halfcactus

My media consumption is brought to you by: the Covid situation in our household! We've been having 30k cases per day, so it was inevitable, especially with two people who do hospital/clinic work. It wasn't a bad time, I just can't focus when there are breaks in routine.

Warning: extra long post

Movies

Knowing (2009)
Copy/pasting from my Twitter: decent suspense + religious horror, bad plot + script. too much bland child screentime. only 1 interesting character, but the movie only cares about nic cage
The premise of the movie is that a time capsule is opened, and in it is a coded message that listed ALL OF THE locations and bodycounts of the big disasters in the world that have happened in the last 50 years. Upon decoding, only 3 events have not happened, and the main character (Nicolas Cage) takes it upon himself to stop them. The characters and dialogue were very badly written, but I watched this against my will (when I was rooming with my parents haha), so it's not like I expected it to be good. XD (The single interesting character was the FL, who was raised by her prescient mother to have intimate knowledge of her own death. )

The Handmaiden (2016)
This is apparently a Korean adaptation of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters??? Which was a psychological thriller set in Victorian England featuring lesbians? The basic setup for the plot and characters is similar (and intricately localized), but diverges at the third act. It's definitely a canon with a life and focus of its own, centered on the characters' sexualities. The movie has elements of suspense, gothic horror, sensuality, which are all part of the original, and (surprisingly!) fluff and sex scenes that went on for much too long. Overall, it's a very visually arresting film with a very happy ending.

Content warnings: grooming, sexual harassment, attempted rape, some gore at the end(???? I DID NOT WATCH THIS PART SO IDK)


Encanto (2021)
I wouldn't say that I enjoyed this movie (I found it stressful to be in Mirabel's PoV), but I liked it! It's a vivid portrayal of family dynamics when you all live together, particularly on the nose about how the ties that pull you together also restrain you. The house parallels/metaphors weren't subtle, but they work. And I particularly liked that one image (the glass etching) they had about Mirabel's prophecy!

It has a happy ending, but it's definitely not a Disney animation I'd watch for comfort--it lands more on the Pixar side for me in that manner. And I think I'm at a place in my life where I focus more on the painful bits. But it's the best Disney animated movie I've watched in recent years, while still being visually stunning; Raya and Over the Moon were enjoyable but too all over the place. Encanto is a lot more self-contained, and easy to follow.

TV

Who's the Murderer
I am too tired to actually talk about it, but I started watching S1 and Guigui is my favorite. The S7(!!!) heist gathering episode was also spectacularly good, and short enough that I plan to use it as my gateway to Who's the Murderer, but I think I'll just link to it when English subs are out. S7 officially starts Feb 10. ♥ And there's a New Year's concert tomorrow but I'm not sure I can watch it. :(


Tennis (Australian Open 2022)
I did not actually watch any of the tennis except some of the men's singles final, but this was a very eventful event! Highlights:

The entire Djokovic saga which had all of tennis twitter following Australian political/court reporters and reading up on Australian mandates.

This was Sam Stosur's last singles tournament. ;___; I'll really miss her, but I think she'll be around for doubles! She and Zhang Shuai won the US Open championship last year, which is especially a big deal for Sam (first doubles title in 16 years)!!!

Eva Asderaki-Moore being an undercover umpire during the Tsitsipas-Medvedev semis. AMAZING.

Nadal getting the championship and being the first man to make 21 slams! Good match--it surprisingly it did not flop in the middle like long (5 hours+) matches usually do in my experiences.

Arcane (2021)
I don't really have any thoughts about this, except that the animation and the way that scenes are synced to music are EXTREMELY worth watching. I did get bored at the plotty/chatty bits (hahahaha typical), but the action scenes are, as the kids, say LIT AF. My 3 points of mild disgruntlement are: 1) the fridging towards the end, 2) Jayce's design and energy are just annoying to me no matter what he does, and more mildly, 3) Hailee Steinfeld's Violet sounds too clean for me. XD Otherwise, I did not really pay attention to the plot/politics, though I did enjoy that most of what I remember about it are women. I also liked the sisterly trauma, the enemies-to-lovers lesbians, and the messed-up father-daughter relationship! All of Jinx's relationships were extremely interesting to me, and all of them gutting. I was so invested in the kids.


Symphony's Romance (2020) (Nodame Cantabile cdrama)
Our groupwatch stopped at around episode 15, and I had time to finish while quarantining, so. It did get good for me at around eps 19–21! And then I got pretty bored with it, though the second half is so much more watchable than the first, SO MUCH more polished than the jarring cuts in eps 3-18. I was livetweeting in this thread, so here are the highlights:

graphic design storyline

Mine's dad being the best character in the show

surprise guzheng scene (they needed the guzheng character to help with the ~hypnosis~ plan lol)

Chiaki's Platini contest application form: so much going on in this form, but it's the "Gender: Mail" for me

this VERY STRANGE editing choice where Chiaki and his dad are sadly going separate ways as estranged father & son, and... romantic music is playing in the background?????????????

Conclusion: this was not a good Nodame Cantabile adaptation, I would not recommend. :( Not even for Zhang Xincheng (the only positive thing I can say about his Chiaki is that it's nice to see a ML be so soft and not masculine at all, but he's neither Chiaki nor interesting as a character). :( There weren't any repercussions with the shadiness of the other conductor's actions. Just, he chose to focus on nothing but his music and lost out on friendships/relationships, and he considers himself a self-made man who worked for what he had? The plot points where he plays dirty (sabotaging Saiko's rival, and somewhat trying to sabotage Chiaki) AND used the connections of a girl who liked him to get where he was are never addressed.


