halfcactus

Wake Up Dead Man (Knives Out 3)
This is a loving tribute to locked room mysteries (I might give John Dickinson Carr another go) while not really much of a mystery movie itself, which I didn't mind because... I don't actually watch Knives Out for the mysteries. XD And I think it's great that every succeeding movie has been different, it makes the weaknesses less stark because you take them as part of a series. I love how this was more character-centric—at least, for the characters it was focusing on. I also felt it had more heart. I've been told that this is a very "current" movie but I think me not being American has made the entire experience more fascinating—in particular the depiction of Catholicism in the US—and less affecting.

Liann Zhang, "Julie Chan Is Dead"
Read this because of superborb's post here.

The first half of the book is about a down-on-her-luck woman impersonating her rich dead twin and taking over her influencer lifestyle. The second half is a psychological thriller.

The main character is so stressful omg haha but as much as I really struggled with the influencer + impersonation storyline, I must admit that it is the more compelling component! Technically I "enjoyed" the very vibes-driven second half more, but the stressfulness of the main character was what gave it flavor. When it was not stressful, it was very funny. The scenes about the pressures of being the only minority (or at least not having the privilege of living with blind spots) in the group were suitably incisive but not too heavy-handed. Honestly, the kind of book I'd recommend to IRLs.

F3 Concert Tour
I previously wrote that Ken Chu had allegedly been dropped from the F4 reunion tour due to multiple instances of publicly disclosing unfinalized tour info. This is now official news (the dropping of Ken Chu, not the reasoning behind it) and Ken Chu has been making a lot of noise about it. In the MV of the new song Forever Forever, Jay Chou and Mayday Ashin have been added to the group while Ken Chu has been uncannily removed from the Meteor Garden group shots which feels like historical erasure (speaking as someone who never even watched Taiwanese Meteor Garden lol).


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PS. Now watching Mobius which hopefully we'll finish by the end of the year! Interesting setting; Loving the use of Canto and the code-switching + feeling of nostalgia when they do action scenes, but I'm unfortunately not really vibing with it. It hasn't been a very well-directed/-edited series. The storytelling is sloppy, the humor is awkwardly timed and shot, the BGMs are very distracting, and the main characters don't have a sense of personality. Vastly preferring Reset which is ALSO a time loop drama starring the same actor.

+ Inexplicably Aokbab (most known for her role in the Thai movie Bad Genius) is in this. Even more inexplicably her character is Chinese-American (technically, 美籍華人 which I guess doesn't conclusively communicate her cultural identity). But her English is (though not her fault) worse than the non-American character's, and her Mandarin lines are dubbed over, so...??????? Feeling like they could have rewritten the character to fit the actress or cast someone else. It's such a disservice to cast her only to make her character speak two foreign languages.

1.

The tree across my window had its first full bloom of the year, the first along its street to turn gold. It shed its flowers two days later, of course, but it felt special, like it was just for me hehe. And hopefully it will bloom several more times before summer ends. :")


2.
It was a long weekend for us and I had so many plans for it: catching up on sleep, catching up on Justice in the Dark, finishing I Am Setsuna, finishing all the episodes/movies I started and forgot to continue, journaling, etc... So far the only thing I've managed to do was game a little, GIF a lot, and finally sub ZXC's latest song, which confirmed for me that Resolve has been misbehaving as far as subtitles are concerned... I should probably check if there are any later versions but I'm afraid that any potential update might make the program stop working!?!?




3.
I actually have been having a lot of complicated thoughts about Anglo cfandom since Justice in the Dark has me drawn back into various fandom spaces (mostly because I dump my GIFs on Tumblr and Twitter) after a long time of only being present on Youtube which was its own can of strangeness.

The drama itself has been... fine. I'm not the best judge because I watch raws (bc there's a provider that has added CN subs... And sometimes it's nice to read bullet comments haha) and can only understand so much... And I'm not particularly invested in the adaptation's plot... And I skip-watch all the parts that stress me out... It tracks fairly close to the novel, but I'm not sure how cohesive it is to an audience who is unfamiliar with the original—a lot was obviously cut (in the sense that scenes are conspicuously missing), and a lot of transitions feel janky, but the emotional storyline between Pei Su and Luo Weizhao has been kept intact. Their relationship is progressing at a different pace, which for me is interesting? For now, at least! Like it's sad that the gay got cut out, but I don't mind this version where Pei Su is still some level of antagonistic towards LWZ (not yet flirting), maybe because I'm just a casual Modu fan. XD

(A little nervous about seeing any SEA rep here since I remember mentions of it in the audio drama, but I'm not sure the universe has a concept of SEA, other than being filmed there.)

