Everything’s a real bummer! Let’s pretend for like five to eight minutes that it isn’t, and get through this October recap together. There will be a picture of a cat at the end, I promise.
Movies
- Piece By Piece (2024): A documentary/biopic about musician/producer Pharrell Williams, only everything is made out of Legos. Yes, really. I don’t totally know who the audience is for this movie — the content is sanitized enough for kids, but I don’t know that it’s engaging/relevant enough for anyone other than people for whom Williams’ music came along at a formative time in their lives. The Lego style makes this interesting/unique, which is great because otherwise this would have just been a Behind The Music-style puff piece. Worth watching for the Snoop Dogg sequences, and the general cuteness of the Lego vibe, but not life changing.
- Slotherhouse (2023): Sorority girl adopts black market sloth in order to become popular, oops and now the sloth is on a murder rampage. This was so incredibly stupid, but also self aware about how dumb it was, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you feel about that particular kind of nonsense. It’s not a good movie but I did laugh a lot.
- Dream Scenario (2023): Paul (Nicolas Cage) is a passive, hapless professor who somehow starts appearing in everyone’s dreams. It’s funny until the dream version of him turns out to be a psychopath. I think this movie was trying to say a lot about standing up for yourself, taking action, not being a doormat, and most especially “cancel culture”, but it never quite got most of those big ideas across the finish line. Cage’s character is so awkward that I wanted to do a “I Pretend I Do Not See” on the whole thing.
- Hold Your Breath (2024): Margaret (Sarah Paulson) tries to survive 1930s Oklahoma, oops there might be a disappearing evil man in the dust. Ebon Moss-Bachrach is delightfully creepy/unsettling in his role as said disappearing evil man, but otherwise the movie just takes so long to do anything remotely interesting. It’s fine for what it is (a direct-to-streaming horror movie) but it’s not memorable at all.
- Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara (2024): Documentary focusing on attempts to unravel the mystery of who’s pretending to be musician Tegan Quin. I could talk about this forever. If you’ve ever been in a fandom for something, if you’ve ever been a superfan, if you’ve ever spent more than 60 seconds online in fan spaces, you are going to be fascinated and horrified by this. Being famous honestly sounds like it sucks. Somewhat astounding that despite years of evidence, there’s still no real solid conclusion, though. The person pretending to be Tegan should have just joined a celebrity RPG like the rest of us early ’00s LiveJournal weirdos if they wanted to pretend to be a famous person so bad.
- Smile (2022) and Smile 2 (2024): We’re just going to talk about both of these at once, since it’s the same concept, same general plot arc, repeated in both films. Both had their pros and cons — the original didn’t rely quite so much on “oops it was all in her head”, the sequel had more interesting/compelling characters. The original loses points for an animal death that made me go “I’m glad my cat is too busy to watch this.” The sequel was at least 30 minutes too long. The concept — traumatized people traumatize people, essentially — is pretty basic and sometimes a little too on the nose, but I get what they’re trying to do. The sequel was genuinely unsettling, which is kind of all I want out of a horror movie, anyway. And the ending of the latest installment sets things up for a completely batshit next installment in the franchise, if they decide to continue on. Deliciously gory; the audience in the theater for Smile 2 was having a blast with reacting to every jumpscare and mangled flesh part on screen. Glad for the small amount of time in each film we get to spend with Kyle Gallner, even with the horrible little mustache/goatee situation.
- The Descent (2005): For as often as this shows up on best of horror lists, I was surprised by how underwhelmed I was. None of the characters are likeable, they all make wildly idiotic decisions, and the lead character’s transformation into a monster-stabbing badass just didn’t work for me. I appreciated that the movie was unafraid of being bleak — both the original ending and the recut ending are depressing in their own ways — but I had so much higher hopes for this one.
