Books, tv, movie

KinnPorsche (TV): I started this after watching some fanvids and reading some fic. I needed to rely heavily on spoilers for getting through the second episode, then read a spoiler in a fic that made me not want to watch the rest of the show. I wish the show had been more like the fic.

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older (2023): F/F mystery novella taking place above Jupiter.

Stilted prose and not particularly engaging; I read it because it was short. I eventually realized it was attempting Sherlock Holmes pastiche, which explained some of the stylistic choices, but I wish the author had gone all the way with it. Doing it only partially was very jarring. The f/f 'ship makes no sense in the context of them being exes, even if it was amicable; only the Holmesianness explains why "dear" gets used immediately.

I also dispute the entire idea that a post-apocalyptic Earth would be a tabula rasa where you can carefully recreate anything and can mess it up by tossing some genes into it. I just could not buy a basic assumption of the book's worldbuilding and that was a problem.

The title feels way too tongue in cheek. The phrase did eventually show up toward the end of the book, but it felt way too much like "ha ha, get it? Because it's Holmes? Which is a known success? And this is mimicking it?"

It's telling that the two things I remember about this book are the things I feel the editor should have cut: the first is a really tumblr joke based on "unhinged" meaning there's a lack of hinges, and a reference to the phrase "why are men?" as wisdom of the ancestors. Ugh. Cut them both.

Not recommended. Could have been much better if it really had gone all the way Holmes.

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (2023): Retired pirate Amina Al-Sirafi reunites with her old crew to find a missing person.

Excellent prose and excellent narrative voice. I understand why this was so highly recommended. However, it is about a hundred pages too long. It was well-structured and with great plot beats and foreshadowing in the first half, and then kept throwing more and more complications and repetitiveness in the second half. A whole lot could and should have been cut. It would have really improved the flow and kept the narrative tension going.

I wonder if part of that was due to a page count thing I've been noticing: that the difference between YA and non-YA in current publishing is that YA is 300 pages and non-YA is 500 pages. Since this book comes in at 460ish pages, if they'd cut it down, it would have been YA length. I am only partially kidding/conspiracy theorizing here; I don't know why books have gotten to this length, there's nothing wrong with a book that's 300 pages long.

The book is good, but the last hundred pages or so involved a lot of skimming/skipping.

The Great Muppet Caper (1981): Serviceable but not very good movie, nothing like the original Muppet Movie. The joke about Kermit and Fozzie being identical twins (with Fozzie not being able to tell them apart -- and yet he kept his usual bit of calling Kermit "sir") was mystifying and got old very fast. It's the kind of thing that must come from some specific movie this one is parodying, but since it's so bizarre, it doesn't stand at all on its own, and the internet does not inform me that it's actually parodying anything in particular. Such a weird plot element. Didn't finish but may eventually watch the ending.