halfcactus

Ahhhh I can't believe November's almost over. A couple of weeks ago we had a typhoon that was as big as our entire country. The coastal areas bore the brunt and weakened it; I spent that weekend keeping an eye on the news while watching a bunch of movies and Physical: Asia, which I enjoyed a lot more than I expected (at 1.5x speed) though I can't be bothered to watch the finale.

MOVIES:

Ballad of a Small Player; American Psycho; The Running Man (2025); Superman (2025); Legend of Hei 2

Ballad of a Small Player (2025)
Directed by Edward Berger, who worked on Conclave (which I haven't seen). This movie is all style, no substance. Macau is painted as a rainbow of neon, dreams, and desperation with a display of excess that feels thematically performative—Colin Farrell plays a gambler who calls himself Lord Doyle and performs at opulence and meaningless hunger. Fala Chen's character recognizes in him a "lost soul" and appears to feel a thread of connection to him. I feel like if the movie had tried to flesh out her thoughts and motives this movie would have struck me as orientalist, but there really is not enough substance here to turn over. It is, however, very nice to look at.

American Psycho (2000)
A portrait of the wealthy as vapid, interchangeable men in suits who are in constant need of affirmation and identity markers and are quite literally an echo chamber. For all their resources, they never achieve self-actualization. They don't even have real jobs. The jokes are funny, but I'm extremely squeamish about violence so I ended up only watching the first third of the movie—which was enough to see its thesis statement—and listening to the rest. Patrick Bateman is the OG # performative male.

Superman (2025)
Enjoyed this a lot, not just because there's a DOG (though mostly because of the dog). Hearing Noah and the Whale's 5 Years Time in a 2025 blockbuster was NOT in my bingo card, didn't really know how to feel about that. The first hour really flew by, while the second one was very standard superhero shtick. The visual gags were fun, the interpersonal conflicts were great, and the ending was satisfying. It's very much a socially relevant movie that's centered on human experiences and doing good. I watched this while a supertyphoon was brewing and seeing the extras take their pets with them in the evacuation scene really hit hard.

The Running Man (2025)
Rather than a dystopian movie, this is more like an alternate reality one, since its themes are very much "present". Apparently this is not just an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, it's also not the first one? It's definitely a great one to catch at the theater and immediately forget once it's over. There's a lot of interesting action, fun references to reality TV shows, and timely reminders about the dangers of AI and digital surveillance and cops, though it's horribly underwritten and overly sanitized. The script simply doesn't support the film's intentions. The dialogue in the last 1/3 outright assumes that the audience is stupid, and the ending is played so safe it loses its meaning.

Glen Powell's character's defining characteristic is meant to be his ANGER towards injustices but he just isn't angry enough and is weirdly passive for someone who's known for always going rogue. Rated R-18, but values are very family-friendly. Michael Cera's scenes were the truest part, both in terms of underground activism (the zines!) and in terms of what I think of as Edgar Wright's directorial voice, which seemed otherwise lost.

罗小黑战记2 | Legend of Hei 2 (2025)
I can see this movie selling really well to overseas animation fans (or at least battle shounen fans), but as I feared, for a movie about Xiao Hei, this didn't have enough Xiao Hei. ;___; First half was great, but second half was bogged down by too many action scenes that didn't feel very meaningful; the entire appeal of the first movie (and even the TV series!) for me was the characters, the relationships, and emotionally driven action and personal conflicts. Instead, this movie was high-stakes and brought to a real-life level I simply didn't care about. There were too many scenes of NPCs with no clear motive or emotional development and the "mystery" suffered for it.

Humor, banter, slice-of-life moments, and 晚安喵 montages were still on-point, though! Like I would still rewatch this for all the character interactions (and I would live in the montages if I could), it's just that I think this movie should have focused more on the found family storyline.

Movies I watched in the past two weeks:

不說話的愛 | Mumu (2025)

Father-daughter movie where Lay Zhang plays the deaf-mute father who is trying to keep custody of his daughter Mumu. A decent tearjerker when you don't think of the plot or its messaging... I suppose that given how patriarchal society is, it wouldn't be too out-of-pocket for a father to choose to do dangerous crimes rather than accept money from his ex-wife, but the movie's intentions are obviously a lot more simplistic.

