Vida: Season 1

Here's a quick one - six episodes, half-hour each - from Starz that was getting at least some very minor buzz on TV critic Twitter back in like, May. The concept, in a sentence or two, is that two very different Latina sisters come back to their hometown to take care of things in the wake of their mother's surprise passing. (Uh, One Mississippi called...) They each reconnect with their old neighborhood and the people in it in different ways and to various extents, and feud with their late mother's lover over inheritance and what to do with the failing bar she was extremely underwater on.

This was classic good-not-great to me, a show where I could enjoy the characters and their conflicts, but that barely registered for me in any way beyond "these are some new faces, and I have never seen this particular demographic represented in stories like this before, and I'm glad that these stories exist, and I hope to see these actors again in other things."

In short - if you're not like me, and don't watch a hundred TV shows a year, this might not be worth your time. (But it's three hours of your time, so.)

Beautiful Katamari

Here's what's almost definitely the last game I'll ever play on an Xbox 360. (Finally!) Not because I've got no Xbox 360 games left on my backlog (I wish), but because all those that I have left are backward compatiable on the Xbox One.

At any rate - Beautiful Katamari. Yeah.  It's Katamari. It's the third overall game in the franchise, the first one I ever played, and the hardest one to find over the last decade.

I played and beat two Katamari games in 2010 and then a third one in 2012. Looking back now at the posts for all three of those, I think it's funny that in each of thsoe I basically say, "this is so stupid and so repetetive, but it's a lot of fun, so whatever." And sure enough, that holds true here, even after a six-year hiatus from the franchise. Roll shit into balls that grow bigger and bigger. Rinse. Repeat.

This game in particular felt repetitive, even more so than the other three, and I'm not sure why. Was there just not enough level variance here? It did feel like I was rolling around in the same exact city with the same exact layout for the entire second half of the game.

Still, any game I can beat in one sitting is a blessing of sorts these days.

And most importantly, RIP to my Xbox 360 - that is to say, retire in peace. This thing is an original white one, pre-HDMI, using component cords and everything, and it somehow never red-ringed. It's sounded clunky and scratchy, like a dying animal, for like eight years now. But it's still here, dammit. And now it doesn't need to be. Thank you for your service, buddy.

Barry: Season 1

I tried watching Barry back when it came out, weekly, and I just absolutely could not get into it. I bailed after four episodes, completely unenthused by this... indescribable show that wasn't really a comedy, wasn't really a drama, was mostly just a weird mishmash of the two that wasn't working at all for me. Very dark, very bloody, with plenty of actual assassinations and firefights one minute, and then the other half the time it's just Bill Hader doing horribly acted community theater stuff while Henry Winkler tries to coach and motivate him. Meanwhile there's a Russian crime syndicate whose members are cartoonishly weird, like something out of an Archer episode or, come to think of it, Killing Eve. It just wasn't working for me, wasn't congealing into anything meaningful, felt completely scattered, and so on.

But virtually everyone else seemed to absolutely love it! So, almost reluctantly, I waited a few months and then finally caught the second half of the season online in one two-hour binge. And, yeah, okay, now I get it. In its later episodes the show finally picks a lane - the dark one! - and by the penultimate episode I completely understood exactly what this show was trying to be and exactly how well it was succeeding at being exactly that thing.

There's a moment in that seventh episode - and a slightly lesser one at the end of the eigthth, to conlude the season - that feels as powerfully tragic as the best scenes from Breaking Bad. And that's no small feat for a show whose entire existence is four hours long thus far, and whose early vibe felt like a silly comedy with a sense of humor I just couldn't get behind.

At any rate, Barry redeemed its fist four epsidoes with its final four episodes. Of course, most people don't think those first four needed redeeming at all. Make of that what you will.

The End of the Fucking World: Season 1

Classic example of a show with an interesting trailer, interesting hook, interesting quirky vibe, that ramps down instead of up as its first season progresses. First episode, I'm completely invested, these weird high school characters, the stark deadpan British humor, the jump cuts and very very dark and twisted content. By the third or fourth episode, everything that made it interesting is already just background noise. Still a very easy watch, at eight half-hours, but probably not one that'll go down as essential TV in 2018. Try the first episode, at least, and you'll very quickly know whether or not this is worth your time.

Joe Pera Talks with You: Season 1

Here's a quick oddity from Adult Swim that I'd never have heard of were it not for a quick glance at a bunch of "mid-year best of television" lists. Joe Pera is, I learned, a comedian whose entire shtick seems to be a slow-paced and earnest grandpa-esque line delivery, just a totally polite and soft-spoken guy. This show is exactly what it purports to be - Joe Pera spending ten minutes at a time just talking "with" you. The "with" is important here - it's not a "to!" The one-sided conversations feel very much like they're coming from a much weirder Mr. Rogers. In the first episode, Joe Pera just talks about rocks and minerals, mostly while wandering around in the scenic lakeside woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In the second one - perhaps the purest distillation of the show - he's just walking around at his community diner talking to people about their breakfast.

The production value is better than it probably sounds; this is not a high school multimedia class project-looking thing, but a polished and professional television show where a guy will just talk about the virtues of getting a good night's sleep or watching a fireworks display. It's still Adult Swim, so it still gets very weird half the time, never veering harder off the rails in a more delightful manner than it does in the episode called "Joe Pera Reads You the Church Announcements."

Look, this is by no means must-see TV, but it's a pretty enjoyable way to kill an hour and a half across multiple nights. And sometimes, that's all you need!

Stan's Book Dump: Spring 2018

Sure, I'll do this again. Go to goodreads.com for takes and reviews I actually gave a shit about, but come her for some incoherent blog-style rambling!

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Fuck, I haven't posted about this yet? Seems like I covered a ton in the TV season recap. Regardless, this is a book that stayed on my shelf for far too long, that I tried reading once and just plum gave up on after all of thirty pages. (And it's pretty long! There are more than 700 pages!) This book wasn't perfect, and it had a few pacing issues, a few character introduction issues - when you're introducing some characters for the first time toward the very end of a story about a dwindling group of survivors, come on, you really ought to just go back and do that earlier in the story! But I absolutely loved it. The book captivated me (likely with the AMC show's help, as I've established) in ways no horror or survivalist book ever has. I remain steadfastly in awe of the hell these real life explorers went through, frozen into the Canadian Arctic for years on end, slowly going mad and starving to death and losing fingers and toes to frostbite, all before deciding, fuck it, the only way out is a thousand-mile trek south. Fuck, man.

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn

I'm familiar enough with Flynn's tone and vibe by now that I was able to just sort of blindly buy this barely-there short story (we're talking 50 very small pages) and trust that I would like it just fine. I did! But it felt very, very much like something she thought up and pounded out over the course of like, one week. (Yeah, I'm ignorant of the whole writing process, I know.) This was enjoyable, but it was over as soon as it got going, the "eight-minute episode segment" equivalent in whatever metaphor allows Flynn's full novels to be feature length films. I think George R.R. Martin might have had a hand in pushing her to write this, if that moves your needle whatsoever.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Much like with Sartre's Nausea a few months ago, I respect the hell out of what's going on here, what's being said here, the absurdity of it all, and so forth, but I didn't walk away with any sort of appreciation for the actual prose of the story I'd just read. Gotta imagine this would make for a better movie or even miniseries than an unfinished novel. (Also gotta imagine this has been done like a dozen times by now.) For those unfamiliar, it's about a man arrested for a an alleged crime no one will reveal to him and then subjected to so much bureaucratic red tape as part of his, uh, "trial," that his ultimate execution comes as a sort of relief. He's been so beaten down by an all-powerful state that he's not even mad when death comes. It's not unlike The Stranger, really, except that The Stranger had a more compelling story. Kafka, a German Jew, gets bonus points for writing this like ten or twenty years before the rise of the Nazis. Prescient much? (Sorry.)

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

So, sometimes you really can judge a book by its cover. Look at this. What is this? This is vapid chick lit, right? Wrong! (Not actually wrong.) It's really an eye-opening cultural exploration of the old money Chinese masquerading as a soapy and pulpy love story, you see! Except, no, no it really isn't, it's really as empty and vapid as its title and book art imply, five hundred pages of designer dresses and million dollar earrings and Filipino servants and decadent food porn. Worst of all, it doesn't even come to a proper conclusion of any sort, leaving whatever story threads did exist at all to dangle in the breeze. Surely they get tackled in the remaining two books of this trilogy, but so what? Bad book!

Alright, so that's fourteen books so far on the year. Can I up it to sixteen on the back half and hit my goal of thirty in 2018? We'll see...