Trash TV: Wandavision

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Well folks, it finally happened.

After more than a decade, I’ve been forced to discard my snooty disdain for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I managed to maintain my sense of pop-cultural superiority despite quite liking Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok and Captain Marvel, and really liking Avengers: Infinity War a whole lot. My disappointment with Endgame allowed me to resist the temptation of going full MCU Stan even as the movies diversified in form and scope and generally became more varied and interesting.

But now, they’ve done it. They got me with Wandavision. And all it took was almost completely leaving the superhero stuff behind and transitioning into another genre entirely.

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The City & The City

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China Mieville feels like an author whose time has kind of passed. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way; the man’s still putting out books. It’s just that after helping to start the whole “New Weird” thing during the early 2000s with the Bas-Lag trilogy, he’s moved on to less fantastical genres and non-fiction, neither of which have gotten quite the same amount of attention as his earlier work.

My first exposure to Mieville was Perdido Street Station, partially because the first edition had a sick-ass cover and partially because I was still young enough that the idea of reading really long novels still felt mature and intellectual (these same factors led me to reading The War Of The Flowers by Tad Williams several years earlier, a mistake I have still not entirely recovered from). Like a lot of people who read Perdido Street Station, I never finished it.

As a fantasy author, Mieville is seemingly more interested in settings than stories, and long-time readers of This Blog will know how I feel about fantasy world-building. With a Mieville book you’re at least getting really strange, original world building, but at the end of the day that’s still not enough to carry a fantasy brick on its own.

Several years later I read The City & The City and also didn’t finish it, for basically the same reasons plus a few news ones, but I recently discovered that there was a BBC adaptation and it piqued my interest enough to go back and give it another shot. Can I turn a Book I Didn’t Finish into a Book I Did Finish?

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The Themes and Imagery of Little Nightmares

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I somehow failed to notice that Little Nightmares II, a game I’ve been quite looking forward to, is releasing tomorrow. After realizing this, I decided to slap out a quick blog about some issues I had with the themes and imagery of the first game, which is something I’ve been meaning to write about but hadn’t gotten around to yet.

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Books I Didn't Finish: A Curse So Dark And Lonely (aka That Time I Got Reincarnated As A YA Heroine)

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I have a confession to make. I love portal fantasies, or whatever you want to call them. Stories about people (preferably kids or teens) getting whisked off from our world into a fantasy setting is something I’ve always had an affinity for. It’s one of the hokiest, most played-out tropes in all of fiction, and for some reason I can’t get enough of it.

So when I found out that one of the more prominent recent YA releases is an example of the genre, and that it was on sale in the Kindle store, I demolished that purchase button and eagerly started to read.

Why did I not finish it? Let’s find out!

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Ghost In The Shell (1995) vs Ghost In The Shell (2017)

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If you’re any sort of sci-fi fan at all, and especially if you’re into the cyberpunk corner of the genre, then you’ve almost certainly heard of Ghost In The Shell. I saw the movie for the first time when I was around thirteen or fourteen, in hindsight way too young to either be entertained by it or to understand it, so I recently decided to re-visit it along with the American live-action remake that came out a few years ago.

Which one is better? Well, I obviously went in expecting that the Japanese original would be vastly superior to the watered-down American remake. So imagine my surprise when I watched them both back to back and discovered, to my absolute astonishment, that the remake is even more of a huge waste of time than I thought it was going to be.

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Tenet

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I’m not a big Christopher Nolan fan. In fact I’m not really a fanatical devotee of any directors, even ones that I like, but then I’m not an Internet Movie Guy, so I’m not contractually obliged to be.

Nolan has made some very impressive and enjoyable films, but he also has a lot of bad habits that he’s attracted too much clout and prestige to be prevented from indulging in, and he’s responsible for the most overrated movie in recent film history. I’m not going to say which one I’m talking about, I’m just going to leave that statement hanging.

