halfcactus

I HAVE FIGURED OUT A WORKAROUND FOR MAKING GIFS / GIFSETS WITHOUT PHOTOSHOP (or screencapping frame by frame)!!!!!!!!!!!!!! With thanks to Rookie (2023) for motivating me hehe I am going to be so insufferable:





(Still processing my feelings for this movie, which for all its imperfections elicited reactions from me and made me feel things.)

I also found out that for some mysterious reason my Jiangzuo Alliance x Leverage animated posters for Nirvana in Fire Exchange 2017 are getting a fresh wave of notifications on Tumblr, which makes me feel sad because I can't make this kind of thing anymore, for creative and tech reasons... But it still makes me laugh seeing the places where I "animated" elements frame by frame with no regard for logic haha

I miss my youth 🥲

Hunger (2023)

Aoy, a young woman who runs her family's pad see ew joint, enters the high-stakes, high-pressure world of fine dining and gets a front seat view of its decadence and absurdities.

The cooking showdowns and menu concepts were artfully done, and the soundtrack was very effective. Half the time I was convinced that we were two seconds from a gruesome murder just because of the music haha.

The gap between the cinematography and the script was too wide to bridge and the film took itself a bit too seriously to glide over the ill-fitting parts, but it was still really nice to see a Southeast Asian movie take on this format. There was definitely a specificity to some of the shots it took that went over my outsider head. What stuck with me was the undertone of a cautionary tale: that an eldest daughter's lapses into ambition will only drive home the reality that her true place is at home, supporting her parents and her younger siblings. If she was a more well-written protagonist, this wouldn't have been an issue for me. Instead she was just a vehicle between two worlds without a strong sense of self or purpose, so the ending stung for me and my sensitivities.

Personally I feel like they could have given Aoy more cooking/sports anime protagonist energy too. XD

作りたい女と食べたい女 She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat (S1)

Jdrama adaptation of a GL manga of the same name: Nomoto, a hobby home cook, feels her cooking options are limited since she lives alone. She also resents how society reduces her passion to a marriageable skill, and yearns for an audience for her craft. One day she gets carried away and makes too much food for herself. Gathering her courage, she seeks out her neighbor who lives two doors away and is conveniently the perfect patron for her art.

Season 1 was a really cute, short, and low-stakes show at 15 minutes per episode. I haven't read the manga so I was worried that the topic of sexuality wouldn't be addressed, but there's an entire lesbian awakening arc that happens quite naturally and is very nice to see in a woman who's in her twenties/thirties (age is unclear).

Daisy pointed out that it was nice to have a "one cooks, one eats" romance where both characters are actually pretty competent and self-sufficient, it's just that one of them pursues cooking as a hobby, and... yeah! The dynamic also changes when they become more intimate with each other, and their individual preferences become more apparent both to themselves and the audience. The food they make is very attainable and homey, but with personal or regional twists.

I personally enjoyed how Kasuga's stoicism and Nomoto's little anxieties are only aspects of their personalities that don't define them any more than their interests; they're both well-socialized introverts with baggage. And on top of that, Nomoto's co-workers are refreshingly... normal. Annoying without being obnoxious, curious without being nosy... just people with their own lives working together.

Overall, a quick, sweet watch with enough substance to sink one's teeth in! Season 2 is still airing (20 episodes this time!!!), so I'm waiting quite a bit to get into that. :)