Zhang Xincheng's acting seems to be well received across various audiences, but I'm weirdly... indifferent to it (the reception). I guess it's not that weird when I've seen (and have been following) most of his body of work and I tend to avoid the fandom/Weibo side of things; from my POV, watching his performance in a drama he filmed four years ago and was partially released two years ago feels more like a puzzle piece sliding into place... Like obviously I think he was cast well and put a lot of effort to build a character that is more interesting than usual... I just don't do fandom the same way anymore, I guess? My relationship with cdramas has changed, idk. Still enjoying! But from a quiet and more neutral distance. ^^;

With thanks to past!me for taking the time to jot notes on my journal. Otherwise I would have no way of differentiating my 4894664 otome isekai webtoons.
( journal photos )

Books

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (tr. Anita Barrows, Joanna Macy)
Rita Dove, "Playlist for the Apocalypse"

Movies

Wicked (2024)
Look Back (2024)

Comics

Komomo Confiserie

Short shoujo manga about a pampered heiress who is forced to find a job and learn to live on her own while her family is sorting out a financial crisis. The MC is a vibrant and confident protagonist who embraces the chance to grow as a person, handles conflicts (and bullying) gracefully, and breaks out into professional renditions of Lacrimosa when anyone in her life is in need of comfort. The ML is sweet but sort of just there to help her attain her independence. The best parts are in the middle which highlight my favorite shoujo friendship dynamic: the spunky FL and her loud, tsundere best friend.

An Incompetent Woman Wants to be a Villainess (ongoing)

Proxy bride story where the FL is very Pure and Cute and Doing Her Best to act like her wicked half-sister whose place she's taking. No one is fooled, but she tries so hard they just go along with it and praise her villainy. Super cute and fluffy.

Like Wind on a Dry Branch (ongoing)
Saving My Sweetheart (a.k.a. A Way to Protect the Lovable You)
The Tyrant's Only Perfumer
廚廚動人 U Kill, I Cook (a.k.a. Kitchen Goddess and Assassin)

Villainess in Love

A good hurt/comfort fantasy canon where the FL, Yunifer, is mature and comfortable with her sexuality, and the ML's trauma is taken seriously. The first chapter timeskips the whole part where Yunifer's just transmigrated and is trying to avoid the main characters, instead landing us straight into a drunken and ill-advised one-night stand with the ML. The manhwa left a lot of loose ends which I hope are tied well in the original novel, but this was otherwise a solid romance fantasy with a less boilerplate setting and some worldbuilding of its own. The ship dynamic is cool and mature older FL x codependent yandere puppy ML, which does not feel as romantic on Yunifer's end since she's also trying to help him be more well-adjusted, but it's appropriately sweet. And there's a beautiful gigantic bird character who always steals the show whenever she's onscreen.

The Villainess is Retiring (ongoing; not sure I'll continue when S3 comes out)

Transmigration with strings attached, with the MC as a reluctant/inadvertent hero. The MC just wants to retire in the mountains but when she summons a demon to light up some unburnable wood, she gets cast into the role of magical problem-solving and leadership. S1 was pretty great (somewhat comparable to Lout of the Count's Family, from what little I've read of it), but in S2 the character writing takes a step back and the power imbalance between the MC and her devoted demon servant felt starkly worse. PS. The outfits for this webtoon are so nonsensical.

Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion

Isekai with a price. This is an enjoyable self-contained romance-fantasy with fake dating and mystery elements, though some of the episodes in the latter half fall into the "plot in service of romantic moments" category, something I wouldn't have minded if they let the hurt/comfort potential marinate a little.

The MC has a strong sense of personality, her own set of pecularities, and is unafraid of getting her hands dirty. The transmigration plot is a puzzle that's meant to be solved and resolved, with the MC having to come clean about who she is and where she came from, which is probably what made the romance more believable for me. Probably not that memorable in the long run, but it was an 8/10 binge with some interesting twists for me.

