Some bite-sized thoughts and reflections on the items I’ve been reading, listening to, or watching this month.
Also: Did you read, watch, listen to, play something this month that you particularly enjoyed? Feel free to share in the comments! I’m always looking for recommendations.
Note: The following post contains spoilers for the following: Eternals, Midnight Mass on Netflix, and Station 19 on ABC/Hulu.
What I’m reading for work
Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk: This is the first book I’ve ever read by Chuck Palahniuk, who is probably most famous for writing Fight Club (the book on which the movie was based). Because of what I know about Fight Club (other than that you should never talk about Fight Club) and some of his other work, I’d always had the impression that Palahniuk was an aggressively male writer who sort of sneers at readers who might clutch their pearls at raunchy or violent stories. That’s probably the main reason why I avoided his stuff even though I enjoy works by similar writers like Irvine Welsh (who wrote Trainspotting…and the sequel, Porno…and the sequel to the Trainspotting movie, T2, which is not based on Porno). Anyway. All this to say that these impressions, coupled with my recent feelings of burnout when it comes to books about writing, did not make me optimistic about how I would feel about this book. But actually I liked it a lot. I’m not sure why. It’s not that much different from a lot of the other writing books I’ve read lately. Some of the advice Palahniuk gives is in direct contradiction to the advice in some of these other books (including his ideas about using gestures as spacer between dialogue, which he is in favor of) but he still visits a lot of the same stations of the cross that other writing book authors do (…The Great Gatsby, Hemingway, blah blah blah) and there’s nothing here that’s radically different from what you’d read anywhere else. But I do like how Palahniuk frames a lot of his advice as stuff he learned from his own writing mentor and then used successfully in his own work and notices in the works of others. The tone is someone passing on wisdom rather than, like in a lot of writing books, handing down dictates of what is Good (aka literary) and what is Bad (aka commercial). Palahniuk’s views are especially interesting because I think his work (which, again, I haven’t read) tends to straddle the line between literary and commercial so he doesn’t seem to be quite as married to the idea that literary fiction is the One True Fiction as other writing book authors are. Also, there’s an anecdote about Stephen King in here that I am not going to forget any time soon.
What I’m watching for fun
Eternals: As a longtime MCU fan who also runs an MCU Rewatch Discussion Group online (come join us!), Eternals is a movie that I’ve been especially excited about ever since hearing some of the early casting announcements a couple of years ago. I knew absolutely nothing about the comic book characters the movie would be based on or any of their associated relationships or storylines. All I cared about was that: a) I might finally have proof that Sebastian Stan and Richard Madden are not the same person(1) and b) Robb Stark and Jon Snow would finally be reunited. Alas, I ended up only getting about half of one of those things.(2) But weirdly enough, I still enjoyed the movie–much more than I thought I would after reading so many tepid and occasionally hostile reviews of it in the weeks leading up to its release. Is it the most exciting Marvel movie ever? No. Does it somehow manage to make actors as magnetic as Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie fade into the background? Yes. Does everyone in the movie look kind of dumb in their superhero costumes? Yeah, kinda. But what you have to understand about me is this: I love it when characters talk about their feelings and relationships. Seriously. If the third Captain America movie had been nothing but Steve and Bucky hanging out at Avengers Tower, talking about their feelings for three hours, I would have liked it soooo much better than Civil War. So. Much. Better. I especially like when characters talk about their feelings within a “found family” type of context. It’s always interesting to me to see what they’re willing to say about what’s going on in their heads and who they’re willing to say it to. So though not all of the characters felt as distinct as they could have, I did enjoy watching them navigate their various relationships with one another. I also liked that there were some genuinely unexpected revelations and reversals and that the movie makes it clear pretty early on that plot armor is not going to be a thing for these characters. There was a moment near the end where I genuinely started to think that I was watching the MCU equivalent of that Star Wars movie where everyone dies at the end. It was kind of exciting! I get why the critics are basically over MCU movies in general though I think their apparent disappointment that Chloe Zhao didn’t somehow manage to make the first truly “Oscar worthy” MCU movie is a bit much. First, because it’s Black Panther erasure. Second, because who really wants the MCU version of an Oscar movie? Probably no one. Eternals isn’t the best MCU movie ever, but I think it manages to be relatively distinct and I’m looking forward to seeing future installments featuring these characters. Even if those installments include Harry Styles, a former boy band star who I am young enough to know was in a boy band but too old to find particularly interesting.
