hrj | Entries tagged with reviews: tv

November 2022

Longshadow by Olivia Atwater - audio

For various reasons I often find myself reading a book in the middle of a series without having read earlier volumes (or even with any intention of reading the rest of the series). I think some people would have a harder time with that, whereas I tend to enjoy the challenge of working things out in context. This book is the sequel to Half a Soul, which sets up the world and focuses on some characters who are secondary in Longshadow, but I don't think you need to have read it to follow things. This is a Victorian faerie romantic adventure with magic and moving between worlds and being bound by perilous rules. I loved the central relationship (which, by some angles, could be viewed as sapphic -- it's complicated) and how the secrets and twists unfolded. But I wasn't quite as fond of the prose, which was very talky and repetitive.

A Restless Truth by Freya Marske - audio

This too, was the second book in a series where I hadn't read the first. And once again, I thought it was set up well enough that you could pick up on the overarching motifs while enjoying the immediate story. There seems to be a fashion currently for series with queer romances where only one of the books has a female couple, as in this one. (I'm more likely to pick up the whole series if I get consistent sapphic content.) Once again, this is a sort of magical Victorian romantic adventure, but with something of a murder-mystery structure. It was a fun story, though I felt like it would have been just as good without periodically pausing the action for a sex scene.

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk - audio

1930s Chicago with supernatural gangsters and deals with demons, and a very central sapphic romance that drives all the protagonist's choices. It took me a little while to warm to the story. I wasn't sure why I was supposed to care about the characters at the beginning but I was much more invested by the end (which was both unexpected yet inevitable). The worldbuilding involves a lot of intensely Christian theology, which sometimes left me wondering what the place of non-Christians was in that world, given that we see the Christian dynamics presented as "real."

The Woman King - movie

As mentioned before, I don't review every movie or tv show I watch, but I want to give a very strong recommendation to The Woman King -- a fictionalized treatment of the Dahomey “Amazons” in the mid 1800s. Even aside from providing a strikingly different view of colonial West Africa, the central aspect of the story is the tight bonds of loyalty, friendship, and love between the women of the Agojie warror band. If you like the energy and power of the superhero movie Wakanda Forever (which I also saw and recommend) then I recommend you seek out The Woman King which adds in some overt sapphic elements.

Warrior Nun - tv series

We're getting an abundance of movies and tv shows that have casual sapphic content but I wish I could get those vibes with a bit less emphasis on violence and fight scenes. But violence and fight scenes are the central driver of the Netflix series Warrior Nun, which is about a secret convent of demon-fighting nuns, with bonus science-fictional elements, Vatican intrigues, and angels…maybe. Again, lots and lots of violent fight scenes, just barely sufficiently mitigated by overt sapphic threads in the plot. But you do have to forgive a show when its willing to include casual lesbians.

Young Royals - tv series

The "November 2022" date is somewhat arbitrary for a bunch of these movies and tv series -- it's when I recorded a number of things I'd been watching in previous months. This contemporary (and very queer) series which just wrapped up with a third season (at the time I'm posting this in April 2024) follows the entirely-too-realistic struggles of a teenaged heir to a Scandinavian throne, exploring same-sex love and heartbreak at an upper crust boarding school. There’s a temptation to shout at the kids, “Dial it down, chill out, adolescence isn’t forever!” But that’s really the point of the drama and angst and the series handles contemporary issues in realistic ways.

December 2022

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin - audio

The sequel to The City We Became, about a group of people who become the living avatars of New York City in a fight against a cosmic evil that manifests as gentrification and other urban threats. This was just as fun and complex as the previous book, and I like how the plot achieved its happy ending without erasing the problems in our world. Excellent series. Probably doesn't stand alone well without having read the previous. (There are also other shorter stories set in this story continuum.)

The Drowned Woods by Emily Lloyd-Jones - audio

A YA historic fantasy featuring elements of medieval Welsh legend. It initially caught my attention because it showed up in my keyword searches for sapphic stories, but I was disappointed on that end. Although the main character does have a significant past relationship with another woman, the central romance is with a man -- which is one of the hazards of identifying queer content by hints and rumor. The book was an interesting blend of genres, but I could have done without the "generic D&D economy"complete with thieves guilds. It was more Hollywood-medieval than historic-medieval. I was also annoyed that, in the critical fight scene, the heroine entirely forgets her super powers, to make what should have been a very quick resolution into an extended struggle.

