The Leftovers: Season 2

Little late at submitting this as I was nearly done watching season 2 when I was writing the post for season 1. Let's be completely honest. The only real reason I've been watching this show is out of respect for dear fellow Back-Blogger, Sween. He seems to have a true appreciation and love for this show. After catching up on both seasons currently available I can definitively say... I don't share the same love for The Leftovers.

It's very much "ok" for me. 

Season 2 continues Kevin Garvey's journey in picking up the pieces to his life after the Rapture-like event that the whole show revolves around. This season primarily focuses on the Garvey's moving to the small Texas town called Miracle -- known for having zero disappearances during the Sudden Departure -- as a new start for both him and his family. 

And, of course, just about everything goes completely wrong for them.

Let's start with the things I did like about this season. I really liked the build-ups. Seeing how Tom and Laurie move on after the Guilty Remnants and Holy Wayne, respectively. Or following Meg's climb to power within the Guilty Remnants, wondering what her masterplan might be as she marches down her dark, demented path. And watching Kevin struggle with his inner-demons all under the suspicious watch of his menacing neighbor. Aside from these set-ups that the majority of the season revolves around, I was also thoroughly intrigued by the episode where Kevin ventures into the afterlife to battle his inner-demon, Patti. Easily the best episode of the season. But I commend all these set-ups and build-ups in making the season both intriguing and fun.

Then things go horribly wrong by the end. 

Most of these set-ups fizzle out to weird, unsatisfying conclusions near the end of the season. Tom and Laurie just sort of fart around half the season when they were initially on this cool path to start a new cult or Tom possibly joining the Guilty Remnants. Then I thought Meg's story would culminate in some ballsy, violent attack making the Guilty Remnants into more of a radical-terrorist organization. Instead, they bluff their big attack yet somehow still manage to cause such a massive riot in Miracle. Then, we have Kevin. Despite having Kevin struggle so hard to return back to the land of the living, he almost instantly gets shot and killed again, plunging him back to the underworld. Despite Kevin having to struggle with all his might to leave the afterlife the first time around, he escapes the second time by... singing Karaoke? No. I don't buy it. I don't buy any of it. 

Is this the curse of Damon Lindelof all over again? To be able to kick stories off in strong, compelling ways, but then never being able to conclude them? This is the same thing that happened for me with Lost. Loved the first three seasons of it, then it just sort of fell apart after that. And the finale? Ugh... Don't get me started. 

Point is, I found this show generally fun, interesting, and engaging through the majority of the season, but the ending seemed so sloppily put together, I struggled to maintain my interest. I hope season 3 (the final season) is able to pull this show together -- especially now that they confirmed a few supernatural elements/plot lines -- better than Lindelof was able to do with Lost. 

The Dresden Files: Turn Coat (Book #11)

I'm closing in on being all caught up with the series, thus far. Book #11 out of #15. Let's get to it.

As Sweeney is currently slogging through the escapades of Chicago's favorite wizard-detective, I spare on the nitty-gritty details of the plot. 

In essence, this is a story where Dresden's rival -- a man he's butted heads with continuously since book #1 -- arrives at his doorstep, near dead, and supposedly framed for a heinous crime he didn't commit. Needless to say, both allies and foes are after this dude and Dresden is unfortunately positioned as the only person who can clear his name and save him.

This book was a lot of fun to read -- much like the others that came before it. I'm not exactly sure how it would rank amongst the ten other books in the series I've read so far, but it's definitely sitting near the top of the list. Just not the the top. I'm taking another break from the series before diving into book #12 Changes -- the book many fans seem to rank as their all-time favorite novel of the series (standing along side Grave Peril and Dead Beat). Perhaps I'll get to this guy before 2016 closes, perhaps not. One thing is for sure, I want to be in a fresh state of mind to really enjoy the next chapter in Dresden's story before embarking. 

The Shining

It's October, so why not? I went ahead and read The Shining. Now, I loved the movie. (Based on our recent Rank & File at gametimebro, I wasn't alone - everyone loves the movie.) But I've loved most of the Stanley Kubrick movies I've seen, and I've only loved - or even liked - some of the Stephen King books I've read; both are masters of their domain, but give me Kubrick's films over King's stories any day. So while I was excited to read The Shining, I was also a bit skeptical. I mean, what if Kubrick had made a gem of a film out of some very middling source material?

