Quick Reviews and Other Stuff: August

The most exciting/interesting thing I did in August was probably a trip I took for work, which is interesting to no one but me, so instead here’s a picture of a kitten I’m fostering. His name is Peter and he is perfect.

Anyway, here’s some other stuff.

Books

1. Cassiel’s Servant, Jacqueline Carey — I have loved the story of Phedre and Joscelin for nearly 20 years, so I cannot possibly be objective about this “retell a novel from the POV of another character” book. That said, this book doesn’t add much to our understanding of canon and is not particularly a good entry point to Carey’s Kushiel series. I loved it anyway, though — I loved learning more about the Cassiline Brotherhood, about Joscelin’s pre-Phedre life, the challenges he faced. I loved being able to see things through his eyes, see how he slowly finds his heart softening to Phedre. I just wish there was more. More of his interior life, more of his thoughts and motivations. He is by nature a closed off, fairly repressed guy in terms of emotions and I would have liked to see more of that struggle. As others on Goodreads pointed out, he’s not even the main character in his own story; his whole world narrows down to revolving around Phedre. I do hope Carey continues to write from Joscelin’s POV; Kushiel’s Chosen and Kushiel’s Avatar have much longer stretches where he has to navigate a world without Phedre that would be fascinating to read about. If this was a book by any other author, I would have been annoyed but I will gladly eat up anything Carey serves in this universe. If you’re looking for meticulously plotted fantasy with a high spice level (lol), start at the beginning of the series with Kushiel’s Dart and then come back to this later. (I’d actually love to mash both of these books together and do a side-by-side read. That’s a project for future me.)

2. All the Sinners Bleed, S.A. Cosby — Thriller set in rural Virginia, featuring ex-FBI Agent/current Sheriff Titus Crown, a Black cop who believes wholeheartedly that he can change things from the inside. This was good but not as good as I wanted it to be, given Cosby’s reputation for Black southern gritty noir/horror. The plot was engaging but Cosby’s writing style here is very manner of fact which didn’t always work, and makes for very dry reading, even when for scenes that should be highly charged/emotional. That said, Cosby’s certainly got a unique perspective and voice that you don’t usually see in this genre and it’s refreshing to read something in the south, about the south, about the struggles of living and trying to thrive there, from someone who has lived it. Content warnings abound in this one for violence/gore, particularly against children, so reader beware.

3. Kushiel’s Chosen, Jacqueline Carey — I shouldn’t have been surprised that reading Cassiel’s Servant plunged me back into doing a re-read of this series, which I’d started doing some random time last year and then got distracted. Anyhow, I can’t review this fairly, I’ve read it too many times and love this series too much. Carey is masterful at plotting and worldbuilding and even though I’ve read this numerous times there are still parts that catch me by surprise, still parts that break my heart. Also, yeah, I really want her to continue writing from Joscelin’s POV because I’ve gotta know what he gets up to in this book while Phedre’s off on her own accidental adventures.

4. Hello, My Name Is Octicorn, Kevin Diller and Justin Lowe —Yes, this is a children’s picture book that I stood around and read in the gift shop of the Shedd Aquarium. It’s a quick read with very simple, mostly black and white, line art, all about embracing your differences and loving yourself even if you don’t look like/act like everyone else. A good message for kids and entertaining for adults, too.

5. Death By Silver, Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold — Victorian-era murder/mystery with magic and also a hint of romance. The writing was generally solid, the magical system was interesting, and I overall liked the mystery that had to be solved. You really got a good sense for time/place in this one, everything felt very authentic to the time period. Ultimately, I wanted more romance between Ned and Julian. Most of their issues result from the classic Failure to Communicate trope, one of my least favorites. I did like that the book starts with them already knowing each other, as they went to school together as children. These two have a lot of shared history which comes through really well, but which also makes the “we didn’t talk about anything and have both come to our own incorrect assumptions” aspect more frustrating. This book is also unexpectedly heavy — Ned and Julian didn’t have a great time in school and this book flashes back repeatedly to the abuse they suffered at the hands of older boys.

6. Camp Damascus, Chuck Tingle — Yes, the “Pounded in the Butt…” guy has an actual real novel out and it’s a terrifying fast-paced horror story of the “well that escalated quickly” genre. Follows the discoveries of a young woman living in a small town dominated by a conservative evangelical church. The pacing wasn’t always great — Rose’s psychological transformation away from devout Kingdom of the Pine member is fairly rapid and I think I would have liked to see a little more of her struggle/conflict. But overall, this works — engaging, poignant, and terrifying, and anyone who’s spent any time around conservative evangelical culture will recognize a lot of their past lives in this book. I really liked Rose and her journey, which I thought was very sensitively portrayed. The body horror/gore aspect is strong in this one, and if you’ve lived through any sort of religious trauma/shame, this could be a tough read.

