and hollowed out the human core of him. Overall, it’s a nuanced depiction well-befitting this twisted midcentury character study.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Unnatural Inquirer by Simon R. Green

Book #158 of 2025:

The Unnatural Inquirer by Simon R. Green (Nightside #8)

One of the blander adventures in this urban fantasy series, further hampered by a streak of sexism and unaddressed poor behavior from the protagonist. And look, I get that John Taylor is something of an antihero — the whole crux of this installment involves his one-off companion realizing in dawning horror that he’ll murder his enemies with no remorse when he has them at his mercy — but that sort of stark morality is at least quasi-defensible. It’s a lot harder for me to accept how he repeatedly cheats on his serious girlfriend by kissing this new character, who says he deserves to be with someone that can stand to touch him (Suzie having an established aversion to physical intimacy due to certain experiences in her past). In the end our detective hero rebuffs the newcomer, but only because the scarred bounty hunter is fine with all the killing and he feels that ‘monsters’ like the two of them deserve one another. No mention is made of how he’s been happily making out with the other woman regardless.

It’s problematic to say the least, and it’s particularly glaring due to not much else of interest happening throughout the novel. The local tabloid that gives the piece its title has hired the paranormal investigator to retrieve a supposed taped broadcast from the afterlife, but the plot doesn’t really build and ricochet in the way these books can do at their best. Instead the characters linearly chase one dead-end lead after another, with a smidgen of serialized development in the greater Nightside power struggle taking place on the margins. It’s altogether dull and nasty, rather than the typical clever fun that I come here for.

[Content warning for gun violence, fatphobia, incest, rape, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: The Bourne Legacy (2012)

Movie #14 of 2025:

The Bourne Legacy (2012)

The beginning of this piece is choppy and overwrought, doing little to sell the already-flimsy idea of telling a Jason Bourne story without Jason Bourne. It weaves in and out of the events of the previous film, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), in a manner that’s alienatingly hard to follow even for someone like me who just watched the thing. In the process, it painstakingly manages to convey the basic premise here, which is that the conspiracy Bourne’s been unraveling reaches far beyond the CIA. The military is involved as well, running a taskforce of elite operatives around the world whom they now begin killing off to cover their tracks as news of the Treadstone program goes public.

Eventually, the script settles into itself, with Jeremy Renner’s character the sole survivor of the attempted purge. He has no canonical connection to the old Matt Damon role, but his journey progresses similarly, using his tactical skills to protect the civilian doctor he’s with (Rachel Weisz, filling the Julia Stiles position of sidekick-who’s-not-quite-a-love-interest) and evade the enemies hunting them down. It all stays close enough to what we’d expect of a Bourne flick that it’s easy to miss how we’ve jumped genres here to science-fiction if not Renner’s more familiar superheroics: Jason may have been a trained assassin experimentally conditioned not to question his orders, but this new cohort take a viral drug to boost their physical and cognitive abilities and become literal super-soldiers. Our protagonist Aaron Cross is even in a Flowers for Algernon situation, where he was mentally incapacitated before starting the treatments, giving his quest to find more medication or a permanent fix considerable weight.

In the end, I don’t think this installment is as strong as the original trilogy — which I’ve liked but not exactly loved anyway — so I’ll rate it accordingly. The closing act is particularly disappointing, featuring the requisite franchise car chase and an antagonist who’s hilariously revealed as a member of an even more experimental and clandestine division in a frankly silly escalation of stakes. There’s no confrontation with the true villain played by Edward Norton, despite an early flashback establishing that he and Aaron have a personal history together, which winds up being the only scene they ever share. Nothing really gets resolved on the wider plot front either, although a couple Ultimatum characters are bizarrely trotted out at the last minute for a quick cameo appearance.

This might work better if further Aaron Cross sequels had followed, but my understanding is that the next (and apparently final) movie in the series opts to ignore this one entirely, rendering it a curious aberration instead. I don’t regret watching it, but it’s by far the weakest Tony Gilroy effort I’ve seen to date.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

Book #157 of 2025:

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

Interesting and well-written, and yet beholden to a bizarre structure that ultimately weakens the work. Essentially there are four threads that author Caroline Fraser develops here, interweaving them as she goes:

1) a true-crime history of American serial killers throughout her life, beginning in the early 1960s, and discussion of how many like Ted Bundy lived or spent significant time in the Pacific Northwest around Tacoma, where she’s also from,

2) an account of unchecked corporate pollution across that same era, particularly of arsenic and lead, with a focus on the nearby ASARCO smelting plant,

3) a running list of fatal vehicle accidents on the local bridges, and

4) her own coming-of-age story amidst all that, with a controlling father in the Christian Science faith who didn’t believe in modern medicine.

The first two items are tenuously linked, at least. The book is arguing in support of the lead-crime hypothesis, which holds that regular exposure to such toxic chemicals can yield an increase in mood swings and violent urges and therefore the sort of sadistic acts that she describes. It’s an idea that I find persuasive but hardly conclusive, and the writer’s engagement with it is pretty surface-level. She presents no evidence that her area of Washington was ever more afflicted by the unsafe materials than similar factory towns around the nation, for example, which suggests to me that some other factor may be required to account for just why it gave rise to so many unhinged rapists and murderers.

The remaining topics are considerably more afield. I can understand the urge to incorporate memoir elements, although the presentation makes it seem like there’s some dark family secret waiting in the wings that never actually arises. But the traffic fatalities don’t connect to anything else at all, reading like Fraser simply wanted them told to the wider world in some manner but knew they couldn’t carry the title alone. In the end I’ve learned things within these pages — uncomfortable, terrifying details about the crimes of the unrepentant prowlers detailed here — but I’m not especially satisfied with the construction of the piece overall.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, rape, child sex abuse, violence against children, necrophilia, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison

Book #156 of 2025:

So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison

I appreciate that this vampire title is less straightforward than author Rachel Harrison’s earlier werewolf novel Such Sharp Teeth, but as it turns out, unpredictability doesn’t necessarily translate to a stronger work. Although I didn’t know quite where the plot was going, its tale of two women in their mid-thirties getting turned into bloodsuckers on a friends retreat never really has any clear point to it. There’s no consideration of their strained dynamic, no payoff to the heroine’s husband’s infidelity, and no resolution to the fundamental genre question of the undead’s need to prey upon the living. (Sloane is more reluctant to do so than Naomi, but opportunities to feed on scummy men keep allowing her / the text to sidestep the matter. I’m reminded of that old piece of writing advice that bad luck can get your characters into a situation, but good luck shouldn’t get them out of one.)

Is this a story about toxic friendships? About feminist rage? About the invisibility a woman in a loveless marriage might feel as she gets older? There are glancing aspects of those themes, but in my opinion they aren’t ever developed at a satisfying length. At the same time, however, the bloody action isn’t nearly interesting or distinctive enough in its details to carry the book on its own.

And then there’s the requisite love interest, a 600-year-old man who tells the still-mortal protagonist on the night that he meets her, “It’s beyond attraction, what’s between us.” I’m sorry, but that kind of line is just way too cheesy to take seriously, and his subsequent characterization as a beatnik in a dirty van robbing blood banks to survive doesn’t come anywhere close to explaining his appeal. That’s another element that could have been intentionally honed — critiquing his sexist sense of entitlement, perhaps — but in practice feels utterly lifeless on the page.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