Well, props to King after all - The Shining was an excellent and unnerving story that I absolutely devoured. It's a bit different from the film it inspired, though not nearly as much as some would have you believe. No, it's all laid out here. Jack, Wendy, and Danny, spending a winter at a magnificent but haunted hotel - Jack gradually losing his mind, Wendy fearing for her safety and her son's, and Danny capable of zoning out into little trances ("shining") that let him see ghosts or other terrifying visions. What you get in the book that you don't get in the film - because you can develop people and places more with 650 pages than you can with two hours - are all these little character flourishes that I think greatly added to the overall story. When I watched the movie, I wasn't really invested in the family's wellbeing; when I read the book, it was about all I cared about, even knowing that things wouldn't end well.

We dive deep and learn that Jack's a terrible alcoholic, but that he's been off the sauce ever since his temper got the better of him and he broke his son's arm. He feels horrible about that, and also about losing his job as a teacher back in New England, and in a lot of ways he considers his winter caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel as his last real chance in life not to be a complete fuck up. Then you've got Wendy, who was ready to divorce Jack after what he did to Danny - and throughout the book it's clear she's never fully forgiven him for it, even though she wants to. But Wendy's got all sorts of apprehensions about wintering at a hotel cut off from civilization that have nothing to do with any fears that Jack will hurt anyone; she keeps thinking about the Donner Party having to eat one another when they ran out of food. And she's harboring some dark, ill-defined resentment toward her own mother. Meanwhile, Danny's "shining" abilities are much more pronounced here. Tony isn't a creepy little finger-based buddy he breaks out now and again, but a full-blown voice in his head that gives him premonitions and telepathic capabilities. Danny also reads his parents minds with some regularity, and knows - despite being just five - that they've contemplated divorce, for instance. And he knows his father feels terrible for breaking his arm. And so Danny is way more concerned with his parents staying together than he is about all the weird shit going on at the Overlook Hotel - at least at first.

So yeah - the book absolutely holds its own here. Plenty of the classic scenes in the movie - "All work and no play," "Here's Johnny," the twins, the maze - Kubrick added all of those, and his movie's all the better for it. But in their place, the book contains some unsettling elements of its own - a wasp attack, some animated topiary hedges, a few more ominous premonitions from Danny, a pesky boiler that doesn't maintain its internal pressure very well, and plenty else.

If I have to compare the two, I'd say Kubrick's much better at bringing the slow-burning tension to a head in a terrifying manner, but King did a much better job at establishing these characters and at making me care about them. Granted, those might just be strengths of "film" and "written word," respectively. But yeah, it's a great book.

Stan's Movie Dump: Mid-October 2016

The horror binge continues. We've got everything from classics to indies and from bloodlust to slapstick. Let's jump on in.

Trouble Every Day

Meh. This French movie about lovestruck cannibals was very highly acclaimed, so I went ahead and sought it out and, yeah, not really. Fucking arthouse... There are definitely some grossly bloody scenes here; the lines between sexual lust and a ravenous appetite are blurred, leading to some truly horrific sex scenes. But I wanted more substance!

Carrie

Wow - Stephen King's very first film adaptation. Imagine that! This was dated, as most movies from 1976 are today, but it wasn't shitty-dated. That's such an important distinction. There were some weird script decisions in this one - what's with the extended tuxedo-buying montage with all the nameless dudes? - but Sissy Spacek is great as the put-upon Carrie. She's a weird little loner at school with an abusive mother at home - and oh yeah, telekinetic powers - and on prom night she just fucking snaps and, well, that scene earns the movie its "horror" tag after an hour and a half of much more conventional high school drama. I wasn't blown away by this, but given my track record with movies from before, I dunno, my birth? This worked. This was good.

The Descent

Make it two straight posters featuring a woman covered in blood! The Descent is a modern classic - ten years old still counts as modern, right? - for good reason; it's not that it does anything phenomenally, but it does everything so well. By obeying all the conventional rules of horror filmmaking - make your victims feel trapped, use very little light, don't show the monsters at all early on - it just kind of manages to be a great exercise in genre. At the very least, it makes me never want to go into a cave, ever, for any reason. And that's what an effective horror movie does. It stays with you. Not that we should all be carrying around more phobias or anything.

