![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Media Consumption March 10–30
Media consumption for March 10 - 30. Have you consumed any of them?
- Ken Follett, The Hammer of Eden (audiobook)
- Michael Twitty, The Cooking Gene (audiobook)
- Nnedi Okorafor, Ikenga (audiobook)
- MJ Carter, The Strangler Vine (ebook)
- Catch Me If You Can (2002 film)
- Queen Cleopatra (2023 docudrama miniseries)
- The Bear (2022 TV series)
- Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (2022 mystery miniseries)
- Love & Leashes (2022 film)
Listening
- Ken Follett, The Hammer of Eden
- This 1998 thriller is about a commune/cult that turns terrorist when the valley where they grow grapes is going to be flooded to facilitate a nuclear power plant. They get a seismic vibrator and try to use it to cause earthquakes. There are two povs, the sociopath-adjacent who runs the commune and a woman FBI agent who tries to track him down in the face of bureaucratic and sexist barriers. It’s well written and the unbelievable parts are easy enough to look past. Thrillers from the 90s are funny because of the outdated tech.
- Michael Twitty, The Cooking Gene
- The author is a Black, gay, Jewish fat guy who has built his career around soul food and Southern cuisine. I was thinking it would have more details about food, but it’s more of a memoir/history centered around his life and the food ways of his ancestors. It’s good — he’s a deep thinker and really open about his feelings on all sorts of things. But I don’t care for memoirs much, and his narration is a little flat and awkward. So I set it aside halfway through.
- Nnedi Okorafor, Ikenda
- Marketed as middle-grade. Novel about a Nigerian boy, aged 11 at the start of the story, who develops superpowers and uses them to try to solve/avenge his father’s murder. Won an Edgar award. I am a hard sell on children’s books and YA and I’m really liking this. The narrator, Ben Onwukwe, has a gorgeous voice.
Reading
MJ Carter, The Strangler Vine. Book 1 of the Avery & Blake series, which is — well, imagine that Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling had a baby who was being raised by a crack historian. I listened to the audiobook and now I’m reading in ebook form.
Watching
- Catch Me If You Can
- 2002 film irected by Steven Spielberg. Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken (nominated for Best Supporting Actor Oscar), Martin Sheen. Uncharacteristically jazzy score by John Williams. Based on the maybe-somewhat-true story of a con man/forger/impersonator named Frank Abagnale Jr. Almost all the Spielberg-directed films I’ve seen are sentimental in a way that doesn’t work for me, and this one didn’t deviate. But the hardest thing to deal with was the sexism. 1960s levels of sexism. Imagine Bond girls, not the co-stars but the secondary ones that he goes through like Kleenex, then make them gullible. (/sarcasm) But I enjoyed parts of it — Tom Hanks disappears into his role more than usual (I wasn’t sitting there every moment he was on screen thinking “Oh, there’s Tom Hanks”). Christopher Walken is perfectly cast as the conman’s loser father. He doesn’t disappear, but he plays it pretty straight for him and it works.
- Queen Cleopatra
- Netflix documentary/drama about the historical figure. I didn’t realize it was a documentary when I began it and I was disappointed in that (I recently read a very carefully researched historical novel about Cleopatra so I’m not really learning anything about her life from this). But it’s absolutely gorgeous to look at. Tho’ I was distracted by her eunuch advisor portrayed as having a full beard and the guy playing Caesar looking exactly like a young David Bowie.
- The Bear
- About a family restaurant in Chicago. Chicago is a character. Marketed as a comedy, and it has funny moments, but it’s more of a dysfunctional family drama with suicide and PTSD and drug abuse and abuse abuse and… Not recommended for when you want something light and silly. All the acting is sharp as hell and within 3 episodes I cared a lot about most of the characters and also thought they were assholes. I like it when a show can do that to me.
- Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
- Hugh Laurie produced this miniseries based on a stand-alone Agatha Christie book. He plays a supporting character and uses echoes from other characters he’s played to lure watchers down a garden path. Brilliant. A relatively impecunious young man witnesses what seems like an accident and hears the man’s dying words (see title) and then is targeted by a murderer. He investigates with the help of his childhood girlfriend, who’s in the aristocracy, and his pal he’s starting an auto repair/sales business with. It’s really fun.
- Love & Leashes
- 2022 Korean rom-com about co-workers who start a BDSM relationship. I appreciated the film’s message that there’s nothing wrong with liking BDSM. I also liked that the main characters were kind of ordinary. But I didn’t like the relationship very much. It seemed mostly about him pushing her into domming/hurting him because he craved having those things done to him, and her going along with it because she liked him. It didn’t come across as a Grest Awakening into Sexual Freedom thing for her and I thought the movie was trying to push the idea that it was.
no subject
Really liked Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (and not just because Hugh)
no subject
Hugh was a delight in Evans! But definitely not the only reason to watch it!
no subject
A friend of mine gave me Michael Twitty's Rice, which is much more about the history of the foodstuff.
no subject
no subject
P.
no subject
no subject
Catch Me If You Can was also made into a musical, which I enjoyed more than I'd expected to.
no subject
A musical, wow, I can’t even imagine!
no subject
no subject
I've seen a much older BBC version of Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, and liked it, and read it, too.
no subject
Yeah, I agree with you on both counts.
I’ll have to check out the older version of WDTAE!
no subject