Reader, I Murdered Him by Betsy Cornwell - audio

Inspired by the character of the young girl Adele in the novel Jane Eyre, I had thought, from the cover copy, that this tale of girl-gang rage against the patriarchy would be a bit more of a madcap heist than it turned out to be. Instead I’d describe it as a dark gothic (much darker than the cover copy implied), and it should have content advisories for sexual assault and threat of incest. Don’t get me wrong, it was a powerful, well-written book, and I definitely enjoyed it. It just wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

The perceptive reader will notice that there are no text items in this pair of months. That's become rather common for me. I hope it will change when I'm no longer staring at a computer screen all day for work, which makes me less inclined to stare at text for fun.

May 2022

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark - audio

I read this one for Hugo voting, but got solidly hooked and added the rest of the works in this series to my to-read list. This book (and some of the other stories in this universe) centers a dapper butch magical investigator in a seriously alternate early 20th century Cairo who gets caught up in a conflict with a bad-ass Djinn. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding of what happened when "our" world unexpectedly communicated with the plane of reality that the Djinn inhabit. That's not the central action of the story--merely the backstory. So what we get in the series is stories that build on the consequences of that background.

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki - print

On a whim—because I found myself in a really cute bookstore and wanted to buy something—I picked up this rather bonkers novel. It’s…well, it has a spaceship full of interstellar refugees managing a doughnut shop, a violin teacher who sells her students’ souls to the devil in order to save her own music, and a teenage transgender runaway violinist. And then things get complicated. Not the sort of book I’d normally pick up, except that it’s a Hugo finalist and I wanted to read it for that, but I very much enjoyed where it took me.

Blood Moon (The Wolves of Wolf Point #2) by Catherine Lundoff - print

This series has one of the best short-and-to-the-point hooks that I can think of: "queer menopausal werewolves." Mix in a thriller plot and a main character who is still working on sorting out the various changes in her life, and it's a gripping story.

Toad Words by T. Kingfisher - print

A collection of some of Kingfisher's short pieces. It took me a while to finish the collection because I kept diverting to read other things and forgetting that I hadn't finished it yet. The stories are delightful (as always) though I don't have any notes on which specific ones are included. Kingfisher is one of those authors where I will pre-order as soon as a book is announced...well, except for some of her horror. I'm just not fond of horror in general.

June 2022

Black Water Sister by Zen Cho - audio

Someone—and I confess I’ve forgotten who—mentioned that the narration for this audibook was truly inspired, so since I’d had my eye on the book already, I took advantage. After growing up in the US, the protagonist is struggling to adapt when her Malaysian-Chinese family returns to their ancestral home. Torn between family loyalty and the desire for independence, missing her girlfriend but not out to her family, things only get more complicated when the ghost of her grandmother takes up residence in her head. Zen Cho brings her own background to a story thoroughly steeped in the culture and setting of contemporary Malaysia.

Spear by Nichola Griffish - audio

I absolutely devoured this Arthurian historic fantasy. Inspired both by dark age history and Welsh and Irish myth, the story posits the knight Peredur as a queer cross-dressing woman. I loved that—unlike many Arthurian fantasies—I didn’t feel like the outcome of the story was pre-determined and guaranteed to be tragic. For a long time I’d given up on my love of Arthurian re-tellings because I was tired of them all ending the same, but Griffith has given me back my joy in this genre.

Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children #6) by Seanan McGuire - audio

I dipped into another title in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children novella series, about the lives of children who slip into other worlds and what happens when they come back. This one features a world that’s a horse-mad girl’s dream…or nightmare.

The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers - audio

Another book that I listened to because it’s a Hugo finalist. This is part of an existing series that stands alone fairly well (which is a good thing because it’s the first book I’ve read from that series). The basic premise is: an odd assortment of spacefaring aliens are stranded together at a planetary truck stop and get to know each other better. I have a number of complicated thoughts about what the book is doing. In large part, I had problems with the aliens not being alien enough. A large part of the plot involves dealing with physical, physiological, and cultural incompatibilities--but for all that, their various cultures seemed strikingly similar. Everyone seemed to have the same preoccupations and rituals, just with minor differences. The main protagonist (who is decidedly non-human) has an adolescent child who is described in terms lifted from stereotypes of human teenagers, but treated as if adolescence will inevitably work the same regardless of species. A lot of the concerns and attitudes seemed very rooted in contemporary social discourse, which is a perfectly fine and entertaining thing to do, but it took me a lot of work to settle into figuring out that it was trying to do that.