It Follows

Lotta hype around this one, and I think it delivered. It wasn't quite as scary as most slasher films are, but that's totally in keeping with the gimmick of its slow-moving monster - an unspecified being who can take any form, and constantly walks toward you in order to kill you. Never running, never driving, never swimming - just walking. Stalking, deliberately. Completely epitomizes the idea of "you can run but you can't hide." You can drive a thousand miles away from this thing, but all that will buy you is time. It's still coming. It's always coming. It follows! As you can imagine, a lot of tension came from seeing people just walking toward the camera in the distance. And I haven't even gotten to the STD metaphors yet! Solid movie.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

I didn't love this. I'm all for over-the-top stupidity in slasher movies, but the plot here was just too dumb, even considering the genre. A bunch of college kids come across two well-meaning hillbillies in West Virginia, assume they're creepy serial killers through a series of misconstrued gestures and snippets of conversation, and ultimately die one by one in a series of ill-conceived attacks on the pair. It just felt too slight for me. I'm fine with absurd death scenes and ridiculous character motivations - it's horror-comedy, after all - but this, eh, less so.

An American Werewolf in London

This very pleasantly surprised me. So many horror movies - hell, so many movies in general - can maintain my interest for about half an hour or so before squandering it away and petering out. It's so often the case where the tension built up in the early going - the unsettling regression from "this is normal" to "shit, guys, this isn't normal" - is far more interesting than seeing the monster, seeing the heroes fight the monster, and so on. Not so, here! If I was bored early on during An American Werewolf in London, I was enthralled during its rising action and climax, in which our poor bastard protagonist goes on a horrifying killing spree. The effects are all kinds of dated and Jim Henson-y, particularly when it comes to animating the undead, but Rick Baker deserves kudos and praise for his then-brilliant werewolf transition sequence.

Dogtooth

This didn't wind up being "horror" in any real sense of the word, but holy shit was it disturbing. Think Room but without the kidnapping and rape and in a bigger home, but where no one ever escapes. A man and his wife have forbidden their three children - late teens to mid-twenties - from ever leaving their isolated estate. This leaves us with three young adults completely naive about the outside world, who've been brought up to believe in some really fucked up things. They're gullible as hell, and that's sad, and they're abused for disobedience, and that's horrifying, and they've got sexual curiosities, and that's - well, you get the idea. I've seen my fair share of messed up movies, so believe me when I say that this was very, very messed up. And still I kind of enjoyed it. Or at least couldn't stop watching. Looking forward to The Lobster!

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

What's cool about this black and white Iranian movie is that it's really pretty looking. The titular girl is a vampire and - this being Iran - she wears a chador, which looks so much like an old school vampire cape as she skateboards around her city at night looking for victims (dudes, it seems, and bad ones at that). Good stuff. But as with so many other subtitled movies, I couldn't fully lose myself in this one. Eh, it's an okay trade off.

Poltergeist

A while back - ten years or so? - I was talking to my dad about horror movies. He told me that this one scared the absolute shit out of him and affected his sleep for weeks afterward. It came out in 1982, which means he'd have been around my age (then) at the time - mid-college. That always stayed with me - that Poltergeist scared the hell out of my dad only six years or so before I was born. I mean, shit, this had to really be something, right? Anyway, I watched this the other night and it was a solid exercise of the horror genre - but even compared to other older horror movies I've seen, sorry Dad, but it's not clear what about this was haunting your dreams. The idea of getting sucked through the TV to another dimension? A demonic portal opening up in your bedroom? Okay, fine - there was plenty here that could scare a barely-grown man, sure. But to me this was more of a "good movie" than a "scary movie." Does that make sense?

The Shallows

I had my issues with this one - mostly factual, like how it gets tides all wrong (and tides are a major component of the story) or how certain beach-goers managed not to see the shark-ravaged carcasses of other beach-goers that had previously washed ashore - but for a quick, dumb shark movie? This was good enough. Remember in Gravity how they give Sandra Bullock the barest semblance of a tragedy that haunts her past, and then they just start flinging her around from space station to space station and her increasing will to survive is supposed to seem like character development? Yeah - take exactly that, set it on rocky outcrops and buoys instead of in outer space, and that's The Shallows.

V/H/S

This was very effectively scary, but also very bad. It's an anthology of five short "films" (all found footage) in which weird and fucked up things start happening to regular people. Some of the shorts were quite effective - the first one in particular had a generic but visually horrifying and memorable monster and the third and fourth ones made for some really good mindfucks - but the whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, and the sum of those parts isn't even all that much anyway. V/H/S was good for some quick scares but not much else; that said, it's Halloween - what more do you want than a few quick scares?

Holy smokes, a three-post month? It's happening!

