Quick Reviews and Stuff: May
Hello from the final days of my vacation. Let’s talk about some stuff I did last month.
Books
First, a note. New for this month, a Bookshop.org affiliation! You can now go to my affiliate page there to check out recommendations lists and whatever else strikes my fancy. For right now, I’ve put up a list of my best-of 2023. If you make a purchase through my shop, I’ll receive some small percentage of dollar for it. I’ll also be including Bookshop.org links to the titles of books referenced below; same affiliate deal applies. So if you’re intrigued by something I’ve mentioned, here’s a great chance to go buy it. Obviously you should always support your local indie booksellers but if you’re going to buy online, you might as well do it here.
We Could Be So Good, Cat Sebastian — 1950s opposites-attract romance between a scrappy, hard-edged reporter and the bougie paper owner’s nepo baby son. (That’s an oversimplification, but.) This book is so soft and so tender, not hiding from the reality of what it would have been like to be a queer person in the late 50s but without being relentlessly sad. Not that I would have expected differently from Cat Sebastian, of course. I love Nick and Andy and I love how much they love each other and I love how incredibly stupid they are. They don’t communicate well, but that’s a bit more forgivable for me when the things they’re failing to communicate about are things that could technically get them thrown in jail, so understandably they’re both a bit reluctant to let the other in. When my biggest complaint is “I wish this was spicier”, then it’s basically like I don’t really have anything to complain about.
Penelope Rex and the Problem with Pets, Ryan Higgins — Picture book about the challenges of acquiring a new pet. All of the Penelope Rex books are so cute and this is no exception. I think this would be great for anyone introducing a new pet into the family, or raising a child in a family that has a pet, or has a kid who is pet-curious, or who just likes cute things. The artwork is precious and I love that the conclusion is the Rex family working on training Mittens to be a better uhhh feline (???) citizen. If you have the hard cover version of this book, take off the dust jacket because there’s some surprise content hidden there.
The Cat Who Couldn’t Be Bothered, Jack Kurland — Legitimately a hilarious, simple masterpiece of a kids book. I picked this up as a gift but honestly I kind of want to own a copy for myself despite the zero children that I have. The drawings are whimsical, simple yet with enough detail/surprises that in the big group pictures, I keep seeing new things. The message is also very sweet, too — it’s okay to feel your feelings, but it’s also okay to lean on your friends for support, and sometimes doing nothing together is the greatest activity of all.
Dragons Love Tacos, Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri (illustrations) — The books in this series are classics for a reason. They’re just the right level of silly for your average kid, who’s probably going to have a giggle fit over the antics of the dragons and friends. The drawings in particular I think have good repeat value for discovering something new every time you look at them.
Maxine Gets a Job, Alexandra Garyn, Bryan Reisberg, and Susan Batori (illustrations) — Maxine is an internet-famous corgi who rides around New York in a little backpack with her person all the time. Incredibly cute illustrations, and of course an on target message of “you don’t have to try to be someone you’re not” (or at least, that’s what I took away from it). Charming even if you’re not a dog fan, or if you don’t know Maxine from the internet. The situations she finds herself in are silly enough that I can see it getting a lot of giggles from your little ones.
Beasts of Ruin, Ayana Gray — YA fantasy/mythology in an African-inspired setting. It took me a while to get going in this one, probably partially because it’d been so long since I read the first book (almost a year ago) and I had to remember where things left off. I like the slow growth of Koffi and Ekon throughout the book, you never forget that they’re teenagers and they react to things the way teenagers do, but they’re also learning and growing as people, too. The expansion of the universe, including learning more about daraja magic, was neat, and the backstory chapters with Binti really helped to flesh out some backstory here, too. As usual, things end on a cliffhanger and with a big info reveal that makes me ready to pick up the next book in the series.
With Love, from Cold World, Alicia Thompson — Contemporary romance between two enemies-to-lovers coworkers at a Florida theme park. I was so disappointed by this and was basically just reading to get to the end. I think had I not been on an airplane I would have DNF’ed it pretty early, but I was a captive audience. This book is basically like “hey so I heard you like the miscommunication trope in your romance so I put a little miscommunication in your miscommunication”. Lauren is determined to take everything Asa says/does in bad faith, and Asa honestly is kind of doormat-y in that he just lets it happened. This book had its moments but I found the constant poor communication between the two of them to be grating, and the fact that they went from enemies to harboring secret crushes to saying I Love You within literally a week made me feel legitimately insane (derogatory). The scene where they hook up in Lauren’s office was good though.
