Mid-January Media: Y.A. Books

Carry On: Eh. It was fine. For all that it read like a watered-down version of Harry Potter and Harry/Draco, it had more modifications and original ideas than expected. That helped alleviate my low-to-moderate level of annoyance that someone made money off a novel only a hop away from HP fanfic. The solution to the Humdrum mystery was satisfying, although the other villain turned cardboardy. I wish there'd been more scenes in which to enjoy how Simon and Baz's magic worked better together than separately. I liked Fangirl significantly more than this semi-sequel—in fact, if I'd read Carry On first I don't think I would have tried Fangirl, which would have been a shame—but it was a quick and more or less pleasant read.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vols. 1-6: This series is such a delight. Rather than fisticuffs—although sometimes she tries that first and fails—, our heroine Doreen defeats villains by asking them what they want and helping them get it in a way that doesn't hurt others. She's skilled and confident, and she's not drawn as conventionally pretty, which is refreshing. The writing is funny and savvy and on trend, with one 2016 storyline centering on Not All Men and Nice Guy-ism. My current favorite supporting character is Brain Drain, a brain and eyeballs in a robot body who speaks in unpunctuated all caps as he pronounces the futility of human endeavors, or, in one memorable instance, tries to make friends with some "cool dudes." (Pic of the page.) Come to think of it, maybe the syntax/humor combination reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Death.

Black Panther book one: A Nation Under Our Feet (#1-12): The Ta-Nehisi Coates installment. I started it Friday and am struggling so far with the steep learning curve, not being well-versed in the Marvel/Avengers comics universe. It's dense and troubled and wrestling with real-life race politics and social unrest. The introduction by Seth Meyers, of all people, helped by previewing the theme of solutions not being simple and actions having consequences even for someone who is trying to do right by his people.

Mid-January Media: Movies

My Own Private Idaho

First of all, I'd been mixing this up with Stand By Me, another River Phoenix movie I've never seen. Second, I couldn't remember why I'd bumped this up in my Netflix DVD queue until halfway through, when Udo Kier danced with a table lamp while lip-synching. (I'd seen the scene on YouTube.)

THIRD, I had no idea this story about street hustlers in Seattle and Portland was also a loose, modern adaptation of Henry IV??? ( From soliloquies to Falstaff-brand beer... )

What a wacky mashup. It shouldn't have worked, this three- or four-time code switching—unsurprising to read that van Sant smushed together two projects—and yet the whole movie was so strange, it did. For me, anyway. It also reminded me a little of Lars von Trier, or a less nihilistic Lars von Trier, if that's possible, in, for example, its ironic use of American folk music and its one-two concluding slaps of "people will hurt you" and "people might help you, but does it matter when your heart's been broken?"

Life (2017)

I'd been interested in this movie since hearing a NASA staffer speak at a conference about real-life development of quarantine protocols for when scientists want to study an extraterrestrial sample without contaminating Earth or contaminating the object with Earth—for instance, if there's a possibility the sample contains life. One strategy would be to bring it aboard the International Space Station and examine it there, and this became the premise of Life. The speaker had either consulted on this (then-forthcoming) movie or knew the person who'd done so. So it was fun to get my hands on the DVD and see what the Hollywood machine did with—or to—the science.

Plot summary: Semi-diverse ISS crew takes aboard a Martian sample containing what looks like a single-celled organism; life is confirmed; the thing grows and evolves and instigates a series of cascading quarantine failures; and then we've got a space monster movie as the characters die one by one while making bad choices, including, of course, all the non-white and non-British/American ones, most notably Ariyon Bakare after an injury that was hard to watch. Similar structure to Sunshine, but not as good. Eventually, Earth's fate lies in the hands of Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson, who have overlooked a whopping big problem with their last-ditch effort to preserve the quarantine. Ryan Reynolds was also there. Verdict: three stars out of five, including one for effort.

Passengers

A.k.a. the one everyone was irritated about because misogyny.

IIRC, this movie was marketed as a science fiction romance where two characters accidentally wake up a lifetime too early on a generation ship headed to a colony planet—except moviegoers were in an uproar because ( Spoilers ahoy. Mention of suicide/self-sacrifice )