Trev's Movie Dump: August - September 2016

Wowzers. Sorry. Forgot about these posts I was planning on writing a months ago. Don’t perfectly recall watching a whole lot of these films, but here’s a stab at recalling what I’ve seen.

Suicide Squad

Oh, God… Even the fog of memory doesn’t help this dumpster fire look any better now over two months from when it first came out in theaters. There was high hopes for this guy to save the other DC/WB mess that was Batman v Super: Dawn of Justice. I don’t even know where to begin on what was wrong with this film. How about we leave the mess of a story alone, and just quickly talk about the actors/characters.

Will Smith is great at being Will Smith. And, like always, he has great charism on screen. You'll likely get exactly what you expect with him.

Margot Robbie got big praise for her rendition of Harley Quinn, when, honestly… I wasn’t all that won over. She was fine, but it always seemed weird that amongst this rag-tag group of anti-heroes with obvious talents, her's seemed to be that she just swung a bat around. (They allude they she knew how to seduce her enemies at the beginning of the story , but that strength quickly goes out the door once our heroes start fighting mutant monsters throughout the bulk of the film.) Performance, though, I just don't know. I'm hearing there might be a standalone Harley Quinn movie in the future. I guess I would be open to that, but certainly not jumping up and down to see it. 

We could have easily done away with Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang and Slipknot (not that he’s in the movie for all that long). Point is, there’s a lot of people, a lot of pieces moving around in this story and it’s a little difficult to keep up with what’s going on or being able to focus long enough on one person to form some sort of emotional attachment to them.  

Then we have Jared Leto’s the Joker. I honestly don’t have much to say about this performance because the Joker was only in the movie a total of five minutes… maybe. I don’t even know what they were thinking about teasing the character like this. It’s as if they meant for it to be a larger role, than chicken-out at the last second. What I can say is that it seems like they’re moving far away from the Heath Ledger direction, and now the Joker is much more of a psychotic thug than this mysterious “agent of chaos” who’s performance earned an Oscar.

The last character we’ll talk to is Viola Davis as Amanda Waller. This was easily the best performance in the whole film. She was cold, chilling, and fun to watch. Leagues above everyone else.

There’s a lot more I could say about this film, most -- if not all -- bad, but at this point let me just leave with a statement to WB.

I couldn’t be happier that these films are being made. That I’m living in a world where I can see Deadshot at a standoff with Batman on the big screen. Please don’t stop bringing the heroes will love -- or will learn to love -- to theaters. But, for the love of Superman, simplify your stories! I feel like these films managed to incorporate every single note that was given from every single exec and studio head. Not all notes are good. Not every piece of material has to make it into a movie. Even if they has a 10-episode miniseries to tell these stories, it would still be challenging to capture everything. 

You’ve gone big and bold… twice, without much critical acclaim. Now try out making them smaller. Making them more intimate. Perhaps we’ll see some of that in the new The Batman. #BelieveInBatfleck

Kubo and the Two Strings

Visually stunning, yet the story leaves a little to be desired. Frankly, you can almost watch this movie for the imagery alone. I love stop-motion animation and want to pay it the respect it needs to ensure it stays alive in the industry. This film does manage to use the animation style to its benefit with imaginative characters and colorful settings -- like a giant skeleton that has swords imbedded into its skull to mimic hair. Really cool shit.

Unfortunately, cool shit doesn't save a film. The story felt a little flimsy, but, then again, it was more like a fairy tale, of sorts. Kind of like The Princess Bride, while a beloved and cult-favorite film, it was kind of a weak story. That's how I think of Kubo and the Two Strings. I can hope one day it will reach some level of cult status to make up being such a flop at the box office. 

The Lobster

Wow... I was not expecting what I got with this movie. I thought I was entering into this dry and witty, dark-comedy about a bleak future where if you're not in a relationship you get turned into an animal of your choosing. (Interesting, right?) The story ended up being sooo much darker than I thought. I mean, it's bleak as all fuck. I think I would have liked it more had I went into it with absolutely no expectations, but since I went into it wanting to laugh -- especially at the sight of John C. Reilly -- I was instead wincing in pain and sorrow. It's a bit of a tough movie to get through, and while certainly don't hate it... it's not one of my favorites of the year. Curious what others would have to say. 

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

The year of #LongReads is slipping away, what with all these three-hundred page nothingburgers I keep on churning through, but that's okay. Here's the much-maligned sequel to the Harry Potter series. Why don't people love this? If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's because it's a stage play rather than a book - and how many people read stage plays on the reg? And also because it was written by two guys who weren't J.K. Rowling. It's basically fan fiction. Fan fiction by professional writers, sure, but fan fiction all the same.