Butcher & Blackbird, Brynne Weaver — Serial! Killers! In! Love! This book is completely unhinged (affectionate) and while it does many things that I don’t like (possessive MMC, some sexual dynamics that don’t appear to have ever been discussed but which happen to work out perfectly anyway, predictable bad guy, massive miscommunication/not actually talking about their feelings), I enjoyed it for its absolutely absurd nature. When it comes to independently published explicit romance, this was miles better/more readable than what I usually come across, and I’m looking forward to picking up the other installments in the series when they come out, knowing full well that they’re just going to be more entertaining trash.
Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros — I knew I was not going to like the hottest fantasy/romantasy/whatever book of 2023 and at least on that front, I was not disappointed. The worldbuilding is incredibly stupid (we are so desperate for soldiers that we have to conscript them but also we put them through a brutal training period that kills most of them!) and the plot is predictable (are we the baddies??!) and the characters are all awful except for the dragons and the writing is bad. And yet this was compulsively readable and I will be reading the equally mediocre sequel. I believe this has been optioned for TV and I think it may end up as a better TV show than a book, since it’ll get to cut out a lot of the garbage.
Movies
The Fall Guy (2024)— This didn’t do well at the box office, apparently, and I’m going to go ahead and blame the marketing. This is a rom-com shoved inside of an action movie, while the previews really leaned heavily on the action side. I saw this twice in theaters, once in an IMAX preview and once a little later after the release; the second time, the audience was mostly full of women who laughed at all the right spots. Thank you, filmmakers, for Ryan Gosling emerging from the water in a wet white shirt. So maybe marketing needs to reconsider how they sold this one, because of course if audiences come in thinking it’s going to be non-stop action and less funny banter/crime caper, they’re going to be disappointed and not tell their similarly-minded friends about going to see it. Anyway, I thought this movie was really delightful and really satisfied my post-Barbie urge to see Ryan Gosling continue to ham it up on screen. The stunts are spectacular, the plot is ridiculous, and everyone is stupid hot. This was absolutely worth my time.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) — I don’t think I’d rewatched this since it was initially released 20 years ago, which made the print that the Chicago Film Society dug up to show even more delightful. It still included the original previews shown alongside the movie back when it was released. Why yes I will be entertained by the Last Samurai preview thank you very much. Seeing this in a packed Music Box full of other movie/nerd/boat enthusiasts was perhaps the perfect way to revisit this one, which inexplicably did not do well enough to justify the sequels we all deserved. Russell Crowe at his peak as a historical drama action star, lots of good boat fights, and a classic extrovert/introvert conflict between Crowe’s Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany’s Stephen Maturin. Fun fact, if you go to the San Diego Maritime Museum, you can tour the boat used as the HMS Surprise in the movie.
Good One (2024)— Feature-length debut from writer/director India Donaldson. A teenaged girl, ready to head off to college, takes a camping trip with her dad and his best friend. (The friend’s son was supposed to come but changed his mind.) Nothing horrible happens, but that’s also the point, right, that bad things can happen to you that aren’t earth-shattering but which also aren’t, you know, good, especially when your father, the person who’s supposed to protect you, doesn’t listen to you and brushes off your concerns. This is a quiet, contemplative film that lets conversations sink in, lets you experience the silence (or the lack thereof, like when the men welcome a group of young dudes to camp next to them, and the endless noise that comes with dudes of a certain age) and really marinate in it. Sam (newcomer Lily Collias) is a revelation. As someone who was a teenaged girl who didn’t talk about things because she knew she wouldn’t be heard, this movie really resonated with me.
First Reformed (2017) — Ethan Hawke shines as a pastor who’s slowly unravelling. I can see why awards voters balked at this, it’s 95% straightforward drama but the 5% that isn’t just gets real, real weird. I didn’t know anything about this going in aside from the fact that the Internet widely thinks that Hawke was robbed of an Oscar for this, and going in fairly blind is, I think, the best choice. Having no concrete idea where the movie is going and instead experiencing the car crash unfolding in slow motion is wrenching.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024) — This movie is resonating with a) 90s nerds and b) anyone who’s ever grappled with their identity, so of course it hit a few buttons for me. I think sometimes it came down on the side of “too inscrutably weird” but I appreciate the absolute audacity to make something this different, even if it didn’t always work for me. The concept of the TV show within the movie works, especially because as adult viewers, we recognize how over the top ridiculous it was, even when it was deadly serious to you when you were a teen. The soundtrack is fantastic. The flat affect of Maddy and Owen, two kids struggling to find solid ground in a world not made for them, spoke so much to me of every awkward weirdo outsider friend that I ever had. The body horror! Owen’s refusal until the very end to live his own truth! I want to rewatch this and marinate in how well it captures this specific experience that only hits if you lived through it, even a little bit.
