Recent books / movies

[halfcactus]

Furiosa (2024)
This was just an okay movie for me. I adored the first parts, with Furiosa's mom, and the end credits (which take you to scenes from Fury Road) and of course the first rig sequence, but the middle bits were a bit too long. Watching this made me realize that I never had any desire to know the lore, whether it was about Furiosa's past or the dystopian landscape they lived in. But it was pretty cool seeing the world through Furiosa's eyes and watching her wear different faces.

The pacing wasn't very smooth and the scenes felt uneven in several spots, like maybe they cut out a lot... In the end, the movie just made me want to rewatch Fury Road.

I feel like my enjoyment was also impacted by me not being able to hear Chris Hemsworth clearly or parse his accent during his scenery-chewing scenes... I found out afterwards through Pop Culture Happy Hour that words were deliberately mispronounced:

. . . We get a bit of the bluff bluster of Thor... But that's not the entire performance. There is also a bit of self-awareness and intelligence that kind of sneaks through - not a lot of intelligence. I mean, he uses a lot of AP English words, but he doesn't always pronounce them correctly. At one point, he says "piquaint", when he means "piquant".

And I wonder if it added to the difficulty for me.


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Bonnie Garmus, "Lessons in Chemistry"
A quirky feminist fantasy about life in the 1960s and the difficulties of being a woman in science.

Read this because I saw z0ngyu's rating on The Storygraph and got curious. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would! It had a lot of things I did not like—canonically very attractive female lead, romcom elements, anthropomorphized talking dog, and exceptionally precocious genius daughter—but surprisingly it all ended up working for me in the end. That, or I just get desensitized after a while haha.

The main character is pretty much a Mary Sue in every way you can imagine—she's quirky, she's smarter than everyone else, she's conventionally attractive and charismatic, she conquers labor pains by erging everyday, and she's Definitely Not Racist—but she is all of these things to criticize the flaws of a patriarchal and ignorantly religious society, so it didn't really bother me. Okay, the white savior bits kind of made me raise my eyebrows, as did the fridging of an offscreen gay character to make a Point about homophobia and give a straight character a Traumatic Backstory, but I just skimmed through them.

The science/STEM storylines felt more like movie science (so I wouldn't recommend it as a book about science / STEM), but then everything about this book felt like a movie screenplay.

CW: Rape, sexual assault... a "bury your gays" fridging backstory

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I also watched Rookie and I don't know if I'll ever write about it or the details that I personally feel were flattened in the English translation, but here, have another GIF of girls being joyful:



In recent personal news, we had a couple of holidays and so I finally went to the dentist. I got 4 fillings and my throat is still a bit sore even though it's been 5 days since then. >:( I also took my wonky phone to a shop, and one of the troubleshooting things we did was to reformat my phone... Which is kind of funny because I just had to reformat my computer a couple of months ago... It's like the universe is telling me I have to make a clean slate and let go of my youthful follies. That, or pick up more interests that don't involve screentime. /o\