7. A Certain Hunger, Chelsea G. Summers — This book is absolutely unhinged and Dorothy Daniels, the protagonist, is what some people would call, well, “evil”, and you still can’t help but root for his. Visceral, bloody, violent, a touch of body horror and a lot of pretension about food. Summers executes (lol) a perfect voice for Daniels as a character, simultaneously unlikeable and fascinating. Not for the faint of heart or, probably, vegetarians.

Movies

1. Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol: Honestly just a darn good time. All vibes and stupid stunts, and the continuation of the franchise actually beginning to have its own charms instead of just trying to be a James Bond ripoff. Ethan Hunt doesn’t need to hook up with the hot girl in every movie! Ethan Hunt is a dorky Wife Guy and that’s okay! Just let Tom Cruise climb towers and do dumb car stunts and make little jokes! Stop making him try to have chemistry with every Bond Girl Lite they insert into the franchise! It’s fine. Five stars to the whole Burj Khalifa sequence. Minus one star for the dumb This Plot Point Revolves Around One Horny Indian Dude plotline — if you wanted to take your movie to Mumbai, okay, great, you do you, but you could have had a better angle than that.

2. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation: The franchise starts to develop an overarching plot! Good job! Thanks, Christopher McQuarrie! This was very good, Rebecca Ferguson is fantastic as Ilsa, a worthy adversary/competition/friend/collaborator to Ethan Hunt. The action sequences are fantastic, the plot twists and uncertainty around who Ilsa is really working for are well done, the usage of Nessun Dorma is fantastic, and Rebecca Ferguson is just really hot. What.

3. Mission: Impossible — Fallout: Possibly the best of the franchise to this point, I’d somehow gotten it in my head that people didn’t like this one so was pleasantly surprised with how good and engaging it was, start to finish. Some aspects of it were predictable but there are enough double crosses and ulterior motives to keep things interesting, plus it manages to succeed as both an action movie and an Ethan Hunt character study.

4. Boxing Helena: Under no circumstances is this Very Clearly 1993 “Erotic Thriller” actually good, but it makes more sense once you learn that writer/director Jennifer Chambers Lynch a) was allegedly 19 when she started working on the script and b) was born with a physical disability. Conceptually there are some interesting things here about men who think they’re owed a woman’s attention/affection, and about women being seen as objects rather than human people, and I think a 2023 take on the same concept could go to some worthwhile places, but the writing, acting, and execution here were all bad.

5. CatVideoFest 2023: I wouldn’t count this as a movie but it’s listed on Letterboxd so we’ll include it here, too. It’s literally just 70 minutes of internet-sourced cat videos. I laughed the whole time and also wanted to go home and snuggle my cats immediately. It is not great art, you’re basically watching TikToks on a movie screen, but they’re cute cats, man. Who can complain about that?

6. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One: First off, what an unwieldy title. This is like a 10/10 for visuals, ridiculous stunts, costuming, shooting locations, Tom Cruise doing insane shit, and overall hotness of the cast, but like a 6/10 in terms of the actual overall story. There’s so much exposition/infodump/telling not showing and I think is more convoluted than necessary. Plus, no spoilers, but one character I really like gets done absolutely dirty in service of giving Ethan Hunt More Trauma, which kind of sucks. I do appreciate the continuing character study of what drives Hunt and the answer, it seems, is fear, which is actually really good for me, personally.

7. The Last Voyage of the Demeter — Ocean Dracula movie was exactly what you expect from an Ocean Dracula movie. The writing was mediocre, the plot had enormous holes in it, and every character made the absolute dumbest decisions they could have possibly made, but it was Dracula on a boat. Also Bear McCreary did the score, which was good. What more do you expect? (The memes, though, the memes — see below — are good.)

8. Passages — Memphis-born, New York-based writer/director Ira Sachs has managed to make the most European film possible. The movie follows Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and Martin (Ben Whishaw), a married couple whose relationship gets blown apart when Tomas sleeps with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos); it’s 90 minutes of people finding ways to be cruel to one another that only someone in a failing relationship can truly manage. Tomas is an absolute Disaster Bisexual, completely unable to realize what chaos he’s causing and unable to understand why Martin isn’t exactly thrilled with it. The cast is fantastic — Rogowski manages to strike the right notes of humor, vulnerability, and absolutely horny; Whishaw doesn’t have much to do except be long-suffering (you get the feeling Tomas has put him through this before) as he tries to be the mature one of the pair, but there’s one scene towards the end where his stoic façade cracks and it’s enough to break your heart.