Reset (2022)
(Livetweet thread with spoilers: here)

Reset is a Daylight Entertainment production starring Zhao Jinmai and Bai Jingting and other Daylight/Nirvana in Fire alums.

The plot: two people are stuck in a bus crash timeloop. The loop starts when they're already in the bus and ends minutes later when the bus explodes, killing them and everyone else who is on the bus.

I think this show is best as a thriller and with a limited POV—I feel that the storytelling is strongest at the beginning, where we're mostly in the 2 main characters' POVs and trying to orient ourselves with the plot and the timeloop mechanics. But the emotional closure in the end is enough to justify what I think are overly long human interest episodes in the middle.

The logic and pacing tend to suffer every time they add storylines that are not directly relevant to the bus crash, or show scenes that are in neither of the leads' POVs. Every unnecessary external detail only unraveled what was initially a pretty tight plot that was obscured by either the urgency of the circumstances or the personal judgements of the characters. Some of the "emotional" details didn't have any value added to the impact of some scenes (ie. all of the major touching moments would have remained very touching without them), and worse, sometimes they didn't... add up at all... which I found very distracting.

[potential spoilers]
There's definitely a lot of messaging and critique in the show, and once again, I think this was strongest when it was less overstated? There's definitely a gendered double standard when it comes to displays of emotion; it's the men who can afford to have emotional outbursts without really having repercussions.

The part that I found heavy-handed was the feminist messaging, which I thought was both poorly timed and executed. It's not that I don't think that these things should be said, but that when they said it, I think they shifted the focus away from the failure of society AND its authorities which should have been the main thing anyway!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And acknowledging/punishing the latter would have even strengthened the copaganda (which was definitely present in the form of Xie Yu XD) that the show had going on.
[/potential spoilers]


BUT OVERALL I enjoyed this show a lot and burned through the episodes as they came out. I adored the payoffs for the timeloops, especially the long, slow visual one in ep 11 and short callbacks in eps 12 and 15! And especially because it was such a difficult and frustrating journey for the leads. I also project a lot on the ML, because I see him as someone who's trying to step up as the older adult but is still a disaster HAHA. Bai Jingting did a spectacular job in portraying his anxiety too--the way he acts is how I feel inside ALL THE TIME. XD

Books

The Priory of the Orange Tree
I wanted so badly to like this (and to some degree, I did, at around the 30-50% mark!), but it became such a different book from where it started: from adult fantasy to fantasy with strong YA vibes. My uncharitable summary of this is that it's 800 pages of "Christianity is wrong, actually" and I did not, in fact, care about this one central storyline.

Charitably: I have read het high fantasies that I actively hated. At least this book had an attractive women-centric aesthetic, a canon f/f main pairing (that I did root for), cool action scenes, and some very interesting side characters!

Anyway, I'm going to try to... break down my thoughts... since I had a lot..

But my tl;dr is that I liked a short section of the book and I wish this had just focused on the main ship and let them have the chemistry and personalities they deserve, instead of letting the plot take that away from them.

POVs
The POV characters are:

TANÉ, an aspiring dragonrider from the East

NICLAYS, a morally gray alchemist, exiled from Virtudom

EAD, a Southern undercover mage/warrior/spy pretending to be a handmaiden so she can protect Queen Sabran

LOTH, an aristocrat, recently exiled from Virtudom + childhood friends with Sabran + best friends with Ead.


1.
The way that book has 1) the East and South as non-white regions while having real-life analogs, 2) the writing feeling supremely Eurocentric and white is uncomfortable to me, especially because they each feel like a mishmash of cultures/stereotypes lumped together. It pushes my "oh, you think Asian=Japanese?" button, which might just be a personal sensitivity, but still I wish that there had been more distance between the novel setting and reality.

It's also annoying to me that there's this talk about different languages and writing systems, but the only ~linguistic~ difference that is reflected in the text is that the characters from Virtudom and the South have a derogatory word for dragons ("wyrms").


2.
Ostensibly the point of dividing the book into these POVs is so you can get a sense of their different cultures and perspectives: the East worship their dragons, the South worship their Mother and hate dragons, Virtudom worships their Saint and hates dragons, and Niclays is a man of science who wants to create the elixir of life out of dragons. Their different cultures and beliefs are points of major conflict, to the point that it affects diplomatic relations, but other than Niclays, it's all so... toothless between the main characters?!? They just talk it out for friendship or the greater good, which is not really what I expected from an adult epic fantasy???


3.
Because the worldbuilding was just fantasy elements superimposed over existing countries and cultures, pieces of it didn't feel like it fit with the others. I was a little confused with the concept of queendom/matriarchal society that was still built on some sort of patriarchal system? I think it is meant to criticize many different aspects of Christianity, but with religious things you need more nuance than "ALL OF CHRISTIANITY was wrong, while the other religions were completely right about everything" as the message. (Speaking as a non-practicing/non-believing Catholic who studied a bit of its theology in a colonized country who grew up with a lot of strong feelings about religious teachings!)


4.
A much more minor complaint: I really struggled with the syntax and writing, which I felt didn't flow very well and definitely had parts I couldn't follow no matter how many times I reread them. The author didn't have a good grasp on which parts should be written down, and which can be left implied. And sometimes there were just passages that were very confusing when they didn't have to be.


5.
The character writing fell into the trap of women being too competent to have room for growth. With the exception of Tane, who was around much less, most of the development went to Loth and Roos, who were much more flawed, even though Roos' "development" was so ham-handed haha. On the other hand, if you like competent women who help each other out, this has an abundance of them!!!