The child actor who played the titular Mumu was so cute and a delight to watch! It was also nice that they cast people from the deaf community to play supporting roles. I wish we got more closure about Mumu's relationship with her mom, which only seemed to exist as a device for plot and conflict, or see how the mahjong parlor was doing, but I guess it's not called Mumu for nothing haha.


Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (2025)

Entertaining enough when you watch it in the theater, but it's objectively a mid movie and worse as an adaptation. I did kind of enjoy this as a brief refresher of the first few volumes of the novel even though they changed a lot of details. I just wish they'd rewritten everything. The more they tried to follow the plot, the more the story suffered from poor pacing and lack of character/relationship depth. There just isn't any time to know the characters enough to empathize with them or cheer for them. I'm generally forgiving about adaptation changes, but the problem with this one is that it doesn't really hold its own as a standalone movie, and even less as an apocalyptic movie, so it's all very unmemorable.

The abrupt cuts also made everything look cheap, like they couldn't afford to film the parts that took the characters from one place to the next. The movie experience was DEFINITELY not omniscient. In fact, it was the opposite, it never shows you the necessary parts lololol. The dokkaebi were so cute though!

Misc. notes about the movie (contains spoilers)

This movie is extremely PG13 and I don't know how much of the changes are to keep it PG13. They don't really show blood, and they usually cut away from violent/killing scenes.

Movie!Kim Dokja is a very typical isekai power fantasy protagonist. His backstory is that he was bullied in school (they don't tell you WHY he's being bullied, so it's just a generic bullying storyline). His most traumatic memory is, apparently, the time when he and his classmate? friend? were forced to beat each other up, and the day after their teacher announces that the other student has passed away.

The part where Jung Heewon gets sexually assaulted has been completely cut out. Her sole motivation is to avenge her friends. One can argue that this made her revenge scene un-cathartic, but that scene was so cheaply shot eitherway...

In the movie, Kim Dokja explicitly states that the reason he saves Jung Heewon was because she's a character from the novel and is one of his favorites or something. This is already his reason for pretty much every character in the movie! In the train scenario, he doesn't try to help Lee Gilyoung either (like he literally takes the ant farm from Gilyoung and doesn't leave him a single ant! LGY survives, but it's no thanks to KDJ) . What a wasted opportunity to make Kim Dokja a protagonist you can root for.

An Cailín Ciúin | The Quiet Girl (2022)
A healing movie about a neglected child who gets sent off to spend the summer with her aunt, who teaches her what it's like to belong in a family.

Nothing bad happens but I was so stressed........ There's implied abuse in the early parts of the movie, plus the pervasive implication that someone died here, so I just couldn't relax. In some ways the first parts reminded me of the experience of reading End of the Bridge, Top of the Tower (cnovel), just so much unease, though The Quiet Girl is thankfully less sinister. The ending montage was 10/10. Recommended if you like a quiet movie about summer in the farm with a lot of gorgeous shots and negative space.


未來讚美詩 | Hymn (2025)
SF short film starring Cecilia Yip and Steven Zhang (Zhang Xincheng) about emotional exploitation and predatory technology, kind of like Black Mirror? (I say without having seen a single episode of Black Mirror.) This was pretty interesting! It definitely benefited from being short. Because Cecilia Yip is Cantonese-speaking, ZXC gets two Cantonese lines. XD I'm not entirely convinced by his smoking, though... He's still too clean for these types of lived-in roles, but I like that he's been taking these film projects. (Especially since I barely watch series anymore.)

I have uploaded this movie on Dailymotion for personal backup reasons.

Also wrote a longer post about this here!

Lord of (the) Mysteries (donghua)
Only saw two eps! The first ep reminded me so much of various parts of Persona 3: tarot cards (of course the MC is The Fool), Velvet Room, Dark Hour, and the two senpai who see your potential and recruit you into their secret magical organization. :P It's based on a super popular transmigration novel so I thought the MC would be OP and annoying, but the writing is surprisingly even about it, setting up an ensemble cast though right now there is little characterization that makes any of them individually compelling. The MC has a language buff from being Chinese. XD

The ending theme samples Moonlight Sonata and is sung by Curley Gao and I've been obsessed with it.


