Musicians, Geniuses, Detectives, Killers, and Aliens, Oh My!

A look at the pop culture I've been distracting myself with

We’re hiring this year, and thanks to the vagaries of staffing I found myself having to chair the search committee as well as the department. Which partially accounts for my recent silence— we were doing on-campus interviews the last two weeks, and between that and some kid-wrangling, my writing time has been badly curtailed.

That only partially explains it, though. The rest of the explanation is that the news over last two weeks has been full of Stupid and Awful in ways that lead to the social-media #discourse being even more Stupid and Awful. which, in turn, produces a powerful downward pressure on my level of interest in participating in the conversation, as it were.

We’re at a point in the hiring process where the demands on my time have lessened a bit, though the flood of Stupid and Awful shows no sign of abating. In the spirit of being the change I want to see, though, here’s some relatively positive #content about recent cultural consumption.

Movies:

Walk Hard:

When we first got back from Florida, before school started back up, there was an evening when both kids declined a Movie Night, leaving me to my own devices. Having heard a lot of chatter about the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, at least some of which was of the form “I can’t believe they made this when Walk Hard exists…”, the obvious choice was to watch a parody full of references the kids wouldn’t understand.

This is a 2007 John C. Reilly spoof of musician biopics (mostly Ray and Walk the Line) produced by Judd Apatow in his imperial era. It was kind of a flop on release, but has grown in esteem since, particularly among movie and music critics who frequently cite it as a definitive takedown of formulaic biopics.

This is pretty much exactly what you expect from that description, in both good and bad directions. Like all of the Apatow factory stuff it’s sharp and very funny, but also extremely broad comedy, which can wear a little thin. One crucial thing it gets right, though, is that the original songs are actually pretty good. Not “That Thing You Do” good, maybe, but they work reasonably well as songs in their own right, and that’s the key to any good music spoof.

This would not have played well with the kids, but I liked it fine.

Good Will Hunting:

SteelyKid is taking a psychology class in high school, and they watched this (split over several class periods) in order to discuss the therapy scenes. That was kind of a disjointed experience so SteelyKid asked to watch it again at home, and since I had unsuccessfully pitched it to The Pip several times, I decreed it to be the Movie Night film for the week.

I hadn’t seen this all the way through in probably twenty years, but damn, this holds up well. Really amazing that Affleck and Damon had this in their bag all the way back in 1997 (I don’t put that much credence in the claims that it was actually William Goldman’s script, though all three of them credit him with a key piece of advice about the structure).

Also, a great parenting moment from this, when we were talking about how Affleck and Damon got an Oscar for the script and Robin Williams for his performance. SteelyKid asked whether Damon had been recognized for acting (nominated, didn’t win), and Googled him to check. Which led to the declaration on seeing a current photo of Matt Damon atop the search results that “Wow, Matt Damon is such a geezer now…”

Reader, Matt Damon is nine months older than I am.

Television

Cross:

Every now and then The Pip has activities that limit the time available for movie-watching, in which case we’ll go for a streaming show of some sort, because in principle these are shorter. In practice, this sometimes backfires and leads to binge-watching multiple episodes, but whatever.

Anyway, we powered through both seasons of Reacher this way, and Prime’s James Patterson adaptation starring Aldis Hodge and Isaiah Mustafa seemed like a logical follow up. And, indeed, it mostly is. Hodge’s Alex Cross is more tortured than Alan Ritchson’s Jack Reacher, who’s borderline gleeful about wreaking havoc on bad guys, but Ryan Eggold and Johnny Ray Gill are highly entertaining as the villains, so it works out. Good show, and I hope Prime continues to lean into being the Dad Thriller Studio.

Black Doves:

My parents mentioned this Netflix show at Christmas, specifically that they had started watching it and found it a bit much, so The Pip and I checked it out. It’s a thriller starring Kiera Knightly as the wife of a high-ranking British politician who got where she is through the influence of a secretive organization called the Black Doves. She’s been having an affair with a low-level government staffer who turns up murdered at the same time that some international intrigue is brewing, and Ben Whishaw is the triggerman brought in to protect her and find out what’s going on. He’s returning to London after several years, having taken it on the lam after a job gone wrong, so has to reckon with his own past as he and Knightly try to figure out who killed her lover and why.

This is a little more atmospheric than dynamic, but there are some good bits involving Whishaw as a kind of gay British John Wick. The most fun element is Ella Lily Hyland and Gabrielle Creevey as a pair of Irish assassins who end up as unlikely partners with Whishaw. I also liked a thing that it didn’t do with the politician husband, but that’s a bit of a spoiler so I won’t say more (ask about it in comments if you want to know).

Only Murders in the Building:

The local weather this winter has been bitterly cold, but not as snowy as I would like, forcing a return of biking-to-nowhere, which in turn means catching up on streaming television as I need things that are an hour-ish in length to distract me from the fact that riding a stationary bike is really freakin’ boring.

