Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

It took me two days to read Dan Charnas Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organise Your Work, Life, and Mind. It would have taken less time, but I had a busy weekend, which meant I was largely carving out blocks of time to read through the book as fast as possible. I was two-thirds done when I raved about it in the Sunday Circle. I am now finished.

And, upon finishing, I scrolled back to the start of the ebook and started reading it from the start. It’s that kind of book.

I love me a good book about productivity. I devour them like popcorn, especially when they’ve got odd little hooks. Charnas’ approach is all hook. He looks at the way people learn to be chefs, the system and the mindset that’s instilled in them in order to keep a busy kitchen functional. He extrapolates out from that, talking about mise-en-place as a philosophy and approach to life. He’s an incredible storyteller with a pool of interesting subjects, so it makes for an entertaining read.

It’s also an incredibly interesting philosophy, right up until Charnas tries to formalise it into a productivity system in the final chapters.The system, if you’re the kind of person who has read Getting Things Done, comes off as a little derivative and naff. It plays to the conceit a little too strongly for my tastes, and it’s just…weaker….than the rest of the book.

But the bits before that? Wonderful. Incredibly useful. I’d gotten my money’s worth by the second or third chapter, because I am the kind of person who hacks together productivity systems and looks for points of refinement. I run my life on a shambling Frankenstein’s monster of GTD, Accidental Creative, and Bullet Journal, cherry picking the best bits of those systems and leaving out the stuff that didn’t work. And I was hacking bits of mise-en-place real fast, especially when it came time to do some big tasks on tight deadlines.

Time I would have wasted on flail has been replaced by time spent building systems, timelines, and lists of tools I have available (and those I need to acquire).

Three quarters of this book is recommended reading. Highly recommended, The kind of thing I’m going to ramble about to my friends who are all about productivity systems, and a tool for having more interesting conversations with some friends who are former chefs gone into management.

The final quarter of the book? Skim it, unless you’re desperately in need of a system and are drowning in your workload.

You’ll already have the bulk of what you need by the time you hit that point.

I went to see Suicide Squad last night. Not because I had any real hopes of it being a good movie, but because it’s a comic book film and I will end up seeing all comic book films eventually. Even the Zack Snyder one’s, which ’cause me actual pain to watch. I will watch them, when it costs me nothing, and then I will hate myself.

Suicide Squad did not cause pain. Mostly because it’s an incredibly tedious couple of hours, by virtue of someone taking all the core beats of six different stories and throwing them in the air, then figuring “eh, good enough,” when the pages are re-assembled.

Suicide Squad is what happens if you try to make the Magnificent Seven and do the assembling the team sequence, then throw out oh, by the way, these guys are meant to be saving a Mexican village. It’s the film that happens when you kick of Die Hard with Hans Gruber taking over Nakatomi Towers, then go oh, yeah, there’s a cop trying to reconnect with his wife or something before launching into the second act.

Suicide Squad is a self-contained story, in that the conflict that drives the story is largely happening ’cause the protagonist is an idiot with insufficient reason to be one (and, despite the film’s attempts to re-frame Will Smith’s Deadshot as the protagonist, there is no way in hell that it’s anyone but Amanda Waller).

Weirdly, it would be a very easy story to fix. I’m almost certain there’s a director’s cut of this film somewhere that has things in the correct order, before the studio laid down the mandate for funnier and make sure there’s a pop song playing every six fucking seconds.

You start with the scene in the briefing room, where Waller demonstrates the need for a black-ops superhuman team. You do the scene where people express their concerns, and Waller talks about who she wants. You introduce the team, one by one, and show us their issues. How they’ll fail to work together, because they’re bad guys, and how they’ll eventually bond and do the family-dynamic thing that is currently missing (and, yet, remains central to the finale).

Basically, you cut the film like someone whose actually seen The Dirty Dozen and paid attention to what made it worked. I am 100% sure the scriptwriter and director have, because there are the bones of that movie submerged beneath the mess, but they weren’t able to enact it.

And the result is a mess. A *tedious* mess, punctuated with moments of greatness from the actors. Will Smith is a surprisingly good Deadshot and makes a lot of out very little. Margot Robbie is a solid Harley Quinn. I can totally get behind Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang. Viola Davis does okay as Amanda Waller, but she suffers from the same problem all Batman actors suffer from: just as no-one is going to compare with Kevin Conroy’s portrayal of Batman in Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League cartoons, no-one is going to be Amanda Waller like CCH Pounder was Amanda Waller.

Honestly, the best reason to see this film is in an object lesson in writing: spending the two hours trying to figure out how things went wrong, and what you’d need to do to fix it, is probably the most educational thing I’ve done in years.

Love and Friendship looks like a Jane Austen film, when you first glance in its direction. This is largely because it’s based on Lady Susan, Austen’s epistolary novella that you’ve probably only read if you’re a hardcore Austen reader or someone who picked up a volume with a title like “The Complete Works of Jane Austen” that took it’s remit rather seriously.

And because you walk into it thinking its an Austen film, and you know exactly what you’re going to get, Love and Friendship is all kinds of fucking glorious as it starts to fuck with those expectations. It’s incredibly funny without devolving into parody; incredibly engaging, without actually having a sympathetic character; incredibly slippery, in that there are machinations at work throughout the film and you’re never entirely sure of a character’s motivations.

It is a two-hour love-letter to the fact that Austen is incredibly funny, when you read her works, and the film takes it as a personal mission to remind you of that. It is good natured and pitch-perfect and…look, it has Kate Beckinsale in the lead, and she is phenomenal. I spent the whole movie basically going, wait, how did you end up here after Van Helsing? How are you this good? Why the fuck are you following this role with another goddamn Underworld?

And i now want director Whit Stillman to be given the rights to all Georgette Heyer novels, so he can adapt them in this style and just take over the world.

Yes, I am gushing. This movie? God damn I loved this movie. I sat there making heart-eyes at it for two straight hours, then spent the car ride home laughing hysterically every time my passenger repeated a line of dialogue. It is a matter of considerable surprise we did not crash into things.

This film has all the love, from me. Go see it.