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July Media Log
Aug. 1st, 2024 05:44 pmA 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:
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:
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