TV

Link Click cdrama

Mostly enjoyable for the songs and the opera troupe case and the scene in the end which shows the gang with their donghua looks! Bold of them to save that for after the Worst Story Arc I've Ever Seen in a Cdrama (a.k.a the MRA case). The last case was kind of okay but, like most of the cases, overly long. I ended up enjoying the siscon because at least it felt so bizarre it gave the story some flavor and it was amusing to see the actor leaning into it. XD The boys' dynamic was actually pretty good (I loved the conflict), but Qiao Ling was, sad to say, paper-thin and awful.

Books/Comics

Mostly Chinese-language lit that I have a lot of thoughts about but never wrote proper entries on... and then a couple of indie comics from Shortbox 2024:

priest, "橋頭樓上 End of the Bridge, Top of the Tower"

Jimmeh Aitch, "哈囉哈囉馬尼拉 Halo-Halo Manila"

接骨木花, "陰間沒有珍奶嗎？ Is There Boba in the Underworld?"

Nico Baidan, "Firsts"

Pearl Law, "Karma's A Peach"

Movies/Musicals

SIX The Musical

Twisters (2024)

The Wild Robot (2024)


RECENTLY: Read up to volume 3 of The Apothecary Diaries light novel series and then stopped reading because 12 volumes is kinda a lot... Picked up 青春18×2：重返最初的悸動 again as a palate cleanser and am happy to report that it's not het all the way through. (As a shoujo manga enjoyer I do love het, I just think that an anthology about youth and first loves shouldn't be exclusive to it.)

Watched the first two seasons of the Cinderella Chef donghua because it was suggested by the Netflix algorithm, though "watched" is a generous way of saying "skipped all the plot and non-cooking scenes". 😂 Plot was mostly a setup for the romance and the romance was downright awful from what I saw of it, which really is a shame because it had all the potential to scratch my shoujo + cooking anime itch. The food animation + cooking shenanigans were SO up my alley... And then season 2 gave us too many characters, not enough cooking, and the reactions leaned more ~emotional and nostalgic~ rather spectacularly OTT and I had to cut my losses and drop out... Disappointing because it had a strong season opener (cooking showdown with the restaurant across the street).


CURRENTLY: Watching the cdrama adaptation of Link Click with daisydiversions, since fansubs are complete. Don't think we'll finish before the year ends. ^^; Also watching Arcane s2 and grateful for the staggered release schedule because this show isn't exactly bingeable for me and I like to avoid major spoilers... AND I easily get overwhelmed with high episode counts. XD

Link Click

Overall thoughts about the donghua

Season 1 was pretty great and well-paced. It had a case-of-the-day format for the first half, with filler cases between the heavy ones... The noodle girlfriends were sweet... And the entire basketball arc was so well done! But I wouldn't have finished this on my own because it's just too stressful for me.

Season 2 is almost purely plot-driven, but the plot wasn't that great... Without the time to breathe or the thread of emotional logic it had in season 1, the gendered violence and weaknesses in writing women were much more prominent. To be fair I don't think any of the characters are written well here (the main villain was cartoonishly bad), but the women definitely got the shorter end of the stick for me. It had a lot of missed opportunities with the lesser villains' motivations and character arcs, and one of the episodes had an extremely extended domestic violence scene.

AND episode 9 is a total waste of time. It was meant to be a "three stories" episode playing with different art styles, something that is normally my favorite kind of episode, but it ends up only showing us 1) nothing we didn't already know 2) information about the main villain that would have been better off revealed much earlier... The entire episode was like 26 minutes, and I was so annoyed by it I almost left the groupwatch ajskdl;ja;fdja;fa

First impression on manhua + live action adaptation

I checked out the manhua and live action afterwards to 緩一緩, and I'm really enjoying the manhua! Volume 1 has an opera troupe case set in the aftermath of the basketball arc, where you can see the emotional fallout and Lu Guang's attempt to give Cheng Xiaoshi some time travel therapy... Will definitely continue.

As for the live action adaptation... the Slam Dunk props are inconspicuous reminders that I'm watching a Sugarman Media production. :P The setup is also quite different, as Cheng Xiaoshi is superhuman in more than the specific time travel way... and he and Lu Guang meet as adults, with Lu Guang purposefully seeking him out to presumably set things right. (I haven't watched past episode 1, so it's still unclear what Lu Guang wants.)

热辣滚烫 YOLO (2024)
Chinese movie adaptation of 100 Yen Love.

Thoughts

I never saw the original, so I went into this assuming it was a sports movie, only to find out it wasn't as sports- and FL-centric as I initially thought.