The story begins some nineteen years after the conclusion of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - so, right where that book's epilogue stops, I guess - and focuses on Harry's black sheep of a son, Albus Severus, who's so unlike Harry that he ends up in Slytherin and befriends a Malfoy. Ga-whu? I actually liked this best in its early stages, as we just check in on our wizard friends nineteen years on in middle age. How's the gang all doing? Great to see you again. Anyway, what ensues is a messy and convoluted "Voldemort returns" story that really strains disbelief, considering how thoroughly he was beaten at the end of the main series and all. (Slight spoiler - we've got time travel, folks!)

I can't say this really enhanced the series in any way, but so what? I mean, forgive me, but was Harry Potter ever even "good," or was it just an entertaining example of good young adult fiction? I mean, for fuck's sake, if you think Harry Potter was something good enough to have a "legacy" that would be "tarnished" by this modestly entertaining epilogue of sorts, go back and read the first book again.

Bottom line, this was enjoyable and entertaining, albeit slight. But my hunch is that you either already knew that, or you were never interested in this book in the first place.

Now - let's get the year of #BigReads back on track with some seasonally appropriate Stephen King. (Damn, I've gotta settle on one hashtag.)

Stan's Movie Dump: Early October 2016

Oof. In an attempt to bolster my horror movie canon, I've spent the first half of October just plowing through movies. Here are my thoughts...

Amanda Knox

Okay, the horror doesn't start right away. First up I saw a documentary about Amanda Knox which - yeah, you know what, this was a bit of a horror movie I suppose. If you're familiar with Knox's case already, this doesn't really provide a ton of new insight. But if you aren't, holy shit, watch this as soon as possible! (It's a Netflix original.) You think Steven Avery got screwed? Brother, you ain't seen nothing until you've seen what the British tabloids and Italian courts did to Amanda Knox.

The Invitation

Here's one of those unassuming little indie titles that I see from time to time on Netflix or Amazon. Good reviews, quick runtime, why not? This ended up being a not-so-great movie about a dinner party gone awry, but I don't regret the time I spent watching it. After all, "dinner party gone awry" also describes, say, Coherence, a hidden gem I found last year and absolutely loved. They can't all be winners, folks!

The Congress

I always knew I had to see this, but damn is it a weird one. It's got Robin Wright, playing herself, and struggling with the reality of being an aging actress who very well may never find work again. (House of Cards doesn't seem to exist in this world.) So she sells her image and likeness to a film studio that, using a new technology reminiscent of full motion capture, creates a perpetually 34-year-old "Robin Wright" to use in movies for ages to come. All this is interesting enough, but one third of the way through the movie, shit gets completely surreal. Twenty years later, the entire world becomes animated. By this I mean that people drink hallucinogenic potions and begin to see the world around them as some gigantic mess of Disney and Looney Tunes. The whole thing is directed by Ari Folman, whose Waltz with Bashir is one of the best and most moving animated films I've seen. And it's loosely based, at least in its third act, on The Futurological Congress, a dystopian book from '70s Poland that I read a few years back. Oh, and Jon Hamm is here, too. Or at least his voice is. Now, so many reasons to see this - but did it all come together? Not really. This was messy and almost at odds with itself for the most part, and it's very deserving of the mixed reviews it's garnered. But man, what an experience.

Rosemary's Baby

Okay, here's where the horror binge begins in earnest. Snooze! I've lamented it a dozen times in these movie dumps, but older movies so rarely hold up to my #21stCenturyPrivilege standards and Rosemary's Baby was no exception. I'm sure this was a huge deal in 1968 - a woman, pregnant with SATAN'S BABY? We're all going to hell for even allowing this to be made! - but it really wasn't very scary and it really wasn't very interesting as a story. I'm sorry!

The Others

This was good, and maybe the best ghost movie I've ever seen. (Depends on how "ghosts" are defined, I guess. I'm not talking possessive spirits here.) Not sure what surprised me more - the ending (which, dammit, I should have seen coming!) or the fact that in fifteen years no one spoiled the ending for me. I mean, this is a Sixth Sense-level twist. Anyway, I dug it. 

