scaramouche: P. Ramlee as Kasim Selamat from Ibu Mertuaku, holding a saxophone (kasim selamat is osman jailani)
I got food poisoning! I haven't gotten it in years and forgot how absolutely miserable it can be even after the worst is over. My appetite is back, which is nice, but I'm still feeling a little wary in general, which is a shame because the restaurant that I got it from (from the salsa!) was fancy, instead of some stereotypical dinky eatery, which just goes to show you can never be sure.

While feeling bleh I managed to finish reading Malaysian Cinema and Beyond: Genre, Representation and the Nation which is a relatively recent get at a local bookstore (I do have exceptions when adding to my carefully-controlled to-read book shelf). I don't think I've ever read anything about local media except a P. Ramlee biography from way back when that I can barely remember, so I jumped on this one, which is a recent 2024 publication, and features seven essays from different authors covering various local cinema topics.

The essays are short-ish and as a layperson I found some of them a bit too technical for my understanding, but I totally respect that because editor Wan Aida Wan Yahaya (who also contributed one of the essays) is totally right in that there's a dearth of scholarly analysis about our movie output and they should be as in-depth technically as they can be. The topics are: an overview (yay!) of trends through the pre-golden, golden and post-golden eras as they are generally understood; the use of CGI as flash to compete with Hollywood-made expectations vs. to actually say something; two essays about Dain Said's Bunohan; trends in representation of Malay women; war films in mythmaking of the modern nation-state; and films that look at the permeability of borders in the Nusantara region.

These were great, and while reading it I did watch some of the movies the essays discuss! Of course I had to check out Bunohan which, besides already being the topic of two essays, is mentioned in THREE other essays in the book. It's one of those few times when Netflix actually does have the thing I want to watch, and they tagged it as "understated", "art house", "rivalry", and I went -- oh no art house. I am not an art house person, and I think if I watched Bunohan without being preempted for what Said Dain was doing, I would have been lost, because I don't think I would've understood the supernatural elements of the movie until the very end (i.e. that the main characters' mother has become a supernatural creature, and their father is in possession of a saka) and from there wouldn't have been able to reflect retroactively on the film that came before it. I would've understood the encroachment of capitalism on the traditional ways, though! But the supernatural elements are a huge part of it and the film gives no context for that. That said, the camera work and framing choices are brilliant even if I wouldn't be able to get all of them, and I do love the strange opening scene.

A lot of the book's topics were fun (eg. we love melodramas and horror movies, and Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam was the turning point for modern horror -- I actually saw that in the cinema!) but my main enjoyment was in learning the older history in the early decades. Like how our movie industry was kicked off by outsiders, hence why the early films looked like Bollywood or Hong Kong-made output because they effectively were, even if the actors used were local, and that it took a while for local voices to become part of the industry and be able to tell our stories effectively, and that P. Ramlee being at the right place at the right time to absorb skills like a sponge gave the entire industry a boost. I did not know Filipino directors and crew were a strong influence as well, as that relationship doesn't seem to have carried forward much, unlike our greater overlap with Indonesia.

Purrcy; Pride

Jul. 3rd, 2025 12:20 am[personal profile] mecurtin
mecurtin: Simon's cat makes laptop goes meeeoow? (meeeoow laptop cat)
I finished taking the laundry out of this basket & put it down on its side for Purrcy investigation. It was worth snooping in, but not really good for long-term use, he found.

What's that in the sky? he wondered, after several days of rain & thunder-growler attacks.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby stands in a brown cloth laundry bin lying on its side. He peers out and up at the sunlight coming from the skylight above, his whiskers looking long but rather doubtful.

My back continues to be better, while not being anything like *all* better. Prednisone has the reputation of being Side Effects City, my biggest ones so far are dry mouth making my voice all scratchy, and a certain amount of ADHD/mania type behavior, trouble settling & sleeping. Only 3 more days of tapering to go, though.

Amid all The Horrors ramping up & up, here's something that's given me active joy in the past couple of days: Sir Ian McKellan joining Scissor Sisters onstage at Glastonbury Festival:



My god, he's still got that full Royal Shakespeare voice.

It makes me cry a bit with joy at the end there, seeing Sir Ian being able to lead his people in a public celebration of being out & proud. And to see an old man being *venerated*, for once, admired for achievements but in this case also as a symbol of what people like those in the audience can have with age: a *full* life, a *long* life, a life with everything in it, despite what they may have been told. You don't have to be young to be queer, it's not a phase, it's part of a complete human life.
oneiriad: (Default)
Aka I signed up for early access to the first episode.

Spoilers below the cut )

Happy Canada Day!

Jul. 1st, 2025 11:58 am[personal profile] grey853
grey853: (ckr_smile_skater_g8r)
I hope all my Canadian friends have a wonderful Canada Day. Let it be known that I respect your sovereign nation. Stand strong against all tyranny.

ckrcanadabanner
mecurtin: a powerful wizard with glowing eyes and a magic cane (accessibility)
Purrcy was lying on top of the sofas and then Suddenly a Wild Hand Appeared! With Pets! it was pretty choice for everyone involved tbh

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby leans his head into a white person's hand that's reaching out to rub his face and body, as he sits on the back of the sofas. His eyes are closed in bliss, his whiskers and paws are stretched out, his nose looks very pink & cute.