The most interesting part about this movie for me is how it carefully avoids bodyshaming the main character, who for most of the movie is thirty years old, depressed, and fat. She ends up losing weight when she decides to get serious about boxing, but the focus is on how much better she feels when she pursues a goal and learns to do things for herself. The movie acknowledges her as not being conventionally attractive, but it also portrays her as being desirable, in a way that I found pretty natural and realistic.

That said, I don't think this was a very good movie... it uses that one cinematic gimmick that I've come to HATE in cmedia, in which scenes are omitted and then shown as "reveals" in the end, to purposes I don't understand... The main character's emotional arc would have been far more compelling from the get-go if it had been told in a regular, linear fashion!!!!!!!!!! The little 小紅花 montage would still have worked, I promise!!!!!!!

Anyway, I enjoyed the last 30-ish minutes (which had the training montage + ending), but I watched most of the middle bits in the fastest speed Netflix would allow me to watch it in.

The Double eps 1-20
DNF, but sometimes I go back to rewatch the music battle scenes (ep 11).

PS. Netflix appears to do this weird censored words thing where it avoids offensive language? Sometimes to ludricous effect. "Xiao jianren" got translated as "you cow" and "hellcat", which... okay...


Also saw other movies I saw when I was rooming with my parents (due to ant problems)! I think they were Oppenheimer and a recent Matt Damon heist movie (it wasn't great). Did another Kung Fu Hustle rewatch too, since it's apparently on Netflix, and yeah... still a classic. :) Curiously, I get more stressed watching this as an adult, in anticipation of the "painful" scenes (mostly in the first half, a.k.a. the best parts) which is funny because this movie is also now "comfort movie" status to me... Landlady with hair rollers you will always be a legend. ♥


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Other recents:
( August life updates )

A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
I felt quite bamboozled by this because I was expecting this to be about Day One, but they mostly skipped day one by knocking out the main character and having all the important parts be revealed offscreen... I never found out how they discovered that the aliens were reacting to sound and that they are averse to water (in this movie, not averse enough). I suppose it makes sense in the constraints of the characters' PoV, but I still feel cheated. >:(

I've only seen the first Quiet Place movie and in comparison, Day One is much weaker in most aspects. It seemed like any semblance of logic had been cast aside, and the tension eventually flagged for me. But it also felt a lot more human, with a far more interesting character and emotional arc, though I have mixed feelings about the (expected) ending. Lupita Nyong'o's eyes and overall acting really carried the film—I wish I had a higher stress threshold to appreciate it more. And there's a cat!

Note: I dragged my parents to watch this with me because we all needed a break from routine and it seemed HoH-friendly, and it mostly was, since they didn't really care about the character stuff and backstories…



The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (2023)
Two childhood friends leave Aomori Prefecture to pursue the dream of being geiko in Kyoto. Sumire proves to be a natural, smoothly rising to her debut, while Kiyo, having neither the head nor heart for it, fails out of training. But as it turns out, the maiko house needs a person to take over the cooking! And to stay with Sumire, Kiyo does. In true protagonist fashion, she has both the ability and the determination to evoke home in the food she cooks.

At some point Momoko, the proud and peerless geiko who's weirdly obsessed with zombies, adopts both Sumire and Kiyo as rivals.

Overall, a short, sweet watch with a cute and compelling central relationship and interesting developments (Momoko, mostly). It's focused on the movements inside the maiko house, untouched by real-life problems of invasive tourists and financial sustainability. The parts with Sumire's dad were dragging and underripe, though.

Just One Cookbook has a recipe compilation of all the food featured on the show, organized by episode.



To the Wonder (2024)
A dramatized adaptation of Li Juan's essays about Altay.

Li Wenxiu (Zhou 依ran), a young Han woman, works in a hotel in Ürümqi in the hopes of saving enough money to move to Beijing and become a writer, but it doesn't work out. She's clumsy and distracted, faint-hearted and naive—sneaking off to attend a lecture, bullied by co-workers for being a country bumpkin and high school drop-out with lofty ambitions, and fleeced out of her severance pay. Out of options, she decides to move back in with her mom (played by Ma Yili) who runs a small shop in Altay, located in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture.

Through her eyes we meet a family at the cusp of change: the patriarch Sulitan (Alimujiang) who is uneasy because the old ways are no longer being upheld, the widowed Tokan (Alima) who wishes to remarry and take her kids with her, the ML Batay (Yu Shi), a talented horse trainer unwilling to stay in Sulitan's ranch, and the injured horse Snowshoe.