Poolman (2023) — Not as bad as the critics are saying, but not good, either. Being Chris Pine means you kind of have free license to do whatever you want without being challenged on it, but the consequence of that is that you wind up with movies like Poolman, which is five different movies in an underdeveloped trench coat. This story originally started life as, I believe, a bunch of inside jokes between Pine and others, so it makes sense that he’s made a movie that he likes but which falls flat to anyone who isn’t part of his inner circle of joke pals. There are a few funny gags but the biggest redeeming feature is that he wears short shorts for most of the time.
The Idea of You (2024) — I offer no apologies for how genuinely I enjoyed this self-insert fanfic of a movie. Whomst among us hasn’t created elaborate fantasies in their head of OOPS bumping into the celebrity du jour at a coffee shop or on the street or in a park or in their own trailer at Coachella and then sparking a hot steamy romance?? The only difference is that Anne Hathaway is So Hot and the rest of us are just normal people. I do like that this didn’t just handwave away the issues that come with being a normal person dating someone famous. If you enjoy mindless romance novels with hot kissing scenes that you can mostly forget about afterwards, you’ll enjoy this.
The Blue Angels (2024) — Very beautiful military propaganda. The in-flight footage of the Blue Angels is fantastic, and I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes looks at the training, selection, and day-in-the-life of the aviators assigned to the group. Narratively it was a little messy, jumping all over the place in focus. Could have used stronger guidance from a storytelling perspective, but I am a sucker for big planes going zoom zoom real fast, and this made great use of the IMAX technology.
Around the World
I took my first out-of-the-country vacation since COVID and decided, go big or go home, and found myself at various points in Glasgow, Manchester, Dublin, Copenhagen, and Malmo, with a brief “oops my flight got cancelled” stopover in London. (Plus 90 minutes in the Helsinki airport.) The trip was exellent, with just enough time in each location to make me angry that I didn’t have more time to spend there. (Scottish Highlands, I Will Be Back For You.)
I stuck all my photos in this here album, if you’ve got some time to waste and want to see pictures mostly from several museums. Here is, however, a non-specific list of incredibly cool things.
Glasgow: getting to meet my friend’s cats and also her boyfriend, Peter Hughes laughing, the tiny tiny Glasgow subway, old boat, cursed taxidermy, getting all the way to the top of the Glasgow Necropolis, the William Wallace memorial, organ tuning at the Glasgow Cathedral.
Manchester: Accidentally being in town for a) the big football game b) a bank holiday weekend c) beautiful weather d) some sort of marathon; Royal Albert Hall in general, late night chicken shawarma, some guy thinking I was Irish, “but I send you stuff in the mail!!”, “is Manchester basically the Nashville of England?”
Dublin: Itty bitty propeller airplane, getting rained on as soon as I got off the bus, new line friends, screaming seagulls, power outages, the coffee shop barista remembering my order after just one day, weird little medieval guys in the Book of Kells, big big library empty empty shelves
Copenhagen: the royal erotica collection, big silver lions, the heaviest crown, dragon park, the most expensive diner, the Tivoli peacocks, hygge, lots of park time, fat ceramic animals, my anger at not being able to fit whole pieces of beautiful Scandinavian furniture into my luggage
Malmo: taking the train, thank you to the Schengen Zone, delicious pastries, everything using the Ikea font, one museum for like seventy-five different topics, yarn, my ability to always find some sort of boat/train/plane museum
What’s Next?
I got a head start on movies for the month when I watched four movies during my 12-hour flight from London to Los Angeles.
Otherwise: a return to Codfish Hollow in Iowa to see Murder By Death, an end-of-the-month screening of Born on the Fourth of July, the memoir of the guy who actually started the real-world Topgun program; probably like six more ridiculous romance novels, my cat.
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