Roll for Initiative

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Third[1] entry in the ongoing annual series of books what I read to my son over several weeks: Roll for Initiative. It’s a big standard coming of age story in which the girl who has never in her life done anything for herself has to come to grips with the idea of doing everything for herself, and just maybe solving everyone else’s problems around her at the same time, all as part of the middle school growth and maturity experience. I doubt there’s a former middle schooler reading this who hasn’t had exactly the same lived experience as Riley.

The twist is, this book is told through the lens of her wanting to play Dungeons and Dragons and not having anyone to play with now that her brother has gone off to college. Until she meets some girls on the bus that she never had to ride before now, and they form a little group, and before you know it, poof, everyone’s life is fixed. Even the people who we didn’t know had anything they needed fixed at the beginning of the book.

Thanks D&D!

No but seriously, I wanted to read him a book where the characters liked role-playing games, since he himself is currently in a kid RPG. He liked it, and I did not hate it, and that’s mostly what I’m looking for out of stories to read at bedtime, so, hooray.

[1] I read another, longer, book to him right before this, and have a niggling feeling I did not review it. This seems problematic. …no, wait, it was the library one and I totally did. Whew. …messes up the count a bit, though, doesn’t it?

Kandisha (2020)

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Based on a very narrow sample size of this movie from five years ago, I have to say that I am shocked by how casually racist French kids are with each other. This has nothing to do with the plot of the movie, nor particularly with the character development for that matter. It was just an adjustment I had to make. (Really, it’s probably like how mean girls in like Heathers or Mean Girls call each other bitch, and mean to be endearing. Of course, that doesn’t really sell itself as a solution either, if you give it more than a second’s thought.)

Again, not the point of the movie. So there are these French girls who I think all live in the same apartment building? They for sure go to the same school, or maybe more like used to go to and are now too old for that, but maybe not. Either way, not much schooling happening. And they’re surrounded by their boyfriends and baby daddies and exes and brothers and so on, and they are also spray paint taggers for some reason, with a secret gang tag all their own and everything. It’s very bonding.

Having established all that, two inciting incidents occur in close proximity. In the first, the white girl finds the name Kandisha tagged [by people not them] under some wallpaper, and the Muslim girl recognizes her as a Moroccan legendary figure who takes revenge on behalf of wronged women. Then they jokingly try to summon her, with no results. In the second incident, later that same night, the white girl is brutally attacked and attempted-raped by an ex-. Later still that same night while showering off the blood and detritus of the evening’s events, she tries to summon Kandisha again, with rather stronger results.

The catch is: you can’t really control a vengeance demon, and without almost any pause at all, the innocent[1] men in their lives are dropping like flies. If only there were some way to call her off altogether! Welp, good luck with that.

[1] At the least, more innocent.

The Housemaid (2025)

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Date night coin toss between this one and Primate, but Mary had read the book and wanted to see the movie, so The Housemaid it was. All I really knew about this movie going in is that it’s a thriller and that Sydney Sweeney, who is broadly considered the hot girl these days, gets naked in it.[1] I’ll try not to go much further myself, insofar as it had a nice, twisty plot the way thrillers ought to have.

So Sydney Sweeney is interviewing for a live-in housemaid job at one of those rich people houses in wealthy suburb NYC, the ones where all the rich families know each other and all their maids and nannies know each other, and where the wives don’t have jobs but also still need help because of all the parenting-adjacent and/or charity-adjacent tasks they perform, so they can be seen by each other to be doing these tasks while not actually getting their hands dirty with any actual charity work or parenting. And because of dark secrets of her own, she really needs the job but also knows she isn’t going to get the job, right up until she does.

And when I say I wish I’d known less, a lot of what I mean is that I wish I’d been able to tell which things seemed suspicious / concerning on their own merits, and not because I already knew something was going to be off-kilter. Like the door with a lock on the outside and scratches on the inside from ten minutes in but also that room is where she now lives? 100% sus if you know the genre, maybe plausibly explained in the moment if you do not know what genre you’re watching though? No way to tell really, since I did know.

Anyway. The point is, she’s a maid, and her lady of the house employer might actually be secret twins, one of whom hates her, so different are her behaviors between one scene and the next. But it’s okay, because the husband guy is not only hot as all get out, he’s also extremely empathetic, and anyway nobody else much likes Amanda Seyfried (the wife) either, and I’m sure this will all turn out fine for everyone involved.

Fun, sporadically steamy, ride.

[1] Does that make it an erotic thriller? I think like two more sex scenes and probably yes, or maybe I more accurately mean two more minutes’ worth of sex scenes. But nah, the threshold, whatever it most accurately is, was not crossed.

How to Train Your Dragon (2025)

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So, remember when that one movie about training dragons came out? And then 15 years later, they did a live action remake?

Look, I don’t want to say this How to Train Your Dragon is a shot for shot remake of the animated feature, just with human actors in place of the animated voice actors. For one thing, the new one is longer.

