I’m not sure how you would categorize this novel, but maybe it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it a rom-com. The main character, Greta, works as a transcriptionist for a therapist, listening to recordings of the sessions and typing them up. (Sounds like a great job to me.) But what gives the story a surreal edge is that she lives in such a small town that she’s constantly encountering the people whose voices she’s been listening to. Imagine that whenever you meet someone in a social situation, you already know their deepest and most secret thoughts, even though you’re a stranger to them.
The title refers to Greta’s nickname for one of the patients, a young Swiss woman, who shares with the therapist (and therefore, Greta) a traumatic story of physical assault. Predictably, Greta ends up meeting Big Swiss, at the dog park, and the two of them strike up a friendship which becomes a fling. Because Greta knows about Big Swiss’s past, the relationship dynamic is messed up from the start. It feels both funny and icky at the same time, similar to how Tom Hanks is both charming and sleazy in You’ve Got Mail.
Greta herself also survived trauma in her past, and one of the novel’s strengths is the conflict between the two women’s worldviews regarding their history. Greta has the tendency to fall back on her past as an excuse for her misdeeds, while Big Swiss believes in moving on by repressing her experience. The novel isn’t saying that there’s a right or wrong way to deal with trauma, only that people must try their best to figure out how to survive and flourish after. You’re left hoping that Greta and Big Swiss come away from their relationship having learned the lessons that they needed from each other.
Godzilla, Alien: Romulus, American Fiction, Oddity, Furiosa, Blink Twice
Over the Christmas holiday season, I had more spare time than usual and got a chance to catch up with some recent movies, as well as revisiting some older ones.
In this second prequel novel for the Foundation series, we follow Hari Seldon as he works on his theory of psychohistory, while the Galactic Empire of which he is a citizen begins to decline. There’s a race against time, because he hopes that his theories will lead to a recovery plan, a way for humanity to continue after the fall. Much of the decline takes the form of political unrest, and also the more mundane processes of failing infrastructure. The machinery that keeps society running continually breaks down, and there’s not enough money to maintain it. I felt somewhat unsettled because it’s hard not to see the same symptoms in the real world.
The novel is divided into four main sections, each occurring about ten years apart. In each section, he has to solve some crisis, like the increasing popularity of a demagogue politician, or an assassination attempt on him and the Emperor, or simply the difficulty of obtaining the funding needed to continue his research. Along the way, seeds are planted for where the series will go. Sometimes, it feels a little perfunctory, like when a character just brings up the idea of establishing a second Foundation, without really going into detail about how they arrived at this idea. I can forgive a little bit of prequel-itis, as the actual stories were enjoyable enough on their own. Plus, I was actually left feeling excited to continue the series, because I’m looking forward to seeing how these seeds will pay off.
I was so impressed with Nell Tiger Free’s performance in The First Omen that I sought out some of her other work. Servant is a suspense/thriller series on Apple TV+, and also boasts the involvement of M. Night Shyamalan, who I still have a soft spot for, despite the roller-coaster ride that his reputation has (not undeservedly) gone through over the years.
The show has four seasons, and I think it’s worth giving my impressions about halfway through. The premise alone is a great source of suspense: a couple welcomes a nanny, Leanne, to their home to care for their infant, but we find out that the baby is a doll, and that the actual baby had died sometime before. Substituting the child with a lifelike doll was the only way for the mother to cope with the loss, but her delusion is so deep that she went ahead with her plans to hire a nanny. When Leanne comes onboard, strange things start happening around the house, not least of which is the doll’s transformation into—gasp!—a real, live baby!
Leanne (played by Free) carries herself in a creepy, detached way. Her performance is one of the highlights of the show for me. She has the kind of face where the smallest change in expression can switch her vibe from innocence to malice, from fear to aggression, in a split second.
A quirky, silly film about a woman who reincarnates and lives several lifetimes, each one taking place in a different century, starting in the 1600’s. In every life, she becomes obsessed with incarnations of the same man, and keeps trying to connect with him. He never seems to return her affections, though.
The production value is extremely low-budget, but it works. The various historical time periods are portrayed via costumes and set dressing, but the locations themselves are often just an empty room with hanging curtains in the background. It’s going for the impression of a time period, rather than a realistic portrayal, which I respect as a stylistic and pragmatic choice.
Ultimately, I had a hard time connecting to the story. I think the film is satisfied with cracking silly jokes, like dubbing the protagonist’s boneheaded husband with dog sounds because his previous incarnation was her pet. I did have a couple of good laughs, but there wasn’t much substance overall.
Eventually, the protagonist is reincarnated in the 80’s, and the object of her desire happens to be a famous pop star. I thought that the film had the opportunity to take a turn and comment on the nature of what we call “parasocial relationships” nowadays. But the movie sticks to its frivolous tone, and leads to a kind of empty conclusion.
The Master Plan is a play produced by the Soulpepper theatre company. Adapted from the book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, the play tells the true story of the ill-fated project to develop an unused plot of Toronto land into a futuristic “smart city.”
The project would have been a collaboration between Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Alphabet), and a government agency. Predictably, the opposing forces of profit-driven capitalism and regulatory bureaucracy ended in a stalemate, and the project was scrapped. The public generally disapproved of the idea, because of understandable fears that residents of the neighbourhood would be spied on, their data sold for profit. Nobody knows if data privacy would have been a real issue, because the project never got very far; on the other hand, even if the project had started off in a benign way, the pattern of enshittification predicts that the lives of the “customers” would have eventually deteriorated due to the profit motive.
When I travelled to London, England earlier this year, I visited many bookstores, as I am wont to do whenever I explore an unfamiliar city. On many of the shelves, something immediately caught my eye: the minimalist white and blue covers of the British publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. I had only heard of them from a podcast, and their reputation for publishing award-winning books, but I’ve never seen them in North American bookstores, and so I made it a mission to get a few. The Observable Universe was one of my selections.
The author, Heather McCalden, lost both of her parents to AIDS when she was a child, and was raised by her grandmother. Because she was so young, she hardly knew her parents, and they’re defined more by their absence than by the scarce memories that she has of them. This memoir is her attempt to process the loss, and is made up of many “chapters,” many of which are only a few sentences long. Rarely are they more than two pages.
Each page of this graphic novel is formatted like a Sunday comic strip: landscape orientation, with the title appearing in the first panel, followed by three rows of illustrations. It follows the mishaps of a suburban family, kind of like For Better or For Worse or Adam@home, where the kids get into trouble and the parents get flustered. Isn’t it hilarious how the father keeps forgetting the kid’s name? Or how the mom is always sleeping in too late? Some strips have a punchline, but other times, it relies on awkwardness and cringe comedy.
But then, a darker story arc develops beyond the individual jokes. It becomes clear that the mother is suffering from depression and alcoholism, and that the father’s bumbling absent-mindedness is not just a lovable quirk: he’s genuinely disoriented and confused about the world around him.
I’ll discuss spoilers further down, but before I do, I’ll just say that I recommend reading this book. Something strange is going with this family, and the mystery box opens gradually and has a fun solution. It also gives the characters a satisfying emotional arc. Once you find out what happens, you can’t blame them for their earlier flaws.
Spoiler warning: Out of necessity, I have to reveal the plot in order to discuss my opinions of this film.
On the surface, this movie is fun to watch. It’s suspenseful and propulsive, and features a great performance by the lead actor, Willa Fitzgerald. However, I ended up disliking it after giving it a few minutes’ thought.