Midnight Mass on Netflix: After not really liking either The Haunting of Bly Manor or The Haunting of Hill House, I had pretty much no intention of watching Midnight Mass, which is a new series by the same creator and starring some of the same cast (as different characters). Then I heard Hamish Linklater, who I’d recently become aware of via old episodes of The New Adventures of Old Christine on HBO Max, was playing one of the main characters. And also Zach Gilford, of my beloved Friday Night Lights was going to be there. And Rahul Kohli, my beloved Ravi from iZombie (who also played the cook in Bly Manor). Then I started watching it and Michael Trucco from Battlestar Galactica was there too! In bad old age makeup! That was actually my first clue that helped me figure out where this story was going by the end of the first episode: I noticed that all of the “old” characters were being played by middle-aged (or younger) actors who had conspicuously been made up to look older than they were. I even figured out Father Paul’s “true” identity long before it was revealed. That’s not a ding against the show–as I’ve
explained elsewhere, I like the suspense that comes from knowing more about what’s going on than the characters do. I still didn’t particularly like the series, though. I’d read ahead of time about long scenes that were nothing but characters giving long speeches about Religion and Death and Existence, so I was fully expecting that but my God. The speeches themselves weren’t bad but they reminded me a lot of some of Elliot’s internal monologue in Mr. Robot. In that show, Elliot has a habit of going on and on to the viewer about topics that he seems to think make him sound really deep or smart. Because speeches like these tend to be delivered “straight” so often on television, it takes some time as a viewer to realize that you know more about Elliot than he knows about himself and one of the things he doesn’t know (though he eventually figures some of it out) is that though he’s a genius with computer stuff, there are a lot of things he’s full of crap about. Midnight Mass has a lot of interesting things to say about religion and spirituality but I think it makes the mistake of thinking it’s smarter than it actually is or that it’s saying anything new. Mostly it’s a lot of depressing conversations about existential dread punctuated with the occasional jump scare. It was fine, I guess. And if Mike Flanagan keeps putting people I like in his stuff, I’ll probably keep watching.(3)
Station 19 on Hulu: What a silly show this is. Grey’s Anatomy is a series I’ve watched off and on over the years but I had to finally stop around the start of the pandemic because it was giving me too much anxiety. I knew, vaguely, about the show’s first responder-focused spinoff but didn’t feel compelled to tune in until it showed up on a list of “recommended shows” one day when I was doing the streaming equivalent of channel-surfing. I decided to give it a try and pretty soon I couldn’t stop watching. Which is weird considering how much I hate most of the characters. And how much I hate storylines where the healthy-seeming relative of the patient in distress is the one who ends up dead at the end of the episode instead of the person who actually needed to be rescued from some terrifying situation in the first place, which happens here (and on Grey’s Anatomy) A LOT. I think what keeps me going is that every once in a while, in between characters being needlessly killed off (followed by a mandatory three-episode grieving period), you get an episode like the one that finally (after four effing seasons) tells the back story of how Travis’s husband died in a way that both manages to make a new character suddenly way more interesting and call out what a judgmental bitch Travis can be sometimes. (I can say that because until Ruiz showed up, Travis was my favorite despite how judgey he can be.) Basically, this show, like Grey’s, is best enjoyed as a soap opera about some fantasy fire house where everyone who works there is relatively young and impossibly hot and has more medical knowledge than most surgeons.(4) It’s ridiculous and sometimes fun when it’s not unbearably depressing. Another one of those shows I can’t stop watching for reasons I can’t explain to myself.
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1) They look alike. Don’t they? I’m not actually sure because I’ve never seen them together (and didn’t really expect to here–but I thought maybe the Eternals would have reason to encounter Bucky, at least in passing, in some future movie). But the first time I saw the trailer for Cinderella, I mistook a clean-shaven Richard Madden (who plays Prince Charming in the movie) for a clean-shaven Sebastian Stan and my mind has insisted on mixing them up with each other ever since.
2) If I hadn’t heard something about them being friends in real life, I would think that Richard Madden and Kit Harington must have something in their contracts that stipulates that they can only share limited screen time together in any project they are both in. Though both are known for Game of Thrones, they only share scenes in the first episode of the series except for a dream Bran has in the third season, which I’m pretty sure was achieved through a combination of stand-ins and CGI. Here, they both appear in one scene at the very beginning of the movie and then never meet again.
3) Hamish Linklater really is great in this. Watching him, though, I have to think he must be a vampire in real life too–he doesn’t appear to have aged a day in the years since his Old Christine days. Everyone else on the series does good work as well, though Rahul Kohli’s American accent is such that he joins the long list of Non-American Actors Who Are Less Hot When They Play Americans. He shouldn’t feel bad, though. As far as I can tell, this list includes every male British actor there is except Hugh Dancy and Andrew Garfield. Even Henry Cavill, one of the most objectively hot actors working in Hollywood today, is much, much less hot when he’s playing an American.
4) My grandfather was a volunteer firefighter most of my life and though I don’t know that much about the nature of his work, I can tell you that the cast of Chicago Fire, at least in its early seasons, was probably a bit more realistic when it comes to the type of people you would find working in a fire station. I couldn’t say for sure, but I think it was also more realistic about what paramedics do and what their role is in a crisis. That said, the ridiculousness of the fire-related and medical crises the characters often find themselves in on that show is probably about equal with Station 19. That said, Chicago Fire may have the edge for me simply because it had Charlie Barnett in its cast for three seasons and even though it didn’t give him a lot to do, I am never mad when Charlie Barnett shows up in something I’m watching.
Studying Research 