- Oddity (2024): Very spooky blind twin tries to uncover the truth behind her sister’s murder via haunted objects. Slightly meh/too on the nose dialogue, and relatively predictable twists, and yet I found myself so deeply unsettled by this, to the point where I watched several episodes of Bob’s Burgers to cleanse the psychic palate before going to sleep. It didn’t help that I watched this on a very windy Halloween night with the power flickering out a few times. The stuff that’s supposed to be creepy really works, despite some script problems and average acting from some of the cast. Gorgeously shot, so many of the scenes are just incredibly framed.
Books
- The Mask of Mirrors, M.A. Carrick: Young con artist creates elaborate scam that honestly could be easily uncovered and yet almost everyone falls for it. M.A. Carrick is the pen name for the duo of Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms; I’m unfamiliar with Helms’s prior work but have read some of Brennan’s and thought it exhibited spectacular world building but suffered in being too slow-paced and just too much information in general, and this book had many of the same issues. The world created in this book is so immersive, they truly thought of everything — even timekeeping systems are different from our world — but the downside is that you’re just drowning in unfamiliar names, concepts, places, etc., that eventually, if you’re me, your eyes just start to glaze over and you look for more dialogue between characters instead of whatever else you’re reading. This book felt like karma for me complaining about another recent book I read that was set in a fantasy universe and yet still used our same month names. It’s got all the political intrigue of the Kushiel’s Dart series without the sex or genuinely compelling cast of characters. There’s a major character death midway through here that is supposed to be horrible and devastating and I honestly almost missed it because it was buried in so much other stuff. This either needed to be two separate books or it needed a lot trimmed from it. It was hard to get into this and if I didn’t have two separate four-hour flights plus a lot of airport time to waste while I was reading, I don’t know that I would have finished it. I checked the next book out of the library but I honestly only really care about one character’s arc, I might just read Goodreads reviews/spoilers instead of investing more time in this series.
- Game Misconduct, Ari Baran: Hockey romance between a young grinder and an aging enforcer on his way out of the game. Here’s another book that had a lot of potential when you look at the bare plot essentials — I love a story that touches on the realities of having a job that requires your body to be at peak performance and what happens when you’re not able to do that anymore, and I love dysfunctional men who want to kiss — but the execution didn’t do it for me. The author clearly knows their stuff — they have a literal bibliography on their website for sources referenced about both enforcers in hockey and the mental health/addiction angle that they used in the story, and yet they also want me to believe in an elite hockey league that still has players who fight nearly every game and also has the first woman playing in the Don’t Call It The NHL (who is also in a relationship with a man on their team, a thing that no one even seems to bat an eye at). Make it make sense? The writing is good enough, but the development from a hate-fueled hookup in an alley to a Happy For Now ending just didn’t work for me, and I can buy in to lots of enemies-to-lovers scenarios.
- Prophet: Sin Blaché and Helen MacDonald: Sci-fi meets Odd Couple: Secret Military Operatives edition. Two mismatched intelligence/military-adjacent guys — one British-Indian and one American, one with a history of substance abuse and erratic behavior and the other a perfect wall of blankness — are forced to team up to investigate why out-of-place nostalgic objects are showing up in places they should not be. Think “fully formed retro American diner in the middle of nowhere England, that definitely wasn’t there the day before”. Big X-Files vibes, which the text acknowledges. It doesn’t 100% stick the landing in terms of the actual plot/sci-fi aspect, but it does scratch a very specific itch for wanting to read atmospheric stuff about a slow burn relationship between damaged men under the backdrop of a very horrible situation. If you are a fanfic person, then the vibes here are immaculate and familiar, which was a deliberate choice by MacDonald and Blaché. See this excellent Washington Post interview with the two of them talking about the stylistic choices they made to lean into the “vibe” of fanfic, making a story about nostalgia seem nostalgic on its own merits to a certain type of fan. I had been on the fence about some of the narrative choices in here, but learning how deliberate those choices were really bumped things up for me. Not the best book I’ve read this year but certainly one of the most enjoyable.