First Kill - tv series

This Netflix series is based on a short story by SFF author V.E. Schwab and can be summed up as “cross Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Romeo and Juliet and make them both lesbians.” So: totally my jam as a premise, though the execution involves a lot of graphic violence to a degree that's less to my taste. You have two warring families – the vampires and the monster hunters – and two high school girls trapped between them as they fall in love. The first season ends on something of a cliffhanger with respect to the romance, but given the tone of the series, I have high hopes for a happily ever after ending. [Alas, after I scribbled down these notes, we eventually got word that Netflix cancelled after the one season.]

(Note: I don't include all my tv/movie consumption in these reviews.)

Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison - audio

This is a sort-of sequel to The Goblin Emperor, turning a minor character in that book into the protagonist of this and subsequent books. While it could certainly be read as a stand-alone, a lot of the worldbuilding gets done in TGE and the reader might be a bit lost without it. The sequels are basically fantasy police procedural, told from the viewpoint of someone whose profession is taking the testimony of dead souls.

And that concludes this installment of Heather Catches Up on Review-Like-Objects. I keep being startled by how many things I was reading in a month back then because it feels like I'm luck to finish two titles a month currently.

Lately I've gotten even more into a mood of "my brain can't cope with thinking once the dayjob is done" and I've been using Netflix and (yes, I capitulated) Amazon Prime Video as accompaniment to dinner and decompressing with online jigsaw and word puzzles. I find it relatively hard to "just watch" something and should really start a serious knitting project (one I can do without constantly looking at it) for reasons I will go into below.

So what have I been enjoying lately? I confess that I signed up for Amazon Video solely to watch The Rings of Power, which I very much enjoyed, particularly the multiply-threaded plot and the uncertainty of just who was who/what. I avoided spoilers and even avoided looking up the source material (probably an unnecessary avoidance) so I could enjoy the discovery aspect.

From here on in, I'm not going to specify which network I watched things on, because honestly I have a hard time keeping track if it's not in front of my eyes.

Loved, loved, loved A League of Their Own (the series). When I first saw haters posting "why is this slow all about lesbians I thought it was about baseball" I thought it was the typical over-reaction to any hint of queerness. No. They're right. This isn't a baseball show that happens to have some lesbian characters, it's a lesbian show that happens to revove around baseball. And I love it. So many different types of representation. Realistic (and sometimes hard to watch) while being overall positive and triumphant. I recognized the "big game climax twist" as borrowed from a (more modern) real life incident and thought it was perfect for the setting.

I've been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and overall enjoying it, although my interest is straying now that I'm in...what?...season 3? 4? Lost track. (Amazon Prime is not as good as Netflix at keeping track of your place in a series.) I think the thing that keeps me going is the Unresolved Romantic Tension between the oblivious Mrs. Maisel and her butch-lesbian manager who clearly has utterly fallen for her.

This week I've been touting a somewhat cheesy fairy-tale/dark-academia movie, The School for Good and Evil, almost entirely for the way it centers intense platonic same-sex friendship. Let's just say that if you liked the resolution of my novella The Language of Roses, the resolution of this movie has a similar vibe.

I've been browsing through the Amazon catalog for interesting costume flicks but am running up against the problem (I mean, not a problem exactly, but an infelicity) that the initial splash page doesn't have an obvious indication of whether the show is non-English with subtitles. See my comment about using video as background when multi-tasking. If I have a knitting project I can enjoy things with subtitles, but I can't enjoy them if I'm noodling on my laptop doing visual things. Ever since my first winter working from home I've been thinking I need to knit myself some leg warmers. Maybe I'll finally go yarn shopping today...

Also recently watched the animated horror-adjacent social-activism movie Wendell & Wild. If you think you would enjoy a "Nightmare before Christmas" vibe with a wounded and rebellious Black teenager going up against Evil Corporation (tm), this is solidly for you. No cheaply easy resolutions, but lots of love.