K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025)
(Or, as I call it, the K-Pop Propaganda Movie haha.)

Non-spoilery thoughts

There are things I like about it: that it was an obvious labor of love and the money was spent on the music and animation, that the romance was meant to be part of a longer journey and not the destination, that you get a magical cat AND a magical bird. The concept of a boyband having devilishly infectious music was also 10/10. But because my fate is to be a hater, I did not think this was a good movie. The writing felt superficial, from the portrayal of girlhood to the conflicts of demonhood.

I would not have minded as much if the music (as good as it is) did not contradict the storylines: Golden and What It Sounds Like are the two big song numbers, which purport to represent the girls' journeys as a group, but they both end up being Rumi's solo songs. What wasted opportunities to do 3-part harmonies. :(

The movie also has a brand of wish fulfillment which, while sometimes funny, ultimately lands oddly. It's a fantasy about idols, but from the PoV of the industry which packages an artificial sense of "relatability" (just like you, they like to eat, go to the spa, and watch Tiktok videos) and "dedication" (they're doing this for the love of the game) in the girls, something I could roll with until the last part where Huntr/x gives up their vacation time because they want to make their fans happy. I guess that's a common superhero trope, but it's not even to save the world, and there's no real sense of empathy for the idols themselves since everyone just sort of forgets and moves on like nothing happened.


PS. While one of the more obvious comparisons to this movie is the fictional band K/DA (especially for Huntr/x's sound), what it reminds me more of is actually FFX-2! Like I can see a sequel where Rumi and the girls go on a quest for closure. XD

Goodbye, My Princess (Fei Wo Si Cun, tr. Tianshu)
Just finished this today!

PLOT: Xiaofeng is a princess from a western desert kingdom who enters a political marriage with the Crown Prince of an empire in the Central Plains.

This is an enemies-to-lovers story in the serious and literal sense as they are from opposing states who don't share the same language, culture or goals; Xiaofeng is guileless but unimpressed with Plains and palace culture, while Li Chengyin is cold and vindictive, (and later on, obsessive) to the point of not having a bottom line. Somewhere in between there's this guy in white named Gu Jian who cryptically alludes to events Xiaofeng has no memory of. As the story progresses, background conversations about power play and subjugation soon come to the forefront until they're impossible to ignore.

Non-spoilery thoughts

The main story is only around 300 pages and the next 250 pages are the extras… which is good, because I was getting concerned and being like "how long are we going to marinate in misery, I’m not strong enough for this"—evidently not that long for the readers but extremely long for some of the characters. Who deserve it. The suffering is satisfying enough for me to ignore the parts that felt emotionally unconvincing, mostly the present-day/palace stuff—I just don't buy the ML and FL falling in love. Certainly it is a trope, and it makes for a more interesting ML, but the FL's PoV isn't selling me on anything but circumstantial attraction. In some ways I wish the main story had been longer and we got to see more of the politicking and emotional developments. The extra chapters did add other PoVs and moments that fleshed out the plot and characters more; my favorite parts were still the shadows of angst and regret. I haven't seen the drama adaptation but I can see them integrating everything together effectively.

On the flip side, the FL being the PoV character makes for a moving story about debts, and I love that by the time it ends you see how her most important relationship is the one she shares with her bodyguard, A'du. Also loved the bits with Yongniang!

The translation was very enjoyable for me. I can see the kinship terms and names throwing people off, but it's immersive, and the writing flows like a book. Hoping for more cnovels to get this kind of translation quality in the future.

( Manga/manhua/manhwa )
( Movies: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes; Nezha 2; The Substance )
( TV: Bai Yao Pu (Fairies Album) S1; I Am Married... But!!! )

( Books: Straw into Gold - Fairy Tales Respun )

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RECENTLY:

Finished Cheese in the Trap (manhwa) and Ya She (donghua).

Watched the "new" Justice in the Dark eps (eps# 9 and 10). "Watched" is a pretty generous way of saying "relied on my memory of the audio drama to understand what's going on". The "zero empathy" thing and DNA talk continue to befuddle me, though they mostly seem to be focused on the argument of nature VS nurture and what that means for Pei Su. It's quite interesting that they made LWZ's mentor's daughter a co-intern in this adaptation, it integrates her more into the plot and emotional themes since she was mostly offscreen in the original work. I'm trying to relearn how to GIF post GIFs on Tumblr and my fandom Bluesky but tbh my fandom energy has been on the decline and my ability to focus worse... it's already a miracle that I managed to watch two whole eps in a week.