But… yeah, the truth is, it’s the same movie. And I already reviewed it once, so.

Son (2021)

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My giant list of Shudder movies to watch has gotten to where the new movies were coming out in 2021. Nice.

That said, man I’ve made a hash of this review. The problem is, I watched the movie over a week ago, then kind of forgot I had watched it, then watched another movie, then let more days pass because that review is going to be pretty easy, then glanced at my Shudder queue and realized my mistake.

So there’s this pregnant lady on the run, played by Laurie Strode’s granddaughter, and after she resentfully gives birth to the child during the prologue, we jump forward multiple years to her moderately free-wheeling single motherhood. That is, until she finds a horde of creepy people in her Son‘s bedroom, Rosemary’s Baby-style, and then he gets very sick. Downside is, there’s no evidence of the people and basically nobody believes her, except for this one Good Cop trope guy who keeps showing up whenever she has yet another evidence-free freakout, and before long, you can feel the chemistry between them starting to build.

That is, until her son finds a more successful cure than the doctors had as yet provided for his affliction, at the expense of the neighbor babysitter, and now they are forced to go on the run from both the law and her past, still unbelieved. But also, we slowly begin to realize… what if it really is all in her head? If that’s the case, just who is it leaving a string of bodies across flyover America? It’s like if You Might Be the Killer weren’t a comedy. I’m not saying I did not have a number of pretty shrewd guesses as to what was going on, but I am saying it was a fantastic slow burn of a movie that kept me guessing right up until the final scene, and you cannot ask for much more than that.

Vicious Fun

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A difference between the movies of the 1980s and the movies of the 2020s is that, for the most part, we have a more enlightened view of the way people ought to behave. For example, if you were a judgmental nerd with a crazy hot roommate in 1983, the arc of your story would be to win the roommate as a prize for your many inappropriate behaviours, such as berating her for wanting to watch Falcon Crest with her friends, or tailing her (admittedly scuzzball) date to a Chinese restaurant on the edge of town and inserting yourself into his life.

Whereas in the 2020s when you are that same loser character in 1983 under the same circumstances, and you take all of the same actions… you know, ultimately what I did not like about this movie is that he was still the protagonist at all. So be prepared for that, even if his end state isn’t quite as thoroughly rewarded as it once would have been.

The plot twist is that, after getting way too sorry for himself drunk and passing out in a supply closet of said Chinese restaurant, he wakes up to a small motivational self-help group in the main room of the now closed location. Before very long at all, he deduces that they’re not alcoholics so much as they are serial killers, and he’d better hope he can blend in if he wants to survive the night, much less get back to winning the heart of his roommate.

The other thing that would have made me like the movie more [aside from the aforementioned more sympathetic protagonist] is if I had not just seen the same overall plot play out across season one of the Dexter revival. Which is in no way their fault, since the movie predates the TV season by five years. Anyway, Vicious Fun was maybe sufficiently vicious, but definitely not sufficiently fun. I wanted more comedy out of my horror comedy than I actually received. Alas.

Wake Me after the Apocalypse

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Some books have hooks that just get me, or maybe Amazon is good at advertising. Whatever. Anyway, this book‘s hook is that Joanna the protagonist wakes up from cryosleep after 200 years only to find that there’s been a cave-in, and she alone has survived out of her group of a thousand people. The backstory, doled out in alternating chapters, is that a comet was about to hit the earth, but with enough warning that lots of bunkers of 1,000 people each were set up throughout America to allow humanity to survive the darkness and the desolation, via centuries of sleep thanks to recently successful cryonics technology.

I mean, Joanna’s personal backstory is also doled out through those alternating chapters, but that’s the gist of it. Cryosleep to avoid disaster, wake up to completely different disaster. So… obviously she’s going to meet other survivors. For one thing, there’s no reason to believe all the bunkers were destroyed just because hers was. But, insofar as this is the first book in a series, I was looking for less exposition and relationships and stuff, more raw survival and maybe mystery solving.[1]

What I got was… about half a book of those alternating backstory chapters, enough to get me well and truly tired of them. Then, just as the book I was looking for got started, the back 40% of it was instead chock full of people again, already. Ugh. It’s not that the story Rivet wrote was bad, it just was not at all what I wanted. Put a different way [that overstates the case of what this book actually is], I’d like to read these YA books and have them be less about Team Jacob versus Team Edward and more about Team Bella.

Anyway, if the second book is available at the Kindle lending library, I’ll borrow it eventually as I did this one. If it is not, I’m pretty sure I will neither buy nor download it. So… yeah.

[1] After all, just because the scientists believed it would be an extinction level event doesn’t mean it definitely would be. 99.999% death rate, we’d still bounce back[2].
[2] …well, maybe not bounce.