( Read more... )

All in all, the show was better than my cynicism of relaxing countryside dramas feared! The romantic shots of lush fields were balanced by coming-of-age elements and a sense of them being lived in. It helped a lot to watch this as a group too, to share in the trauma and betrayal. 😂 It was weakest to me when it peeled away from the realism and leaned into the realm of fictionalization--it's still a lot more restrained than I expected, but I felt that we could have tied things up a bit more neatly—with concluding excerpts of the author's writing, maybe? A little bit of something, anyway. I think I just didn't vibe with the final scene haha. And I think even though I got "closure" about Tokan, I wish the FL was impacted by a relationship within community other than the one with Batay.

But it did an otherwise good job in showing us around and taking us back full circle into the point-of-view of an outsider looking in. And it was so nice to see skin looking like skin! The novelty of seeing people's faces having texture in a 2024 cdrama. XD Also! So! Many! Fluffy! Sheep! And little baby sheep! Plus it was only 8 eps.

CW:

major spoilers

animal death (a horse is brutally killed)

待我醒来时 (no official title yet) special wrap-up teaser. Based on a novel by Ding Mo (Love Me If You Dare, When a Snail Falls in Love), directed by Tsai Yueh-Hsun (Mars, 2001 Meteor Garden, Black and White... some recent stuff that I didn't follow), starring Jing Tian and Zhang Xincheng... I'm personally wary about mental illness depictions but it's otherwise an interesting role for ZXC. I wonder if this type of novel is readable for me haha.



A Douyin BTS for 春色寄情人 Will Love in Spring (formerly known as There Is a Lover in My Hometown), set to come out in April 22. Stars Li Xian and Zhou Yutong. (I'll probably watch this through friends, as usual.)

TV/Movies

Theater Camp (2023)
Musical theater camp mockumentary mainly following two seasoned teachers and an influencer who has no idea how to run anything. I didn't care for these three main characters but I did find all the theater jokes very fun and was thoroughly moved by the payoff in Glenn's storyline (+ the kids). Also felt that Ayo Edebiri's character was underused? I wanted to know more about the kids on their own as well.

An Ancient Love Song (2023)

A historian travels back in time and meets the Demon Queen he had written about in his book, which propels him into a quest to rewrite history in every way he can. (Daisy rightfully called this "method writing". XD)

At 14 episodes that are each 30 minutes long, this is a highly finishable drama that captures the feeling of the webnovel in a way that I think is refreshingly old-school. The main characters aren't particularly unique on their own, but they balance the story very well between their relationships. Production values are maximized and editing/directing are marvelously done—there's a strong sense of point-of-view, some well-timed comedy, and fight scenes I don't zone out of.

The FL has a role and arc that's usually reserved for MLs and I love that so much about her as well as for the actress who gets to play a character which such range. It is SO satisfying to get to the point where she's peeled back to her final timeline and layer. Also loved her brother's storyline is also about gender stereotypes/expectations but for boys.

Cons: I feel like they could have gone harder on the music + songwriting aspects between the two main characters, and I wish the conflict wasn't as centered on the prime minister + politics (which contains the flavor of nationalism that stereotypes the ~barbaric northerners~). But at least the plot is just a backdrop for a relationship-driven story whose weaknesses outweigh its strengths.

PS. All palace dramas should include a scene where the emperor gets an eggducation. XD

Books/Comics

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone


Enemies-to-lovers novel in epistolary format as two highly competent agents from opposing sides leave each other letters in the time war. I found the writing flowery and distracting at first, but it grew one me as we spent more time with the characters. Plot was self-contained but a bit too lean for me—I could have done with more meat and tendon.



Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha

IN THE WAR: YOU AND HOUSES

You fight. You
die.
You’ll never know who won or lost,
or if the war ever ended.

They didn’t find a place to bury you.
They carried you on their shoulders,
wandered through the neighborhood,
stopped at your childhood school
and the old park.

The houses never saw you.
They’ve already packed their bags.
Dust has erected a tent in the corners.
Rust has landed with its worn-out clothes on the tap
and on the spoon.
It steals from the water its soft slide,
while you,
you sleep on moving sand.

(I got my copy from Publishers for Palestine.)




Winnie Chua, "A Walk in a Park"

some images

A gorgeous and moving meditation about not knowing how to live your life that landed on all the right spots for me since I too have been Going Through It this year and trying to do things to get out of my head—trying to find myself in the world around me.