Actually I lied, it’s The Dark Knight.

For this reason, I wasn’t really looking forward to Tenet, like, at all. The trailers looked cool and it took on a weird cultural relevance back at the start of the pandemic since Nolan threw a big tantrum and insisted that it just had to be released in la cinéma, global crisis be damned. But overall, not really hyped about this one.

So when I say that it still didn’t come anywhere close to meeting those already-low expectations...yeah, this is a total dud.

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Ready Player Two

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Ready Player One was a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, which became a brief nerd culture sensation before most people decided it was actually bad. I thought it was bad the first time I read it, although on subsequent attempts to revisit it I realized it’s actually far worse than I remembered; the plot in the first half is actually pretty exciting, which masks the poor writing and annoying retro pop culture references on an initial read.

A few years later Ernest Cline wrote Armada, which everyone hated, and then he vanished for a while until the Steven Spielberg movie adaptation of Ready Player One came out and was fairly popular. I can’t prove that Ready Player Two was knocked out in a hurry to capitalize on the movie’s release, but I’m going to argue that that was probably the case.

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Bad Writing Masterclass: A Discovery of Witches

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I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but we’re living in the golden age of witch-fic. Books about witches are inundating the fantasy and YA shelves; you can’t swing a black cat without hitting four novels with crystals and pentagrams on their covers. This has come alongside a trend of literary novels infused with the earthy scent of pagan-influenced folk horror, as seen in books like Max Porter’s Lanny.

I don't know whether all of these books are chasing a big trend-setter or if a bunch of authors have decided to become wiccans or what, but this is all extremely My Aesthetic so I’m on board with it. Last week Deborah Harkness’ entire All Souls Trilogy popped up in the Kindle daily deal for less than a euro (including the intruiging “All Souls real-time reading companion”, whatever that is), and since I suspect that those books may be part of the impetus behind the trend, I heartily smashed that purchase button (because the last time I impulse-bought something from the Kindle daily deal, it went very well). Can the first book in the trilogy provide the witchy content I crave?

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Books I didn't finish: Q

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You may not have noticed this, but I like reading bad books. When a novel lets me down, my immediate reaction isn’t to cast its author out of my Kindle wishlist for all time; it’s to take a keen interest in whatever they write next.

In that vein, today we’re looking at Q, Christina Dalcher’s followup to 2017’s Vox, which I didn’t really like at all.

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Post Election Purgatory Chat

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Well...at least Trump lost. Eventually.

Having made the incredibly foolish decision to stay glued to the election results as they came in, I got to experience the turbulent roller coaster ride that was watching Biden’s odds flip back and forth on a seemingly hourly basis. In the end he just about managed to win, but the victory is far from the sweeping landslide that many had hoped for. The Senate is still up for grabs by a two-seat margin, the Democrats lost seats in the House, and to top it all off human/snapping turtle hybrid Mitch McConnell not only won reelection, but has yet to be vaporized by a bolt of lightning.

The mood on the biggest mainstream political opinion stage in the world--by which I mean my twitter feed--has been mixed these last few days. This is the outcome people were hoping for, but there’s a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction. To be honest, I think some people would have preferred a Trump win to what we got, because we at least know what that would look like. Right now, the future is a lot more uncertain.

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Pre-Election Hell Chat

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The world is burning, and only blog posts about American politics can save it.

So hey, remember 2016? Maybe it’s just because of the personal circumstances I’ve found myself in since then, but the last US election feels like it happened approximately forty years ago. Anyway, in just a few days it’s time to do all of that over again because existence is suffering and time is a flat circle and all that jazz.

I’ve been seeing a lot of pessimism from my fellow left-leaning people on twitter. In this post, I’m going to break wildly from character and explain why you should actually be optimistic about November 3rd...but still concerned for what might come after.

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Annabelle

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James Wan’s Conjuring franchise is the horror version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, encompassing a current total of seven feature-length movies, with three more in various stages of development or planning, and multiple short films. My only prior exposure to the series is the original Conjuring, which I watched years ago and didn’t like very much.