Happily, there was a new season of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building back in August or so, so I powered through those over several weeks of exercise. This is the fourth season of the show, so by this point basically everybody should be aware of it and know what they think about it, so there’s not much point to making a recommendation. I thought it maintained more or less the same level it’s been at in previous seasons, which is to say “a charming distraction from the drudgery of exercise.”

Books:

We went to Florida and back over the holidays, which once again involved a flight to Tampa that lasted long enough for me to get within fifty pages of the end of a Jack Reacher novel on the way down, and within twenty pages of the end of a Robert Crais novel on the way back. Those are solidly in the “Either you know you like this, or you definitely don’t” category, though, so I won’t spend Substack space on them. Instead, I’ll throw out brief comments on two less-well-known books, one recent and one not:

Paladin’s Grace by “T. Kingfisher”:

(Quote marks because “T. Kingfisher” is widely known to be a pen name for the highly prolific Ursula Vernon, who is also a good follow on Bluesky if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Paladin’s Grace is the first of the “Saint of Steel” series, but I somehow skipped it when it came out, a fact I realized only when I said something to Kate about the most recent one and she said “Yeah, it was great to see [character] from the first book again,” and I replied “I have no idea who you’re talking about.” These are basically romance novels in a fantasy world, sequentially featuring the surviving members of a religious order whose god was mysteriously killed. These paladins were previously sort of holy berserkers, dropping into a battle rage to fight evil, but divinely guided away from hurting the innocent. Since the death of the Saint of Steel, the battle rage is still there, but not so much the divine guidance, making them highly dangerous and feared by everyone save the Temple of the White Rat, a religious organization of lawyers who fix problems for the downtrodden.

It’s a fascinating set-up for a fantasy world, which largely carries me past the weaknesses inherent in the fact that these are, at their core, romances. Which is to say, there are pages and pages of one character or another wistfully contemplating the person they’re obviously going to end up with by the end of the book but not, you know, doing or saying anything that would move the relationship forward. Happily, those bits are easily skimmable, and the secondary characters are generally charming and entertaining, so these are fun reads on net.

The Mercy of Gods by “James S. A. Corey”:

(Again, quote marks because this is a well-known pseudonym for Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham.)

The Mercy of Gods is the first book of a new science fiction epic from the authors of The Expanse series, which did a great job of telling a story with epic scale in a way that was a lot of fun. The TV show is also pretty great (though it starts our a little slow).

I picked this up more or less sight unseen, on the name alone, without even reading the cover copy. This is doing a slightly different thing than The Expanse was, probably because the authors are now big enough to have signed a multi-book contract up front: where at least the first few Expanse books more or less stood alone, this is very much a part of a series: from the very first page it telegraphs that this is a story with a definite end. Actually, even before the first page, if you take the time to read the cover copy before buying it.

I became very slightly nervous when I realized that, because telling the reader up front that you’re aiming for an ending raises the stakes of sticking the landing. They did manage to bring The Expanse in to a reasonably satisfying conclusion, though, so I’m not that worried, but if you’re the kind of reader who won’t start a story that doesn’t have an ending, well, consider yourself warned.

Anyway, the actual story here is really well done, following the lives of a group of basically-human characters (they’re not on Earth at the start, but their exact origin is unclear) who find themselves conquered by the Carryx, an interstellar empire of incredible power and ruthlessness. The principal human characters are mostly academic scientists, who after the invasion are spirited away to the Carryx homeworld and given a research task to demonstrate their usefulness to the Carryx, with extinction in their future should they prove unworthy. The two exceptions to this are one character who turns out to be a disguised alien spy for a rival to the Carryx, and another who is technically a junior scientist but really more of a politician. He dedicates himself not to the scientific problem they have been assigned, but to figuring out how the empire works and what the Carryx actually want, with an eye toward exploiting that knowledge to save humanity and maybe even exact some measure of revenge. (This is all in the cover copy, so not really a spoiler…)

This is really good space opera stuff, with genuinely alien aliens, whose motives are not entirely comprehensible (at least at the start). The authors do a great job of conveying the fear and bewilderment of the human survivors, and somehow manage to avoid having the entire thing become crushingly depressing. It’s a neat trick.

Whether they’ll be able to bring this whole thing to their telegraphed conclusion in a satisfying manner remains to be seen, of course, but I will absolutely grab and read the next one as soon as I can.

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So, yeah, that’s a bunch of pop culture. Beyond that, I’ve watched a lot of football over the last few weeks, but that’d be an awkward fit here, so we’ll save it for another post. If you want to see that when it happens, here’s a button:

And if you’d like to either comment on any of these or plug other movies/shows/books that I should check out, the comments will be open: