I had to turn off Episode 1, Season 2 of And Just Like That because it was so bad. In fact, it was awful. It was SATC movie 2 awful. Carrie used to be a badass! She used to screw her mouth up and snarl, e.g. “I dunno, maybe her face got caught in a door,” and then stalk off, smoking. Now it’s just a pile of simpering crap with too many characters who don’t symbolise anything and NO. FUCKING. PLOT. Is Samantha Irby even in the writer’s room any more? If she is, are they listening to her? I don’t object to modernisation, but you still have to be reasonably sassy with it and, please, tell a freaking story: is that too much to ask? I admit I only watched 15 minutes of the first episode, but I’m sorry I just felt too ill to carry on, it was like a Boots Here Come The Girls advert from c.2003.
Emily the Criminal. SPOILERS. This is a movie available on, I think, Apple TV. The titular character is played by Aubrey Plaza, who you will recognise from White Lotus 2. Now she is a badass. She plays a down on her luck new-graduate, her bills are racking up, she’s got debt to pay and she can’t get a job because she has a conviction for assault. So she turns to a life of crime! Credit card fraud to be exact, which turns out to require more violence with a hand-held taser than I expected. I actually loved this film right up until the end, where in order to escape the police she flees to South America where she decides, after a brief bit of soul-searching on Playa Del Carmen, to continue her life of credit card fraud, just in South America. Good luck against Columbian drugs cartels with just that taser, Emily.
Beef. This is a superbly mad tragi-comedy on Netflix about two Korean-Americans who get into a road rage incident and then are just so deeply, deeply weird and damaged and angry and insane that they set out to destroy each other. I found this show very moving, very original, brave - and extremely confident in its more wacky side-squirts into talking animals and very gory deaths and so on. Giles didn’t get it and I am sympathetic but I thought it was absolutely knockout. Terrific.
Euphoria. I am very late to this bizarre Gen Z sleazathon but it made me laugh. Every generation of young people - mine was the same - thinks that they are so wild and mad and unhinged and desperate and debauched and tragic. People love to freak out at Euphoria, (and also at Skins before it), going “Oooo, oooo young people are such a mess, they’re so lost, can you believe what they’re getting up to??” like either show bears any resemblance at all to reality and aren’t merely a hot n sweaty daydream about cruel, rad shirtless bros and skinny drugged-out chicks with messy hair, from the imagination of some male TV douchebag. Ha! Young people are the same as they have always been, which is a load of STUPID RIDICULOUS BABIES who make shit up about what goes on at parties because the actual truth is so tragic and dull (we sat on a sofa and picked our nails while three boys MC’d incompetently over a speed garage track). Gen Z is just treading water until it is finally allowed to grow up and stop pretending that they aren’t completely ordinary and quite into The Rest Is History and going to bed early.
The Little Mermaid. Everyone does their best in this pointless remake of the cheerful 90s Disney cartoon, but CGI is such a curse, isn’t it? Is it acting that these poor people are doing? Or are they just trying desperately to muddle through their lines while wearing a blue motion capture gimp suit, talking to things that aren’t there. Melissa McCarthy ought to have been an absolute knockout as Ursula the Sea Witch but it was like her face was going one way and her eyes were going the other way and her mouth didn’t quite match the voice track and they bowdlerised Poor Unfortunate Souls horribly. Nul points. I hope Halle Bailey does okay out of it all, she really didn’t deserve to become a lightning rod for the entire BLM backlash and, of all the cast, she’s probably the best at talking to things that aren’t there, while wearing mo-cap.
I have struggled enormously with books recently. I have gone back to reading Brightness Falls in distress at the whole thing. I had to give up on A House for Alice by Diana Evans because she used the word “partake”. I can’t explain why this was such a disaster for me but it was. I marvelled at the rat-tat-tat-tat humour of Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey, but when it looked like it was turning into a romcom I couldn’t carry on. I failed at Whips, Stone Blind, My Murder, Arrangements in Blue, The Cassandra Complex, All My Puny Sorrows and many, many more. It’s not them, it’s me. The one book I might return to is Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess, which tells the story of a Black liberal and a white Republican falling for each other. I read the sample on my kindle and I am considering buying the whole thing. But I confess I am mainly just waiting until The Librarianist By Patrick deWitt is out on Kindle - but I wouldn’t put it past me to give up on that, too.
How about you? What have you seen and read recently that you can recommend? Please leave a comment in the handy box below.
I watched 2 eps of CH4’s The Change. I liked it. Funny, both sweet and acerbic, and a bit weird.
I once read (on here by you Esther I think?) of the dupe that is all these zillions of new books constantly being reviewed and offered to us. The same clutch of ‘of the moment’ novels. Dozens of them. I would list them feverishly or add them to my Amazon wish list. I no longer do this as most of them are crap. I really try to use the library or go to a bookshop and browse.
Well, firstly, I don’t think everyone has a book in them. Or they do but not necessarily one that any other fucker should be exposed to. I blame the culture of anyone can write you just need to find your voice on this expensive course / retreat. Write by all means people - it’s good for you - let it all out for heaven’s sake. But why foist it on the rest of us. I write in my diary, think I write a great letter and love to think of myself as a raconteur in real life (no, says friends you are a just an opinionated arsehole who won’t shut up). Me writing a book would be like me to trying to birth a zebra calf (foal?), just really really forced with nothing that anyone should be interested in without a lot of very very close support from an editor who sees the artistry (£ signs) in me.
Just because we can all be creative / get in touch with our inner artist doesn’t mean a publisher should be encouraging it.
I now resort to hacking away at the dense undergrowth of the lists I’ve been carrying around for decades - 100 best books this, top books about whatever that. Or see what inspires me at a local bookshop. They are often meh too.
Why the massive volume of new books all the time? Was it ever thus? Or is it cynical commercialism to cast the net wide and get as many people writing one marginally saleable book that has been squeezed out of them to satisfy the glossy magazine monthly suggestions (I just completely ignore these - it’s like the Avon lady touting her products)? I don’t know but where is the quality control?
Obviously none of this can be reconciled with my various phases when I rip through piles of garden centre 2 for £5 chick lit, the Mills and Boons of our time. As Richard Madeley said once, ‘a book must nourish you.’ So those books obviously serve a need in me at that time. I definitely wouldn’t be paying £15 for one of those books. I have shat better books.
I just don’t understand the whole thing - zillions of books in a race to the bottom (of my wallet?).
I started to allow myself to think yes, that book is just not for me (or total crap) and since then I’ve stopped being so influenced by the zeitgeist. Because if the zeitgeist is Where the Crawdads Sings I’m not interested.
Of course these books can’t be utterly without merit (can they?!) m or they’d never get out there but I now sit back and wait and if it’s still piquing my interest in a few years’ time I’ll give it a whirl and invest my time. Same with TV shows. People still bang on about The Sopranos so that’s on the list for sure.
I held off watching The Crown then binged the first 4 series. 40 episodes in ten days. And I have a child and a full time job. During the day as I stumbled through my episode to episode existence I was so tired it was like I had been given a nerve agent. And I am still jealous of anyone who hasn’t watched the first 2 seasons (series?).
What a contrary consuming cretin I am.