Let the Right One In

This Swedish vampire-ish movie had such good reviews, so I didn't even think to check out the English language remake. I should have! Apparently it's just as good - and how often does that happen? Anyway, this was delightful and fun and all kinds of scary: jump scary, creepy scary, shocking amounts of gore scary, etc. But it wasn't really a horror movie. It's more of a teen romance, or a budding friendship movie, disguised as a horror film. I won't hold that against it - lots of the best movies with horror elements aren't pure "horror" movies at all - but just know heading into this that you'll be saying "aww!" at least as often as you'll be saying "AHH!"

28 Days Later

I knew plenty about this movie going in - mostly that it completely redefined the zombie genre by making the dangerous hordes "infected" and fast and vicious rather than "reanimated" corpses who just kind of ambled along aimlessly - but nothing could have prepared me for how old and shitty and dated this thing looked. This is a 2002 movie that looked grainier and blurrier than most things this side of 1985. Granted, it was a very low-budget film, and the grainy look definitely matched the vibe, so, fine - but still! Anyway, I liked this a lot. Not quite as much as I hoped to; it gets bogged down in the same tedious "other people are the real monsters in a zombie apocalypse" themes that plague everything else in the genre. And hey, maybe - again - this was the catalyst for that trend to start popping up everywhere, but I guess I was looking for more of a "holy shit, fast zombies are everywhere, and we're all gonna die" vibe in the vein of the Dawn of the Dead remake. But this was good! It was good.

Honeymoon

I'm drawn to streamable indie horror flicks. This one's got a grand total of four actors - only two main characters - and it takes place in, of course, a secluded cabin in the woods. Two twenty-somethings gets married. They have great chemistry. They joke a lot. They fuck a lot. And then one night the woman sleepwalks naked out into the middle of the woods, and suddenly, everything is different. She's spacey. Distant. Weirdly cut and bruised. The man is confused, concerned, and eventually of course quite distraught. There aren't a lot of jump scares in this one, and frankly, the story doesn't make a ton of sense - it's an allegory, but for what!? - but the final act is plenty disturbing. I liked this! Your mileage may vary.

Dressed to Kill

Oof. Damn, what a bore. I had high hopes for this - Brian De Palma making a Hitchcock-esque thriller in the '80s about a transgender serial killer? Sure, yes, let's do this! And... nope. Nothing! Even Michael Caine couldn't make this interesting. Let's move on.

The Ring

Alright - this lived up to all the hype. Fucking. Terrifying. Apparently the sequels are butt, which is too bad, but who cares? This is the kind of movie that absolutely would have given my younger self nightmares for days. (Nights?) Glad I didn't see this in 2002 when it came out. I'd still be interested in seeing the original Japanese version. I have one friend who's seen it, as far as I know. That friend? Sheridan, of all people. And he liked it! Imagine that!

From Dusk Till Dawn

I've wanted to see this for a long time - probably fifteen years - but not enough to actually, you know, see it. Because I always knew it'd be this kind of middling Robert Rodriguez movie that played like an Evil Dead knockoff set near the Mexican border. Now, this wasn't bad - Clooney was great, and Tarantino's script elevated this a great deal - but it was still a rather generic monster shoot-em-up, ostensibly about vampires but really just full of whatever the hell monsters and demons Rodriguez and company felt like designing and throwing in there. It all felt very '80s. Very B-movie. But hey, Salma Hayek looked great, huh?

There will be more to come in October, I assure you. But this will have to do for now.

Inferno

Ten years ago I read Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code between my senior year of high school and my first year of college, and I thought they were just great. Then came the movies, first The Da Vinci Code and then Angels & Demons, which together made Dan Brown's Robert Langdon a household Tom Hanks character, but also kind of sucked. And hey, in hindsight, the books kind of sucked too, and the Internet agrees, and at this point Dan Brown has become a bit of a laughing stock among people who read, oh, at least one book a year you can't buy in an airport.

Five years ago I read The Lost Symbol, and it was just terrible. Six-hundred-some-odd pages of the same old formulaic romp through Washington, with symbol-based riddles and ancient secrets and a giant conspiracy and a boatload of pseudo-science. Hot garbage, completely unmemorable, and the best thing I could say about it was that it flew right by.

So it was with very little enthusiasm that I started into Inferno a week ago. Imagine my surprise when the book, hey, wow, wasn't that bad! I mean, it was still "Dan Brown" bad - at one point a woman was described as "an epidemiologist of epidemics" - but it was tough to put down and easy to get into and loaded with all kinds of twists and turns I didn't see coming. (Some of them cheap as hell, sure, but still!) Look, what I'm saying is that I liked this book against all my better judgment. Dan Brown is still a bad writer from any technical standpoint, but airport paperbacks are meant to be quick comfort food, and sometimes a big old McDonald's combo meal sits just right.

