Thor: Love and Thunder

More of the colourful vibes of Taika Waititi's previous Thor outing, and leans heavier into the goofy comedy while also trying to land some serious emotional moments - not always successfully doing the both. Diverting to watch but slipped by without leaving much of an impression.

Gone Girl

It hasn't aged that well from 2014, especially from a feminist perspective (which is hard to not adopt), but its high gloss nastiness and poison-pen take on (a) marriage still has fangs.

Soak - If I Never Know You Like This Again

Another genre that endures, sulky sounding indie rock with a flair for melody. A good one.

The Beths - Expert in a Dying Field

Life is long but I wonder whether I'll ever not like this kind of music. With a couple of exceptions, the songs themselves are a lot less good than the sound, but it's still no hardship to listen to all the way through.

The Old Guard

Watch #2. (last time)

Do Revenge

Of-the-moment callback to 90s teen movies that's enjoyable and more or less the right amount of knowing, and successful in keeping you guessing about where it's going and just how dark it will turn (in the end, not that dark but still darker than most, at least for a while), although not entirely satisfying in how it reconciles its treatment of the trauma of teenage cruelty between its two main characters. Also reminded me a bit of Promising Young Woman (which so far has proved to have a bit of staying power in the memory incidentally) but with a much gentler touch.

Prey

I've only seen a couple of them but it seems there's something about the Predator concept (franchise) that lends itself to reinvention - at least partially. This one's set in 1719 amidst the stunning landscapes of that-era North America and focuses on a group of Comanche people and a female warrior in particular, and makes a pretty good fist of it's 'I'm underestimated because I'm a woman and I'm victorious because I'm a woman' narrative.

Hanya Yanagihara - To Paradise

Whatever else it is, To Paradise is certainly something. It's got a texture and heaviness that feels similar to A Little Life, and I found it at once boring and somehow compelling - at least until the dystopian final section, where the pace picked up a bit at the same time that it shifts to a nominal main character who is definitionally diminished in affect and even harder to relate to than all those who came before her. 

That heaviness extends to the prose and scene- and chapter-level structuring, which I wouldn't call elegant. There's an awful lot of what feels like redundant detail - admittedly especially in the first, 1890s-set section, where the detail is possibly period-appropriate for literature of the era - and some pretty thudding expository stuff, especially via all the letters. 

Having said that, the novel as a whole does land as more than the sum of its parts, in a way that doesn't feel over-determined despite the overt formal signposts - the 100 year leap-forwards, the building on Washington Square, the recurring names (and suggestion of a familial connection near the end). Each of the three sections - the David Bingham of 1893 and the possibilities of Edward Bishop, the David Bingham of 1993 and his relationship with his Charles along with the layering of his father Kawika's own story starting some 50 years earlier or maybe more, and Charlie in pandemic-struck 2093 along with the layering of her grandfather Charles's story again starting some 50 years earlier - is more satisfying in the context of the others, the lack of individual resolution in each of their endings especially. None of them are truly stand-alone, despite the near-complete lack of any real story crossover between them.

Scattered throughout are some powerful scenes and motifs - the first Charles's (the 1890s David's older suitor) experiences in Canada, the failed dream of Lipo-wao-nahele, the horrific fate of the two unwell children in their plastic-sealed confinement. And also a set of powerful themes and visions about humanity and the more visceral and sometimes darker desires and social and political forces that drive it - including abuse, need, power, control, privilege, family, love and loss. 

It's impossible to not read To Paradise at least partly through the lens of COVID-19, and what's less clear is to what extent the novel's primary focus is ultimately around both that real-world pandemic and the imagined series of catastrophes leading to its dystopian authoritarian vision of a future America, as opposed to those being rather illustrations or manifestations of a broader thesis about society and human nature. And equally unclear is the ultimate relevance of the embedded queerness - embodied almost entirely through seemingly cisegendered homosexual men - that is part of Yanagihara's imagining of these alternate Americas.

In the end, there's a lot of grist for the mill there, and while the heaviness can at times feel heavy-handed - and, somehow, opaque at the same time - and I didn't find it a particularly satisfying reading experience as a whole, To Paradise is certainly an achievement, at a minimum in putting these big issues into conversation in a way that illuminates, rather than merely illustrating.

The Sandman season 1 / Neil Gaiman - Preludes & Nocturnes & The Doll's House

The show really does a remarkable job of capturing the spirit - and often the letter and the line - of the books, the first two of which I re-read beforehand and to which this first season largely corresponds. I hope there's more, not least because the books get so much better after this opening volley.