Annabelle, the second movie in the franchise, is a prequel/spin-off of the first movie depicting the origins of the creepy doll that showed up in a minor sub-plot there. Taking place some time in the late 60s--it’s after the Manson family has gained enough prominence to be on TV, but before the Tate-La Bianca murders--Annabelle focuses on fresh-faced all-American couple John and Mia Form, who are awaiting the birth of their first child while John starts a stressful medical residency. John buys the titular doll for Mia to round out her extremely creepy collection, but then a cult stages a violent home invasion, during which one of the cult members--a teenage runaway named Annabelle--ritualistically cuts her throat while holding the doll. Some of her blood gets on it and then boom! Possessed doll. That’s how it happens, folks. Generic poltergeist activity follows, which in movies is what demons do to troll people before they eat their souls.

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Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

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A while back I reviewed all of the then-released Paranormal Activity movies. If you don’t feel like reading my stellar blogs posts on the topic, the short version is that the first movie is Good Actually, Fight Me while all of the sequels were disappointing to varying degrees, with Paranormal Activity 4 being especially bad. Due to the diminishing returns offered by successive paranormal activities, I didn’t see the sixth and “final” movie when it came out in 2015 even though it has possibly the greatest film title in cinematic history.

It’s time to rectify that. Step through the spooky portal in your daughter’s bedroom and join me in...THE GHOST DIMENSION.

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The Conjuring 2

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I guess it’s time to review The Conjuring 2, the second movie in the James Wan/Warner Bros franchise that’s turned into the MCU of horror movies. In case you’re not familiar with them, the Conjuring movies are about proven frauds Ed and Lorraine Warren, but in the movies they’re actual ghost hunters instead of con artists who scammed mentally ill people. The Conjuring 2 opens with them investigating the Amitville haunting, which was a hoax, and then moves onto the Enfield haunting, which was also a hoax.

Hang on, I need to drink some water. Things got a little spicy there.

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I'm Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid

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Note that I deviated from my usual review title format for this one, so as not to alarm my many loyal fans

You could sum up Iain Reed’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things in two sentences: a woman goes to visit her boyfriend’s parents. Things start out kind of weird, and then they gradually get extremely weird. But detailed plot synopses lasting at least two paragraphs is how we roll here in the content venue, so let’s dig into this some more.

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Guest Post: Borrasca

It’s another guest post, please experience and enjoy it in that order.

For a few years now I’ve been aware of the burgeoning genre of narrative horror podcasts. Probably the best-known example is Welcome to Nightvale, the long-running podcast/media empire that centres around a town stuffed to the gills with supernatural phenomena.

I’m going to admit something scandalous here and reveal that I could never quite get into Nightvale. The writing and presentation was solid in the few episodes I sampled, but the tongue-in-cheek tone and the setting never really did much for me.

Lately I’ve also seen a lot of people recommend The Magnus Archives, a long-form narrative podcast which has apparently developed a very rich and well-constructed mythos over its four year (and counting) run. Unfortunately it also has over 170 episodes. I don’t have quite that much time on my hands, even taking the lockdown into account, so I decided to look for something a bit more manageable in terms of length.

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The Haunting Of Hill House

You know what there isn’t enough of? Good horror.

You know what there especially isn’t enough of? Good horror TV shows. This is a shame, because the format would seem to solve a lot of the issues that plague horror movies, the slower pace and much longer run-time of a series allowing for more subtlety and a lighter touch with the scares. And yet, most supposedly scary TV shows are either not scary at all, or only sporadically scary.

So when Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House arrived in 2018, cries of joy were heard o’er the land and the series was turned into an anthology whose second season, The Haunting Of Bly Manor, is coming out soon (and will be reviewed on this very blog, so watch out for that). Does it live up to its reputation? Let’s see.

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