Feeling a bit anxious in light of global news, because the repercussions of certain US policies might eventually ripple into my livelihood, but I'm trying not to think too much about it.

After months of being bald, the tree (I think it might be narra?) across the street has finally sprouted bright new leaves and has been practicing how to flower. :) I was actually really worried it was dying because it grows on concrete and seemed withered for so long and its "seasons" seemed out of sync with the rest of the trees along the street, but the vicious summer seems to have brought it back to life.

I'm still paper-journaling faithfully. Four months in and no blank pages, thanks to the manhwa I write about and the smatterings of cmedia that have me drawing new vocabulary. It's the only thing that feels tangible and real these days.

Nü Er Hong (2023) (stream here)
Science fiction/fantasy + GL microdrama where one of the two main characters is basically a killing machine and the other has to stop her. I'm not built for microdramas and romance trope speedruns, so I mostly enjoyed the beginning and end parts and wish they'd picked a different BGM for the poison-sucking scene... But I'm very into this specific trope dynamic (it made me want to continue the NieR: Automata anime) AND the aesthetic of the main characters so I'm still glad I watched it.

PS. Apparently the series tells you at the beginning of the first episode that the main characters are aliens, but somehow all four people in our watchparty missed that AND none of us caught on to the visual cues... everything made more sense (the earpiece, the inability to use chopsticks, the mentions of dishwasher, the meteorite sword) when we realized. 🤣


Ballerina (2023) (Netflix)
Revenge thriller about an ex-bodyguard who in her quest to avenge her ballerina girlfriend uncovers a drug and human trafficking ring. Overall this is a very genre-typical addition to the revenge movie catalogue with gorgeous setpieces. It's not as tight or cathartic as it could have been even with its short runtime:

spoilers

I didn't see the point of introducing another character (a victim!) who also wanted to kill the bad guys but having that character still get abducted and undergo torture AND not even be able to participate in the revenge. It felt not only extraneous but also like it went against the emotional logic of the movie.

In terms of violence/gore, there were a couple of gruesome scenes that I avoided looking at, but the movie otherwise avoids gratuity more than you'd expect; a lot of the bloodshed is quite clean, either averting from the gore or skipping ahead to the outcome, and at one point puncturing through the tension with comical abruptness. The action is also a lot more exciting before the main character gets access to guns, but it's all still very cool.

tl;dr - a gritty action-thriller revenge movie for the lesbians (the ballerina dies at the beginning, and the ex-bodyguard destroys everyone who hurt her while remembering their past)

CW: suicide, blood/gore/violence, date rape (they show the lead-up and the aftermath), drugs, sexual assault, human trafficking and blackmail

海角七號 Cape No. 7 (2008)
Suggested this as a groupwatch because I'd just come from the Taiwan Pop Music Exhibit (highly recommend, would go again if I had the means + time) which instilled in me such a longing for film and music... And groupwatch is always an excuse to go through my movie to-watch (or to-rewatch) list. :P

Cape No. 7 was a massive domestic hit that came out a year after Jay Chou's Secret and outsold it... And I can see why.

PLOT: Former rock musician Aga leaves Taipei and moves back to Hengchun. He gets hired as a postman through the strings pulled by his estranged stepfather, who works for the local government—and through the same strings, he is tasked to perform as the opening act of a famous Japanese singer's beach concert.

Aga, who has a lot of authority, emotional, and personality issues, in a characteristically unprofessional move, opens the mail. Among it, he finds seven sixty-year-old love letters written in Japanese addressed to a certain Tomoko in Cape No. 7, which is now no longer to be found.

By day, the mystery of these letters slowly unravels, and by night, a band is assembled for rehearsals, comprised of a ten-year-old church pianist, an eighty-year-old yueqin player, an indigenous Taiwanese policeman who was jilted by his wife, a sad drummer who longs for a married woman, a Hakka Malasun salesman, and Aga himself, so... yay representation! Both the story and the movie are all about promoting and supporting local, and most of it is in Taiwanese, so I think it speaks a lot to the domestic audience. Overseas, the language aspects might not be as clear, apart from present-day Tomoko's brief outburst as the outsider who could only communicate in Mandarin or Japanese.

