I have a house guest, so don’t expect much. Still, I found my way through some good stuff this week. And some terrible stuff.

Seven reviews.

Movies

A Quiet Place — Oh my god so stupid. SO STUPID. *gathers self* So, look: this was actually really good for about the first half of the movie. The premise is solid: there are blind monsters who hunt you if you make sound, so you have to be very quiet. That makes for some super tense scenes in the early movie, as well as some rather good bits that demonstrate how a family might remain close without being able to speak to each other. There’s a sequence involving a bathtub, an exposed nail, and some fireworks that works really, really well. But almost immediately after that, as the movie is beginning to near its resolution, something happens that exposes to the audience beyond a shadow of a doubt what the monsters’ weakness is — and the characters somehow manage not to figure it out. Let me be clear: I am a champion suspender of disbelief. I get viscerally upset at people who poke at plot holes or try to suggest that a movie doesn’t make sense because the characters don’t always do the smartest thing. To me that constitutes thinking outside of the linear story the movie is trying to tell. “Why didn’t they just xyz?” Because they didn’t! Get over it. But the actual contents of this movie’s linear story finds the characters acting in the dumbest ways possible in the face of incredibly obvious solutions. And the second that started happening, I was done playing along with this movie’s game. Where I might have at some early point in the movie been able to rationalize away the fact that the characters drive a TRUCK at one point, the rumble of which is conveniently elided by the sound mixing, in the third act I just couldn’t, no thanks. Also, this movie has that thing in it where a guy has clearly been trying to work out a complicated problem, so there are whiteboards and newspaper clippings everywhere, with lines underlined, and all that. And somewhere amidst all that paraphernalia is a scrap of paper that reads, in big red letters, “NO PATTERN.” WHAT. The most amusing thing about this movie was leaving the theatre and hearing the entire audience complain about how dumb it was in near-unison. So stupid. SO STUPID.

Literature, etc.

Rebecca Solnit: “Driven to Distraction” — An excellent essay that makes connections between several different tech-related anxieties, and also E.M. Forster. It is primarily about the notion of “connectedness,” and whether that’s actually a virtue. But there’s also a few paragraphs in succession where Solnit hopscotches from one tech anxiety to another, six degrees of Kevin Bacon style, and ends up covering Uber’s internal misogyny, Spotify’s underpayment of artists, Cambridge Analytica’s data mining, and the fact that Peter Thiel exists. That section in itself makes this worth a read.

Rutu Modan: The Property — I found this on the “shit you can take” table in my building’s laundry room. I was surprised to see it there, frankly. I’ve picked up a few worthwhile things from that table over the past couple years, but nothing so promising as this — nor anything that delivered on its promise so completely. Modan is seemingly best known for Exit Wounds, a comic about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Property tells the story of a woman and her grandmother who travel from Israel to the grandmother’s home country of Poland to reclaim a property that she seemingly inherited after the second world war. It’s a small-scale, personal story that’s deeply rooted in mundane experience. But it has a story like a spy thriller, with secrets everywhere and motivations always obscured. It also has a cute love story and a darkly funny bit about a Holocaust re-enactor who really misses the ghetto. I sat down with it not knowing whether I’d finish it or return it to the laundry room. And I read it in one sitting. Pick of the week.

Podcasts

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Pop Culture Dichotomies” & “Summer Movie Preview and What’s Making Us Happy” — The dichotomies episode is a fun flashback. The summer movie preview is always an annual highlight of this show’s calendar, partially because we get to hear Glen Weldon talk about stuff he hates. That’s always fun.

Fresh Air: “James Comey” — Comey is dangerously charming and sympathetic. Terry Gross questions him about the double standard he seems to have employed when deciding to reveal that Hillary Clinton was being investigated and not that the Trump campaign was being investigated for collusion with Russia. His answer is human and well-reasoned, but still intensely frustrating.

NPR Politics Podcast: “Comey Tells NPR The FBI ‘Would Be Worse Today’ If Not For His Actions” — This was plugged across the NPR podcasts as a companion piece to the Fresh Air interview but it’s actually a companion to the Morning Edition interview, which I haven’t heard. Still, it’s fine. Actually, even on its own it’s a good analysis of the Comey media tour.

Caliphate: “Prologue: The Mission” & “Chapter One: The Reporter” — I’m not completely on board with this yet. If you haven’t heard, it’s a serial podcast from the New York Times about ISIS, featuring their star reporter on that subject. There are a few journalism cliches present, including “Who are they? Who are they really?” But Rukmini Callimachi is a compelling presence, and the decision not to make her a traditional host, but rather to document her in the process of doing her job, is a good one that obviates the frequent problem of investigative journalists needing to put themselves at the centre of the stories they tell for the sake of drama. But mostly, Callimachi knows a ton about ISIS, and ISIS is really complicated and interesting. I think this will be very good, and very enlightening. Pick of the week.