Recent Media I Have Consumed (May 2019)

[rsadelle]

Hiya, Dreamwidth friends! Here is a periodic post about pop culture things I wanted to write a few paragraphs about. They are solely in the order I felt like writing about them. I think I appropriately cut tagged all the spoilers, but let me know if I need to move any of the cut tags. Also, don't spoil me for anything that happens later in the show I'm not caught up on.


Russian Doll (Netflix TV show)
I read Emily Nussbaum's review a couple of months ago, and I was intrigued by it. She calls the show "propulsive and joyful," and I fully agree with that. The basic plot is that Nadia keeps dying, over and over again, and resetting into her friends' apartment bathroom at her birthday party. This could be really grim, but it's not. It's very light, and it's fun to watch how things change as she resets. A few episodes in, she meets Alan, who also keeps dying, and then they try to figure out what's happening to them. It's so fun to watch them change and grow and re-examine their relationships with other people. At heart, this is an "only connect" sort of show. I loved what happened when they figured out where they need to start, and the very end of the last episode is such a great, weird bit.


Alias Grace (Netflix TV show)
I'm not sure how I feel about this show. I will admit that I only half paid attention to it while I was watching it. There's a layered narrative to the show: there's a Grace voiceover that's addressed to Dr. Jordan, we see her telling him about her life, and we see flashbacks of that life. In my head, I kept hearing Roxy Hart saying, "Yeah, but did she do it?" while I was watching it. I ended up reading this interesting article which says of the ending:

The series' final question is why, exactly, watching a woman in pain is something we find entertaining. What do we want from Grace Marks? What version of her life would we find most appalling, most spectacular, most unusual or alarming or remarkable? How can she perform in a way that will make her - a lowly, uneducated, poor, single housemaid - even visible to a wealthy, educated doctor? What would the life of a 19th-century housemaid's life have to look like in order for us, her viewers, to find it interesting?

Alias Grace is a remarkable story. We don’t know if Grace Marks killed Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery. But we do know at least one party being indicted for something they deserve - it's us, the viewers. The charge is complete disinterest in women's lives unless they're salacious and sensational. We are definitely guilty.

Here is the part I found most interesting about the show as a viewer: There's a bit where Dr. Jordan asks Grace what she would put in a memory book. She tells him it would be a piece of her dress from the asylum, a piece of the red petticoat Mary (her first friend, who died after an unsafe abortion after getting pregnant by one of the sons of the house) gave her, and a piece of the dress Nancy (the housekeeper at her last place of employment, who she's in prison for killing) was wearing when Grace first arrived at the Kinnear household. At the very end of the show, Grace is set free and marries someone she knew when she was in the Kinnear's household. After a lifetime of making quilts for other people, she finally gets to make one for herself. She makes a Tree of Life quilt and explains in the letter voiceover that she incorporated triangles of her asylum dress, Mary's red petticoat, and Nancy's pink dress into the design so that now they'll always be together. That was so interesting! That's the part I can't stop thinking about, about Grace wanting to keep Mary and Nancy with her forever, and also tying those two women who never met together.


The Witch Files (movie)
I genuinely thought this was going to be a terrible movie, and then it turned out to be actually good. Netflix categorizes it as "Teen Scream," but if you are not a fond of scary movies, I can tell you I found it much less scary than The Craft, which I have seen many times and can still make me jump. The Witch Files is structured in a found footage style, which I think is supposed to make it seem more real, but for me it made it that much more obvious that it wasn't and that I was watching a movie. (Note: most of it is shot from a steady camera - a video camera on a tripod, security cameras, phones propped up - but there are a few dizzying motion bits.)

I don't know what I liked so much about this movie. Maybe that it was about girls from completely different social circles coming together in a coven and the way our main character investigates the mystery when bad things start happening to them. I thought it was a fun supernatural story worth watching.


Set It Up (Netflix movie)
This was a good reminder to me that I should try out popular things on the upswing and not wait until they're overhyped. I really wanted to like this! I like rom-coms! Other people who like the same things I do liked this! I did not like this.

I spent a lot of the movie making ick faces at it. The plot is that two people who are overworked assistants to two terrible bosses use their knowledge of their bosses to manipulate the bosses into an ongoing relationship, thus keeping the bosses busy and freeing up some of their time. It took at least an hour before either of them stopped and thought, "Wait, maybe manipulating people into a relationship isn't cool." It also made me deeply irritated about the whole idea that being a badass assistant isn't enough. One of the characters genuinely wants to do something else with her life; the other one doesn't really know what he actually wants to do. It made me really want a rom-com about a badass assistant whose career journey over the course of the movie is to move from being a badass assistant working for a terrible boss to being a badass assistant working for a good boss. (Full disclosure: my day job is being a badass assistant to a team with a good boss.)


Isn't It Romantic (movie)
This movie I did like! The premise seems like it could be bad, but the trailer was funny, so I went with some friends, which was an excellent choice. This movie is completely hilarious, and the audience when I saw it was almost entirely groups of women who were all laughing. Blurbs call it a "satire" of romantic comedies, which I disagree with because I think satires are more biting, and this wasn't mean-spirited at all. It plays with rom-com tropes in ways that point out they're ridiculous without putting down characters in them or viewers who enjoy them. Also, Rebel Wilson is such a great comedic actor, and she was surrounded by other people who leaned into the over-the-topness of rom-com formula elements.


Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (books)
I reread both of these recently for the first time in years. I had really forgotten how (a) dark and (b) religious Doomsday Book is (which makes my having loved it as teenage/early twenties me totally on brand), and it turned out I remembered almost nothing about the plots of either of them. Basically I remembered that the medieval contemps Kivrin ends up with in Doomsday Book call the plague "the blue sickness," where the virus in the future-set portion of Doomsday Book originated, and that the thing they were looking for in To Say Nothing of the Dog was taken out of the church.

Reading these now was really interesting. Doomsday Book is from 1992 and To Say Nothing of the Dog is from 1998, so it was weird to read books with a future where there was time travel and video phones but no cell phones. There's a plot point in Doomsday Book about racist protesters speculating that the virus came from an immigrant and wanting the UK to pull out of the European Community, which was interesting to read now. It was also weird to read sci fi without any queer characters. I know this is partly selection bias because a lot of the sci fi I read these days is for my progressive sci fi book club organized by a queer woman, but I really expect there to be at the very least some side character who is queer, especially in things set in the future.

The other thing that was really interesting to me was how frustrating I found all the screwball running around to read. I'm not sure if that's just not my thing now, if it works better if you don't know the answers, or if it's spillover from how irritated I was by Crosstalk. The Crosstalk side note: I was enjoying it while I was actively reading, but every time I set the book down, I paused and thought, "Mmm, no," about the plausibility of it. I eventually realized part of my irritation was that it's basically "Spice Pogrom" with overinvolved family members and telepathy instead of aliens and subvocal communicators. Anyway, I keep meaning to go back and read one of the screwball short stories to see if they still hold up for me or if this is now something I used to love but that is just not for me anymore.

I also want to know what kind of time travel discussions were happening in the mid-nineties, because part of why I couldn't remember exactly what happened in To Say Nothing of the Dog is that I kept thinking, "Wait, I thought the saving treasures from the shadow of history thing was Kage Baker's Company novels," the first of which came out in 1997.


The Last Day of Emily Lindsey by Nic Joseph (book)
I've been reading a lot of things from the library's suspense/thriller ebook categories recently. Most of them have been on the spectrum from not very good to terrible, but this one was good. If you can read this without being spoiled, I highly recommend it because I think it works well with slow reveals.

Here's the book blurb:

Emily Lindsey doesn't speak when they find her. Holding a hunting knife and covered in blood that is not her own, she communicates with a single, ominous drawing.

Detective Steven Paul has had the same nightmare for as long as he can remember, a strange symbol figuring prominently into his terror. He decided long ago that the recurring dreams are nothing more than an unfortunate side effect of his often traumatic profession. Until, that is, he's assigned to the case of Emily Lindsey, the beautiful, elusive, and controversial blogger found alone, who can't possibly know the symbol from his nightmares... unless she does.

The book alternates between then and now sections (everything in the blurb is from the now sections). The book starts with a then section where you can see that something is not right, but it took me a little bit to realize, oh, cult, not badly run orphanage, which I thought was one of the things that highlights Joseph's skill. There's a mystery, but the arc of the story is really about Steven dealing with his issues, and that I thought was really well done.


Marcella (TV show)
I do not recommend this show. On the other hand, I got emotionally involved in the character and it helped me realize what I do and don't like in crime shows. This show has way too much onscreen violence and way too many threads that take too long to connect with too many similar looking white dudes who were hard to tell apart. Marcella is a cop who comes back to work when a serial killer she never caught becomes active again. She has a husband she's separated from and a pair of children. She also has blackouts, after which she tries to piece together whatever violence she committed while in them. She had a third child who died in her crib. At one point we find out that her ex-husband faked some of the violence she assumed she did to him, at which point I thought, "Oh, he killed the kid." Then Marcella goes to a hypnotherapist (recommended to her by the ex-husband's new fiancee) where they start delving into what happened during her blackouts. And then we find out that Marcella killed the baby. All the yikes. And yet now I'm totally involved and need to know what happens to her in season three.


Fighting With My Family (movie)
This was so good! Saraya, whose stage name is Paige, grows up in a family that runs its own wrestling school/shows in Norwich. She and her brother try out for WWE training. She gets in; he doesn't. This is basically your usual sports movie with a female protagonist. It has a training montage! Saraya's family is sort of Addams Family-ish in that they're very weird to the outside world, but genuinely warm and loving. Part of her journey involves making friends with other women, and I was pleased to find out that the real Paige fought for gender equality in wrestling. The movie is also funny, which rounds out all the good things you could want in a sports movie with family feelings.


Wynonna Earp (TV show)
If you like the siblings hunting demons element of Supernatural but wish they were sisters, this show might be for you! Every time the Earp Heir turns twenty-seven, everyone Wyatt Earp killed comes back as revenants. The Heir can kill the revenants with Peacemaker, Wyatt's gun. Wynonna Earp is the current heir.

Our other main characters: Waverly, Wynonna's younger sister. Xavier Dolls, an agent with Black Badge, a division of the US Marshals service. Nicole Haught (pronounced "hot"), a sheriff's deputy and Waverly's love interest. Doc Holliday, who had a spell put on him to stop him from aging and was then thrown into a well for a hundred years.

The show is not without its problems: The vast majority of the cast is white. Dolls is black, and he's some sort of part demon, who later dies. Nicole is presented as "butch," but she's pretty femme. All of the women have similar conforming to feminine norms around attractiveness looks.

That said, the show is also a lot of fun! They fight monsters. It's funny. It has a good mix of action and found family interaction. There's solid queer representation. I love that Wynonna calls Waverly "baby girl." I am one hundred percent into Doc and Wynonna's relationship. I also love that there's an implication that Doc is into her because she's like Wyatt.

I am working my way through season three as I type, so don't spoil me!