I thought it was an okay movie... I sought music and I got music, culminating in three musical numbers at the end. It has a low-stakes atmosphere that focused on the lives of ordinary people in a small town, which I like. But the protagonists themselves AND the romantic storyline are hard to connect to—in part because I don't really understand Aga or Tomoko's motivations, but also because the most natural ending for me would have been for their relationship to be a beautiful summer fling—one that represented a turning point in their lives, rather than this sort of, idk, past lives reparation.

That said, I'm not the target audience for this movie and I tend to be cynical of indigenous rep... I'm also disconcerted, though unsurprised, over TW pop culture's goodwill for imperial Japan... but I should stop complaining because I have great fondness for an actor who is a product of TW and JP relations. XD I still got emotional closure at the end of it, though! So I'd give it a 3/5.

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (2024)

Sons inherit assets. Daughter inherit cancer.

Huge Thai movie that came out just this year, starring Bilkin as an unscrupulous grandson vying for a slice of his ailing grandmother's inheritance. (The English title is quite misleading.)

It's emotionally driven and M(Bilkin)'s character arc is mainly there to depict the grief of his grandmother, who has lost all familial support from the generations that came before and after her... and I suppose to critique, to some extent, son-first upbringings. The parts where it touches on daughters doing all the caregiving while entitled sons reaped all the favor and rewards felt pointed and realistic, though this was not fully addressed due to the main character being the grandson. (There is an interesting granddaughter character, M's cousin Mui, who is similarly pragmatic and sweet, but she appears only briefly.)

Overall I loved the slice-of-life depictions of a Chinese-Thai family (with the language being lost on M's generation), and I enjoyed M as a selfish but sweet grandson who undergoes character development. But the concluding family-friendly messaging is not for me and my cynical heart, even when I could follow it emotionally. I still cried at the right places, and skipped over the scenes that would have been too hard for me (mainly cancer and elderly care bits), so there's that!

Definite CWs for: death of the elderly, terminal illness / cancer, family inheritance drama that i found had realistic (though low-key) tropes...

Would give this a 3.5/5.

I'll Be the Matriarch in This Life also known as I Shall Master This Family (webtoon)

Webtoon based on the novel by Kim Roah, in which the FL goes back in time to rewrite her family's history, using her knowledge of future events to set herself up to become the next heir and exact vengeance on the Empress's family that ruined her. Along the way, she earns the respect and loyalty of various family members and employees/artisans/misc. NPCs, and wins the undying love of the Second Prince who has the same vengeance goals. The retcon begins when the FL is seven, and it takes around one hundred chapters for the timeskip to her eighteenth birthday, so for a lot of it she is this insufferably genius child that is doted on by her father (who is a talented fashion designer), her grandfather (the patriarch), her twin cousins, and her hypercompetent aunt.

I binged 160 chapters only to find out that this is still ongoing (oops). It's a very light and easy read with "yay! feminism" energy and a romance that's secondary to the main plot, and a series of politics and business arcs that, although repetitive, are the right amount of substantial without being too complicated for my brain. There's definitely not a lot of depth in the characters; people are very black-and-white, so any person who is in the FL's side is good (and will never betray her), and anyone against her is evil. The tension and emotional honesty peak when her father finally falls ill, as predicted, and the FL is an anxious mess. In contrast, the aunt's divorce storyline lacks the punch it deserves, falling into dramatic tropes instead of taking the opportunity to flesh out these other characters that are otherwise so important to the FL.

See You in My 19th Life also known as Please Take Care of Me in This Life As Well (webtoon)

Reincarnation romance webtoon based on the novel by Lee Hye, which also had a kdrama adaptation last year. The FL has the ability to remember her previous lives, leaving her jaded and unable to form attachments until she meets the ML in her latest incarnation. Things happen, the ML is super traumatized, and then we get to a timeskip to the FL drawing on all her experience from her previous lives to pursue the ML with shameless single-mindedness.