The Forbidden Library

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I randomly found a Django Wexler book in the kid section of the library, which was a bit of a surprise. Turns out he wrote a YA series ten years ago, and since my son has a heck of an attention span for books, I took a chance. At usually a chapter a night, it took close to a month including one auto-renewal, but then again how fast do I read to myself?[1]

Important ingredients for a young adult fantasy series are a) an orphan b) who was orphaned deliberately by an external force who will later drive the plot, and also c) the orphan later discovers an unanticipated talent for a magical world that they previously had no awareness of. Also, if you’re a girl orphan, probably d) you’ll meet someone your age in similar but not necessarily identical circumstances, who you most likely cannot trust, and yet you really want to. I’d say I’m not sure why this is less common with boy orphans, but the truth is, I’m pretty sure of why.

Alice Creighton is an intelligent 12 year old girl living her best life (good at school, science, math, all of that) in Manhattan (I think) with her father at the height of the Great Depression (which does not really affect anyone in the story, they’re all rich here especially by the standards of the day), up until she learns fairies are real. A week later, her father is lost at sea and his estates are sold off to pay his debts, and she is the ward of her uncle Geryon, a man she had not previously known existed but who seems to be doing even better financially than her father had been (debts notwithstanding), what with his massive estate outside, I don’t know, Philadelphia maybe?[2]

There’s only one rule: don’t go into Geryon’s personal library at the edge of the forest without permission. But when you’re surrounded by vague maids who do only what they’re told and literal-mindedly at that, and then just kind of wind down waiting for their next instruction, and with talking cats and evil wasp fairies and distant uncles who have no real interest in you, and above all when you are the protagonist of a YA novel who has been given one rule to follow, plus also you like to read?

Well, I think we all know where this is going. (In case you do not: it’s going into The Forbidden Library.)

[1] It’s the comics, is what it is. Well, and the parenting. The storytimes, just for example, most of which are regarding books that are unreviewable, such as Geronimo Stilton and Dragon Masters. And the Three Investigators, which I should have continued to review, but failed. (I’m not sure what happened there.)
[2] If you’re wondering why I don’t know where anything happened, it’s because the cities are mentioned like once each at the beginning of the book and then never matter again. If everything happens at your massive country estate, who cares what state it’s in? Or nation, honestly.

A Game about Digging a Hole

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Well, I don’t know what I was expecting.

No, it was acceptable fare, I just like the line. A Game about Digging a Hole is, I would argue, a self-contained and self-evident description of what to expect, but there are (technically) more details than that. See, you find a bulletin board advertising a house for sale, $10,000 as is, but it comes with an electric shovel and a treasure in the backyard, to which the new owner is welcome.

So now you’re digging a hole.

In the hole there are various bits of detritus aside from loose soil. Rocks, coal, that sort of thing. Happily, the various ores can be sold for money, and money can be used to recharge batteries, buy equipment upgrades, that sort of thing. Eventually, one presumes, there is a treasure.

Aside from a victory-locked access to most of the achievements, that’s it. That’s the whole entire game. I’m glad I played it, but having finished, I… am not interested in starting over, just to get the 8 or so achievements I did not get already. It was fun for a few hours, but it wasn’t that fun.

Videodrome

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Horror podcast time. The scare was society, and the style was sexy / erotic. So naturally, they landed on David Cronenberg. I… if I’m being honest, I ought to rewatch the last 20 minutes of Videodrome, because everything happened so fast after he was given the gun that I don’t think I actually know what transpired. But also, I kind of don’t want to watch it again? So…

The Onion once wrote a man on the street interview piece during the 2000 election in which one of the interviewees indicated that Bush vs Gore was choice he made every weekend on Cinemax. That guy would have felt very comfortable watching Toronto’s CivicTV, the channel you take to bed with you. Channel 83 is programmed by a shockingly young James Woods, who is always on the hunt for the newest way to keep his audience satisfied. (Mostly with, you guessed it, either bush or gore.)

In addition to scouring the earth for the latest and lowest brow, he also advocates for his programming on local talk shows, explaining that he is not causing society to worsen, but rather giving people an outlet for their pre-existing base desires so they don’t enact them in reality. Which is honestly not far afield of the discussions that were happening a few years earlier in Eyes of Laura Mars, nor for that matter discussions that continue to happen today. At least, he briefly advocates that position before pivoting to hitting on fellow panelist and radio call-in show host Blondie[1]. Before you know it, he’s showing her the pirate broadcast out of Pittsburgh that he recently acquired, of people being plotlessly tortured and killed, but, you know, fake. Really. Definitely not a broadcast of actual harm and murders. Who could do such a thing?

Anyway, she’s so into it that she wants to be a contestant[2], and heads off to Pennsylvania in search of Romero or whoever is putting the thing out into the world. When she never returns, James Woods goes down a rabbit hole trying to find out who is responsible for Videodrome (the name of the pirate broadcast his hacker intercepted, you see), what its purpose is, where Blondie ended up, really all of that. And suddenly shit gets weird. I’m talking pulsing videocassettes, involuntary body mods, and a climax so hallucinatory that I legitimately have no idea what happened.

No, that’s not true. Cronenberg is what happened.

[1] The band, not the comic strip
[2] It is unclear to me where the idea that this was open casting came from