Apparently a film adaptation of this one is coming out in less than a week. Wow! I had no idea! I will watch it within the next few years, I am sure.

Morning Star

Late last year, I read Red Rising and its sequel Golden Son, saying in my review of the second book:

What do I want from Morning Star, the coming-in-2016 conclusion to this series? More than anything, a brake pump. Let's slow things down. Zoom in on the main character and his personal issues, zoom way out and look at this society's struggles overall - it doesn't matter. But [Golden Son was wall-to-wall] crazy high-stakes action and now it's time to land this ship instead of just flinging it into a wall as hard as possible.

So, what's the verdict?

[Timpani drum roll]

[Dramatic pause]

[A brief, high-pitched squeaker of a fart]

Five-hundred pages of tersely described space fights and planet-ruling college-aged kids betraying one another. Early on it looked as though I might get my wish for a brake pump. Our protagonist, captured and tortured for a year after the shocking events that concluded Golden Son, returns bruised and battered and broken to his very humble origins. I'm thinking, yes. Okay. Here's where we break into the third act. Here's where our guy reconnects to his roots. Here's where he "remembers what's worth fighting for." Here's where - oh, no, never mind, there he goes zipping off into space again to kidnap a billionaire or stop a moon from exploding. And just like that, Morning Star turned into Golden Son all over again.

I mean, I think I liked it better than Golden Son, at least a little. It did conclude neatly, if not amazingly. Then again, the second book was a page-turner whereas this one was a little more sluggish. I guess I stopped caring about the story somewhere in 2016. Pierce Brown had an interesting little something going with Red Rising - sort of a more sophisticated and sci-fi-flavored version of The Hunger Games with lots of references to Greek and Roman antiquity. But after an impressive-by-YA-standards job at building worlds and setting stakes, he spent the next two books flinging characters back and forth between alliances - his protagonist oblivious to all of it of course - and ended up bringing more than a few people back from the dead (or, just as bad, and more frequently, allowing them to be captured only to get away at an opportune moment). It's not "bad" or "lazy" writing, it's just YA fiction being YA fiction.

Brown's already announced another trilogy set in the same world and in it he intends to explore the society surrounding the events of this civil-ish war for the solar system throne. That's great, but I'm not biting. You had your chance, bud!

I'm done with YA fiction, guys. (Almost. Still have one more on the backlog...)

Stan's TV Dump: September 2016

Fall's here, I'm back at school, and the TV beat goes on and on and on. Let's get on down to it.

Flowers: Season 1

Another Seeso binge, this just wasn't for me at all. I get what they're going for here - super-dramatic British despair played for laughs - but it never really clicked for me. Thankfully it was just six episodes.

Hard Knocks: Season 11

Every few years I watch Hard Knocks, and more often than not I'm reminded that there's no compelling reason to watch it. That Jets season with Rex Ryan notwithstanding, it turns out football coaches tend to be just cookie cutter as hell. Plus, fuck the Rams.

One Mississippi: Season 1

Yes, yes, yes. Loved this. I'd only vaguely been familiar with Tig Notaro before watching this "comedy" on Amazon Prime, but she:

• is gay
• is from Mississippi
• lost her mother unexpectedly
• had breast cancer
• had a double mastectomy without reconstructive surgery
• developed severe gastrointestinal problems after her cancer and surgery

And she jumps straight into all of this and more in this six-episode series. Truly a tear-jerker of a show and yet, somehow, undeniably funny and hopeful and uplifting. What got me most of all was the version of Mississippi depicted here - not the backwoods hellhole my elitist East Coast ass assumes it is, but a friendly, progressive, tolerant place to live on the Gulf Coast, with warm weather and good food. (Was this an exaggeration? Probably. But still!) So yeah, One Mississippi was great.

An Idiot Abroad: Season 1

Here's one I've been meaning to get around to for a while. Karl Pilkington is a friend and collaborator of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and he's just fantastically dull. As a spinoff of sorts to a podcast segment in which Karl dismisses lots of world travel as pointless and not worth it, Ricky and Steve decided to send him to see the seven wonders of the modern world. See him cope with traffic in India! Watch him ride a camel in Egypt in total discomfort! Observe as he chokes down authentic Chinese food with fear in his eyes! It's total cringe comedy - so, Ricky Gervais has a field day with it as you may expect - but I can't pretend I didn't laugh at poor Carl a time or two. Look, he brings it on himself! He spent a week in Mexico and complained multiple times that he hadn't yet seen or eaten a Mexican jumping bean - go ahead and Google what a Mexican jumping bean is. There are two more seasons of An Idiot Abroad, and although I'm in no rush, I'm sure I'll get around to them eventually.