In typical me fashion, I would have preferred this to be a shorter canon. It started out really strong, with beautiful and heart-aching slice-of-life. Even after the timeskip the FL and ML have pretty good chemistry as adults. But the murder mystery/conspiracy and wild car chase plots dragged—the murder mystery especially.

That said, I really liked how the [maximum trauma event] that the ML survives is more than just emotional damage. He develops PTSD with episodes that are impossible to predict, and a hearing disability that not only affects his daily life in visible ways but also gives him anxiety of further hearing loss.

Our Times (2015 movie)

I found this an excellent nostalgia piece, set in the 90s and drawing storylines from 2000s dramas. Felt a lot like a Hanadan/Meteor Garden remake but with 2015 sensibilities. The cameos were very on-the-nose and by the time you get to the end it stops being its own thing and becomes 2000s RPF. XD It got me raring to rewatch a bunch of movies, which I wonder will withstand the test of time?

A Sign of Affection (manga)

Haven't finished this yet, but this is a fluffy romance canon centered around the FL's life of navigating university and working towards her life goals as a deaf person who communicates with sign language. I don't really care for the ML (he has this really bonkers idea about purity, especially at the beginning where he correlates it with the FL's deafness), but as far as MLs go he's probably one of the less bland ones. There's not much momentum but tons of fluff, and also an anime adaptation that came out just this year.

According to the mangakas, they did a lot of research and consult with someone from the deaf community to shape the FL's experiences and also draw the hand movements. I'm really interested in the FL's journey—she's presently still in the process of breaking out of her bubble and I'd love to see her meet people from different regions.

Ghost Trick
I'm around halfway through! It's a really good game to pick up when I'm anxious and need a little reset—I can just jump right in without trying to remember the plot (which is now thickening) or what I'm supposed to be doing. Except now I'm kinda stuck lol.


priest, "橋頭樓上"
24/32 chapters done. \o/ At this point I think I could just keep reading instead of stopping at 2 chapters / week... but alas, life. I've been remiss in taking vocab notes too, and as a result, my journal/planner is once again empty and making me sad.


接骨木花, "陰間沒有珍奶嗎？" (Google Books link)

I was reading what I thought was a sample on Google Books, but idk, maybe it's the whole thing after all? This is a YA novel(??) about two boys separated by death and bonded by bubble tea (which is very Taiwanese of it ahaha) and mutual pining, so I've been calling it the "boba boyfriends book" in my head. It's actually really easy to read!!! Google Books isn't letting me read with a pop-up dictionary, but I've been managing surprisingly fine with the context, the radicals, and the very plain writing style. For the first time I feel almost literate!!! A feeling that will be replaced by despair when I go back to reading Bridge Tower. XD

This is also my first time reading any kind of TW lit, so it was a lot of fun for me, reading a "different" kind of writing. I learned that 機車 is scooter and that the traditional from of 庙 is 廟. Idk if I'll continue but it seems quite short?

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)

( Furiosa (2024) )

( Bonnie Garmus, 'Lessons in Chemistry' )

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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\

リンダ リンダ リンダ | Linda Linda Linda (2005)
Recced by Daisy; 2000s slice-of-life movie about the memories you make in your last year of high school and the supportive communities that come forward to help you attain them.

Plot: An all-girl band is set to perform at the last day of their school's cultural festival but lose two of their members due to internal strife and extenuating circumstances. Keyboardist Kei defiantly steps up to fill the guitarist role, and the vacant vocalist spot goes to the unsuspecting Korean exchange student Son (played by a very young and baby Bae Doona). As they face and overcome rehearsal troubles and encounters at the... boiler room, the girls become more comfortable and confident with each other.

Overall, a nice and mostly plot-less summery watch where any romantic interludes are just opportunities for the girls to make more memories and get closer. The strongest emotional relationship outside of the central characters is between Kei and ex-bandmate/frenemy Rin which fulfills a lot of my rival/girlfriend needs.

PS. The confession scene was very cute and funny.


春光乍洩 | Happy Together (1997)
A messy, co-dependent and destructive couple is stranded in Argentina. Rather than facing their loneliness, they cling to the last breaths of a passionate relationship that is past its expiration date.