- Dirty Slide: KD Casey and Lauren Blakeley: Novella co-authored by two sports romance writers about two baseball players who just really, really hate each other so much that they have to bang about it. This was fine. I need to stop expecting novellas/short stories to do more than basically serve as a PWP. The two guys were pretty interchangeable here, to the point where I had to keep reminding myself which was which. This is a total “this escalated quickly” with a huge dose of “can’t talk about our feelings” to an infuriating degree. Like, somehow they both left what was clearly a date with the feeling that the other guy didn’t want to date??? Please, gentlemen, use your words. I liked the glimpses of other players from some of KD Casey’s other books; I haven’t ready any of Lauren Blakely’s stuff but it appears that there’s some crossover from her book universes too. If I hadn’t loved Casey’s other books, I might have rated this higher, but I know what she’s capable of, which contributed to this being a let-down. It didn’t leave me inspired to check out any of Blakely’s writing.
Book links go to an affiliate page on Bookshop.org, where I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase.
Other Stuff
Here are some assorted photos from October:
Also, I want to take this opportunity to plug a new podcast endeavor by some great guys: Tired: The Car Podcast For People Who Understand That Cars Are Bad.
Yes, I know, we all only have so many hours in a day for taking in new content, but here’s why you should check this out, and, even more importantly, give it your money:
- the podcast is just a good hang, three friends sitting around and talking about cars, technology, tinkering, shenanigans, and life. For the introverts among us (hi), it scratches the same itch in your brain as being in a room with people you like, listening to them talk, but not feeling compelled to participate in any way.
- it’s about cars, and there is a lot of car talk, but it’s easily accessible even for the non-car-inclined, and, possibly more importantly, acknowledges that while cars are a major part of our world today, that we also need better global transit infrastructure so that cars can go back to being fun little escapes and not a necessary evil.
- you will learn something and also laugh a lot along the way
- if you have a relative who’s a car guy (gender neutral) this is a great opportunity to get them hooked on a car pod that will also slowly turn them into a communist (probably) (maybe) (good luck).
- I want my friends* to be able to keep doing things that they enjoy, and you can help enable that by giving them $5.
(*I technically only know 2/3 of the hosts but I feel like Rory is my friend via the transitive property of friendship.)
For extra fun and an example of what you’re going to get, check this out:
And for the more refined summary of the show’s central thesis, as penned by one-of-three hosts Matty:
We all need to be able to look at cars, look at their place in society, and demand an end to it. We have to pressure the people who can build what we know are good solutions: transit infrastructure, affordable urban housing in walkable cities, et cetera.
But while we still live with cars, what do they… mean, exactly? How have they shaped society in the past? How do we experience them now (and what about that is exhausting?) and how do we talk about them? What is the car as a tool, as a technology for motorsports, as a design object, as a mechanical hobby? As a burden? How is the car just another piece of the massive forces in all of our lives, like financialization of industry, or tech companies turning the world into an open beta? Is there such a thing as “having a car” or do you just own a piece of a massive infrastructure project — whether that’s gas stations, EV chargers, or the networks that communicate with “driver assistance” tools?
For more information, check out the following links:
What’s Next
A couple of concerts, a lot of hockey. Trying to catch up on movies I haven’t had time to go see at the theater. No travel planned other than a quick trip down to Purdue to watch some football. Exhaustedly churning through books for a 2024 reading challenge that I’m behind on. Sleeping. Snuggling with cats. Watching new What We Do In The Shadows and hoping desperately that they stick the landing (I’ve enjoyed the first three episodes of the new season so far.) More sleeping. Daydreaming about taking my cat and absconding into the woods for the December holiday break but not wanting to pay the kind of money to a place that’s going to accommodate a cat for a week of vacation.
Here’s That Cat Picture I Mentioned
This is, uhhhh, either Blurb or Synopsis — a pair of bonded brothers I’m currently fostering for One Tail at a Time. Their sister just got adopted today, which has got to be a record turnaround for me in terms of time under my roof — I took the three cats from their regular foster over the weekend! All three are super sweet and make the currently trying time we live in a little bit easier.
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