Vice Principals: Season 1

Lotta mixed feelings here. For something that was initially billed as "Danny McBride vs. Walton Goggins," this... wasn't. McBride was serviceable enough as a very McBride type of sad schlub - picture Kenny Powers without any fame or fortune - and Goggins was fantastic, but the narrative thread here wasn't my favorite. Two vice principals conspire to overthrow the new principal - a successful and headstrong black woman - in what at times feels like "angry white men: the show." I thought the nine episodes were really hit-or-miss, with one of the objectively dumbest scenes of the season (a druggy dual-hallucination outside a high school football game) sending me into absolute hysterics while a few entire episodes left me unenthused. From the get-go HBO said Vice Principals would last two and only two seasons, so perhaps this is just a story that's only been half told at this point. Time will tell!

Fleabag: Season 1

A six-episode quickie from Amazon Prime. British. Funny enough, but really nothing memorable. Sorry!

Big Brother: Season 18

This is my trashy summer comfort food. Big Brother always has a tough time sustaining itself for entire seasons. In a game comprised almost entirely of competitions, alliances, and backstabbing, you can almost always count on a few great moments a year where a villain is born or an underdog becomes a fan favorite. But you can also almost always count on a ton of dead time, when alliances really do stick together and maintain power, and entire month-long stretches can feel predictable. There's also the undeniable catch-22 of shitty people making for good television; you root for the assholes to get knocked out of the game, but once they're gone, you've lost your investment in who wins and who doesn't. Or, worse, a group of assholes runs the table, and you're left to root for the lesser of three assholes by game's end. And then, asshole or not, some people just plain don't "deserve" to win the game, you know? That's how I felt about the winner this year. She wasn't the least deserving winner, not by a long shot, but... damn was she boring this year.

Mr. Robot: Season 2

It wasn't all that long ago that I watched Season 1 of Mr. Robot, and in short hindsight, man, this show really jumped to new levels in Season 2. It was way more surreal, far more "blown open," and nothing felt impossible. For that, I commend it! For the way Season 2 unfolded, particularly in later episodes (compared to Season 1 which faltered and stagnated if anything), I praise it! But that ending... eh. That felt like a classic "just wait until next season" case of blue balls. Not like Walking Dead bad, but, you know, it just left me wanting more! Two seasons in, Mr. Robot is a pretty-good-not-great show in my book. Like, it may sneak into my top five list of dramas this year, but that's in a year without Fargo or The Leftovers. Look, we'll get to that in a few months.

Jane the Virgin: Season 1

When I heard the concept of this one a few years back, I laughed. (So did everyone!) A CW show about a religious virgin who accidentally gets artificially inseminated - that's a laugher! Turns out, this loving parody of telenovelas is one of the best surprises in recent years. It's good! And addicting. And legitimately fun to watch. There are tons of female-leaning shows Marissa will turn on while I'm in the room - Scandal, Grey's Anatomy, Hart of Dixie (R.I.P.) - but Jane the Virgin is the only one that made me say, alright, yeah, I need to start from the beginning here. And now I have, and so far, so good.

Bloodline: Season 1

I ignored this one last year, but Marissa finally convinced me that we should give it a go. In a word, it's good. In a more descriptive word, it's tense. Slow. Not bad - deliberate, really - just not an action-packed type of tense like Breaking Bad was. (But then, what's as good as Breaking Bad?) This one's about four siblings in the Florida Keys. The most memorable tagline of the series, delivered by Kyle Chandler more than once (and who doesn't love Kyle Chandler?) is "we're not bad people... but we did a bad thing." Without spoiling anything, Season 1 seems to be mostly about the bad thing these not-bad people did. Season 2, I'm guessing, is about the repercussions of that bad thing. I'm sure I'll know soon!

Transparent: Season 3
Definitely a great show, but three seasons in you don't need to hear that from me. It's often moving and even more often jarring - not so much for being the most LGBT-friendly show on television, but more so in how cringe-inducing this family can be. Selfish monsters, all five of them! I actually thought this was a slight step down from the first two seasons, but that still leaves it comfortably sitting in the upper echelon of television shows in 2016.

Happy October!