And now, I need to Do The Thing I promised myself I'd do in exchange for a coffee shop morning: dealing with the fact that I haven't glanced at my email in-box for two days solid.

I'm still very much in the middle of this series, so no hints at how it works out, but I'm enjoying it very much from both a visual and storytelling point of view (other than some obviously patriarchy annoyances inherent in the historic setting).

Setting:
1720 Spain, at the estate of the Duke of Castamar and at the royal court

Basic plot:
Family-saga type soap opera with lots of personal and political scheming.

Content notes:
On-stage sexual activity, male-gaze depiction of f/f sex, character peril, death of sympathetic supporting character, lots of historically accurate patriarchy bullshit, possibly other items that didn't register for me or that appear in later episodes.

Main characters:
Clara, an agoraphobic woman, mourning the death of her father, who takes the position of cook in the household of the duke, a talented cook and something of a natural philosopher
The duke, who is still very emotionally messed up by the tragic death of his wife, and who finds himself unaccountably drawn to his new cook...

Supporting characters
The rest of the duke's family, the women who are being thrown in his path with a mind to marriage, his political enemies, his friends (including two men in a forbidden sexual relationship), King Philip who is having historically-accurate mental health issues, an assortment of the duke's household staff including a housekeeper who seems to have been borrowed from a time-shifted Rebecca, a scheming kitchen servant jealous of the new cook who is given her own story arc and motivations, a developmentally handicapped young woman whom the duke promised to provide a home for, etc. etc.

Why I'm enjoying it:
Historic kitchen porn up the wazoo. Let me repeat that: if you are a fan of historic cookery, you're going to spend lots of time rewinding to watch the kitchen scenes. Great set dressing. Gorgeous and reasonably accurate costuming. Diverse representation in the characters: racial, gender, sexuality, lots of reasonably sensitive depictions of a variety of physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities ("reasonably" because we're still operating within fairly accurate historic parameters). Women claiming agency within the limits of their setting.

I got turned on to this show through a mention in the podcast Writers Drinking Coffee (which is a fun local "writers talking about / with / to other writers about all manner of things" show). The premise is a fun little meta-story about actors David Tennant and Martin Sheen being roped into trying to do zoom rehearsals for a play by their director Simon Evans (all playing themselves -- with their real-life spouses also playing themselves and all manner of minor parts also self-played by some highly recognizable names). They are not dealing with lock-down well and much hilarity (and bits of pathos) ensue. If theater people doing theater-peoply things dialed up to eleven, leavened with the inherent comedy value in zoom communications during lock-down sounds like your thing, I think you'll love this.

A couple of content notes. Plot thread about a medical crisis for a minor off-screen character in whom you will have become emotionally invested. And much more prominently, the show relies heavily on the trope of "men are incompetent and helpless in their everyday lives and rely on the women in their lives to pick up all the pieces and do all the household and emotional labor while still managing to have creative careers of their own." It's the sort of motif that simultaneously pokes fun at and normalizes gender imbalances in interpersonal relationships, while never managing to sincerely critique them. Another minor content note for embarrassment humor based on character lying to each other and getting found out. (I know some of my friends have a hard stop on that trope.)

Ok, so all the content notes don't negate my personal enjoyment of the show. But this is humor, and humor can be very individual in taste. It's a BBC production. IMDB says there are 14 episodes. I've watched the 6 episodes of season 1, which are currently available through Apple. It looks like both seasons are available through Hulu.

For a bit there, it looked like today was going to be a lazy lay-a-bed day. (And it sure is nice to have self-permission to have them. Hmm, maybe I've finally managed to achieve that whole "year of me" thing.) But after doing breakfast in bed and watching the last couple of iTunes-purchased episodes of Blood Ties (unsatisfying because there's no series closure), making my way out into the rain to get groceries, I actually made significant progress on two sewing projects. I've gotten the supportive gothic gown (in peacock blue, by the way) up to the point of doing the lacing holes. It still lacks sleeves and I'm waiting to figure out the neckline until I know how it's going to fit when laced, but now it's at a handwork stage. Then I did the main seams in the re-fitted "laurel party dress". (Have I mentioned that I hate hate hate remaking garments?) The re-fitting had to work around keeping the original buttonholes (all down the center front and sleeves), but that wasn't too difficult. I need to refit the lining, then put the sleeves back in and redo the hem. I'm also thinking of adding fitchets, since the inspiration I'm working from had them (as best I can tell -- it's a low-relief grave slab, so there's a fair amount of guesswork). Having the Oscars on in the background probably helped in getting the sewing done. Have I mentioned recently that I think Hugh Jackman is incredibly talented? One thing bothered me that I've noticed at previous Oscars: excluding all the "special form/genre" awards, it seemed like all the nominees came from only maybe half a dozen different films. And while I liked Slumdog Millionaire (saw it Friday, will try to review soon), it felt a bit like it had been adopted as the official "Oscar darling of the year" (of which there always seems to be one) that gets just a few more awards than its quality really calls for.