9. The Godfather — I have been pretending my entire adult life that I’ve seen this movie. So much of it has been made into cultural reference points — you come here on the day of my daughter’s wedding, the horse head, take the cannoli, look how they massacred my boy — that I thought it was actually impossible to watch and not already know everything that was going to happen. It’s a 50 year old movie; I just assumed I had actually been spoiled for everything. And yet it turns out that’s only a fraction of what’s going on here. This movie well deserves its reputation as a true film classic; if nothing else, if you’ve never seen it, watch it so you have more context for the bits that have made it into the cultural lexicon over the years.

10. Top Gun: Maverick — I have no shame over the fact that this is at least the 10th time I’ve seen this movie. I do not care about the plot holes or bad dialogue or anything like that. I do care about the onscreen chemistry that Tom Cruise has with airplanes.

11. 2001: A Space Odyssey — I didn’t mean for this to be “Sarah catches up on classic film” month but I guess it sort of is. I can see why people have been talking about — debating — this movie for 50 years. Its achievements from a technical standpoint are remarkable. Imagine if this movie was made today, it would be almost entirely CGI, and largely devoid of the soul that makes this so breathtaking. The use of sound here is fantastic, particularly the scenes in space that go utterly quiet, as compared to scenes that cut back to inside the ship. I know the ambiguity and slowness of the movie have been frustrating viewers for years but I liked letting myself be enveloped by this one, just curious and happy to be along for the ride.

12. Champions — Woody Harrelson stars as a basketball coach with an attitude and a temper who gets sentenced to community service after An Incident, where he is assigned to coach a local Special Olympics basketball team. Honestly more charming than I’d anticipated, although I could have done without some of the gross-out humor (my problem with most mainstream comedies, to be honest). Yes, there’s still the aspect of Inspiration Porn that permeates any movie like this, but I think it’s handled about as sensitively as you’re going to get from a mainstream Hollywood comedy.

13. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem — The 1990 TMNT movie was one of the only movies I ever went to with my dad and there is a nostalgia-based portion of my brain that kind of wishes I could have gone back to Pennsylvania to take him to see this. Anyway, this was a fun time, plenty of jokes and references to keep adults entertained while their kids are still screaming about the Paw Patrol preview that rolls before this movie. I think some of the cultural references won’t hold up very well in the future, it’s a very 2023 Movie, but the turtle teens all did feel like teens, I laughed a lot, and I loved the animation style. A Letterboxd reviewer called it “grubby”, which is better than any description that I could come up with. It looks like a comic book plopped onto the screen and while it’s no Spider-verse, it helps add to the conversation of actually allowing animated movies to look fun and different and weird.

14. Talk to Me — I would have enjoyed this a lot more were the theater not filled with people sitting in seats that weren’t theirs/people who snuck in/unaccompanied tweens. I watched lots of movies way earlier than I should have (shoutout to my parents for letting me watch Silence of the Lambs!) so I can’t judge that but at least I watched my age-inappropriate garbage in my own home instead of in a theater where I screamed at my friends/played on my phone the whole time/got up and down and walked around like every five minutes/sat in other people’s seats and refused to move. We live in a society!!! Anyway. This movie was fine. Very creepy. Handful of jump scares and gory sequences. Yes, it’s horror-as-metaphor-for-grief, so it isn’t exactly saying anything new, but the specific premise — creepy severed hand lets you commune with the dead — was neat. Somewhat predictable but honestly I’d love to find a horror movie that isn’t. (Recommendations?)

What’s Next?

• how tf is it already September?

• I’ve got a ticket to see an advanced screening of Fremont, about a former military translator who restarts her life in the US and works in a fortune cookie factory.

• I’ve been bouncing between a bunch of different books and none have really been catching my attention yet. This is probably because I keep getting no sleep because the kittens wake me up at 3:00 a.m. because they think it’s play time.

• My library to-read pile includes Beasts of Ruin (the sequel to Beasts of Prey that I read last month), She Who Became the Sun, and Station Eleven, so I can read it before reading the other Emily St. John Mandel book that I’ve borrowed from a friend.

• What are you looking forward to in September?

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