The themes definitely hit their marks, and it was poignant to see how fragments of tenderness survive the turbulence of such a violent and ill-fitting love. It was easy to see why this is such a seminal work in LGBT cinema. They screened this in our local theaters, which was really nice!


Anatomie d'une chute | Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
romantic_drift recommended this as an "interesting" film and it is... exactly that. Interesting, well performed and well directed (and used sound to great and somewhat humorous effect), but not really something I'd categorize as good. I didn't realize that the French legal system was such a free-for-all and thoroughly enjoyed watching the court scenes! The film itself could have been tighter.

CW (might contain spoilers):

Domestic violence, dog harm (the dog ends up okay!!! But I still think this scene was unnecessarily dragged out, and not even necessary in the first place), bad and unmediated conversations about mental illness

Dune (2021) + Dune 2 (2024)
To be honest I wasn't very enthused about watching an epic-length movie where one of the central plot points is the colonization of a planet and its inhabitants, even if it's meant to be a subversion of the White Savior trope... so the first movie wasn't for me, and the second one took a while for me to warm up to. But my parents enjoyed them a lot, enough to catch the second movie at the theater, and we really, really liked that a significant amount of the movie had subtitled dialogue since my dad is HOH.

It was my first blockbuster in a while and as far as blockbusters go this has been better than some of the recent ones I've seen, maybe because the source material is substantial enough and the adaptation has a clear vision. I didn't really care for any of the characters, though.

TPTB have also confirmed that the Fremen fighting style is based on Balintawak Eskrima, a type of Filipino martial arts from the Visayas region, so that was pretty cool to watch too.


Rewind (2023)
"Second chance" movie in which a selfish husband gets the chance to relive the day his wife dies in a car collision and change her fate. This was, from what I recall, the most marketable entry in last year's Metro Manila Film Festival, and... I can see why. It's calculated to be family-friendly, from the casting of a real-life celebrity power couple, down to the very explicitly Catholic messaging and aspirations of greener career and educational grass. It's also unfortunately everything I'm allergic to, including a precocious and personality-less child character who functions as the voice of the narrative (no offense to the child actor, it's not his fault the script is like this).

From a Catholic framework, having an insufferable husband/character is acceptable because no soul is beyond redemption; and then you can fulfill the fantasy of having such a person undergo an epiphany and repent from his selfish and egotistical ways... I personally find this trope kind of toxic, on top of its (still very Catholic) stance about death being part of a higher plan, and I'm even saltier that the cause of the initial death is irresponsible driving!!! The ML's license isn't even revoked !!! Also did not appreciate the madonna-whore dichotomy... like they almost had a very cool side character and then they decided to sabotage her for the sake of the ML...

It does wrap up in an emotional way that is easy to get swept up in but ultimately it goes against each and every one of my sensibilities. ^^;


Superhero Movie (2008)
I have nothing to say about this except that it's definitely a movie from its time—the era of broad comedy and irreverent parodies, shortly before the advent of the Avengers franchise—and it's really not my thing, though there were some good jokes.

(My superhero parody of choice from this era is Kick-Ass.)


달콤한 인생 A Bittersweet Life (2005)
Slick and stylish award-winning noir action film that I mostly watched by... looking away from the screen. XD It's a well-paced and well-structured gangster thriller where a disgraced hitman takes you from the surface to the belly of the beast. The visuals are pretty interesting, and there’s ample breathing room from the tension and violence, and a satisfying ending. Definitely not my thing since I'm extremely squeamish about violence, BUT the part where Sunwoo goes after the boys in the flashy car and introduces them to the full FAFO experience was pretty cathartic...


Polite Society (2023)
Took me a while to warm up to this one because high-energy coming-of-age and social/cultural satire are not for my low-energy heart... but once it got going, it really got going and I happily ate up the most ridiculous and unsubtle plot developments.

2023 had some well-anticipated big and visually arresting movies with feminist slants that I did not quite vibe with, and this is the one that finally landed for me. This is my Barbie!!! My Bottoms!!! It had cool fight scenes AND a dance number that had all the energy of a fight scene but also fit spectacularly well in the context of its themes. And sisterly love and sisterly joy. ♥

Overall: very fun, satisfying, and comforting movie about sisters and friendship (the setup takes a while though)