For fun: Wednesday, for work, I got to go on a "sharing best practices" tour of a major biotech company located in South San Francisco whose name starts with "G". There were 8 of us from the Big B (half from Berkeley, half from our new Emeryville site) so the guy organizing it ordered a shuttle van to take us over there. What we got was a stretch limo. Complete with mini-bar (but, alas, no potables other than soda). Nothing quite like pulling up to the security entrance of one of your competitors in a limo. There was, however, some good-natured joking about where our year-end bonuses were going. (Truth to tell, it was probably the same cost as a similarly-sized van.)

A brief review: Books 1 & 2 of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (No spoilers) Given that television tends to screw up most stories that it interprets to some degree, my default assumption is that if I like the tv adaptation of something, I'll probably like the original. And the tv series based on the supernatural mystery series The Dresden Files stood out as one of the better members of this tv season's inexplicable crop of supernatural adventure/mystery series. (I figure when a single season includes not one but two vampire-police-procedural series, then the word "inexplicable" can be brought into play.) Alas, in this case the books didn't infect me in quite the way the tv show did. The key difference seems to be in sub-genre emphasis. Butcher's novels blend the supernatural with a good old fashioned hard-boiled detective sensibility. The protagonist is a skilled magician (in the non-stage sense) but otherwise checks off all the hard-boiled tropes including regular fisticuffs, seedy living-on-the-financial-edge digs, romantic entanglements with a member of the press, and an overall pessimistic cast to life. It's a smooth and functional blend, but I'm just not that into the whole hard-boiled thing. The tv show had a somewhat different blend: more emphasis on the sense-of-wonder aspects of the supernatural (where the books have a more mechanistic feel), more Otherworldly Stuff less underworld stuff. The novels follow the standard theory that a hard-boiled protagonist must take three times as much physical punishment as any human being can function under, and will still come up swinging at the end. I tend to find this less believable than vampires and werewolves, somehow. So I probably won't be reading the rest of the series. A pity. And I'm not saying that the tv show was better than the novels -- they aren't badly written and they're actually quite nice representatives of the genre. It's just that the tv show better intersected with my own entertainment interests than the books did.

I want to go on record as being extremely in favor of the rule changes that now allow female figure skaters to skip the silly little skirt thingies (if they want to) and wear outfits that show off their magnificent bodies to extreme advantage. Like that wonderful thing Slutskaya wore in the short program. Mmmmm. In my opinion, there's nothing sillier looking than a figures skater with her alleged "skirt" fluttering up around her waist.

Has it really been nearly a week since I posted? I guess without mortgage issues to bitch about, I don't have much to say. (Nah.) ( Read more... )

We've had wonderful spring-like weather this week. I'm all set to switching over to bicycling to work again starting next week, although they say that we may have rain moving in again soon. This is probably a Good Thing since it's much too early to entice the plum tree into blooming. One of the almonds has already gone off, but they're a lot hardier about spring storms. Tomorrow I'm hoping to get around to installing a few more cinderblocks in the driveway. Xrian brought over a load of some she was trying to get rid of last month but someone seems to have decided that since they were sitting next to the trash cans, I was trying to get rid of them too. (When I mentioned this at work, one of my co-workers gave this long-suffering sigh and said, "You are way too willing to believe the best of people." Well, no, I'm not. But I like to practice giving the world the benefit of the doubt. I find it extremely exhausting when people are always jumping to the worst possible interpretation of things.)

Wonderful Olympics opening ceremonies last night. ( Read more... )

Now I'm busy setting up my VCR schedule for the week.