One of the things I've been doing to deal with stress is occasional binge-reading of book series. Most recently Rivers of London, which I'd never read all of before.

I do like them, and they're cute and all, but I'm forcefully reminded of why I don't read police procedurals any more, or watch TV shows with law enforcement heroes. Because this is really a fantasy of copaganda, as well as a fantasy with copaganda. I mean, the very idea that murders are treated so *seriously*, with huge commitments of personnel & resources ... This has *got* to be a fantasy for the UK, right? It's certainly a fantasy for the US, where almost half of all murders are unsolved.

So I can't really like them unreservedly, I can't *wallow* in them, my disbelief won't suspend that far.

But! Good news today!

I went to the doctor about my sciatica, and he started me on a course of prednisone, and ... it already seems to be working? maybe? Could this be what not being in pain is like?

Honestly it feels very strange. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
alierak: (Default)
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Purrcy in the morning

Jun. 28th, 2025 11:21 pm[personal profile] mecurtin
mecurtin: tabby cat pokes his cute face out of a box (purrcy)
During the heat wave this past week there was no Purrcy on the bed, but I woke up to him at my feet again yesterday and this morning. Lookit that face! Lookit how I touch that paw with a single finger!

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby wriggles on the bed to gaze lovingly at the camera human. His pupils are blown wide, his paws are in bunny position on his white fluffy tummy, one back paw is stretch forward toward the camera where a human hand reaches to touch a toe with a single finger.

I haven't been Purrcy-posting regularly for a while, because I've been tired and distracted and didn't have time -- because of the fascism, but also because of sitting outside in the spring and listening to birds. I'm trying to get back into it now, as you can see, but it's hard to keep in focus.

Also, my sciatica has been acting up, which means a lot of time just lying in bed, dozing or reading. I'm going to the doctor on Monday, hopefully I'll get a steroid injection or something similar & things will be better for a while. I'll try to write more tomorrow.

Purrcy and the snake

Jun. 28th, 2025 01:34 pm[personal profile] mecurtin
mecurtin: tabby cat pokes his cute face out of a box (purrcy)
The other day I heard Purrcy scrabbling in the corner between our bedroom & the laundry room, and then hissing. When I went over to see what was up his tail was all puffed up, as he confronted a new experience:
a milk snake!

cut for snake pic )

Purrcy was very excited, but wary--he clearly has a "snake instinct" that says this isn't normal prey, but something possibly dangerous. We weren't able to catch the snake, but we're pretty sure it went out the way it came in, it was pretty scared of us (& Purrcy).

Purrcy spent the next half week sniffing & searching for it everywhere, & also being v suspicious of all the cords & any long or snakelike toys. It's like his "snake instinct" was dormant & had to be activated.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby looks warily at a fuzzy blue, yellow and gray 'snake' toy where it lies next to the baseboard, wondering for the first time if it might be a real snake

The bad part about Our Inside Snek Adventure is that I mentioned it to the housecleaner ... who turns out to be *horribly* snake-phobic. So much that just knowing there'd been a snake in the house, she was too scared to come this week. We're blocking up the Snake Holes, hoping that helps, & she'll try to come back next week.

I'm not going to tell her that this is the 3rd *species* of snake we've seen close to the house, which is made of stone, 100 yrs old, on a stony NJ hillside (others are garter & black racer). Mr Dr Science & I love it! He in the Atlanta suburbs, I in Champaign, IL, we were the kids who caught snakes & brought them in for show & tell in elementary school.

Gloria, our housecleaner, grew up in Jamaica, but she's a city girl through and through. She's prob. too old for snake therapy, I hope this works.

aha!

Jun. 26th, 2025 01:30 am[personal profile] twistedchick
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
I have been watching 'Elementary' the past week or so, especially during the heat dome of the last few days, and throughout the first three seasons Holmes' father is mentioned a few times but never shows up.

He finally does show up early in season 4, and from the first moment I saw him I kept thinking, 'where do I know this actor from'? His face, older and lined, was like many other actors, but that voice was singular.

So I looked him up.

He played Denethor in LOTR, the bad father who tried to burn his younger son to death and immolate himself on the fire as well -- the worst of the fathers in LOTR.

Tone down the madness, make him a high-level businessman with a finger in every government, and you have Sherlock's father. Pretty good casting.

Alice in Borderland

Jun. 26th, 2025 01:06 pm[personal profile] scaramouche
scaramouche: The White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland (white rabbit is creepy)
As Squid Game's season 3 is about to drop, I found myself hankering for an Alice in Borderland rewatch, so I decided to do that. They're both death game media, but I guess I'm in the mood for nightmare realm survival over capitalism critique.

I realized I never posted about AiB's season 2 here, and I can't really remember what all my thoughts were at the time, but I do recall being WAY more excited about the reveals of the face card games when I read the manga, and the TV show didn't hit that same level of whoa. Also, season 2 compressed a lot more manga content than season 1 did and had to add a new game for Usagi specifically (I get it, the manga's sexism doesn't do her any favours). I think there could've been two more seasons instead of one, but it was a better idea to only do one more season in order to complete the story instead of risking cancellation.

The cost is that the various face card games have to be simplified (which works for everything except the Jack of Hearts, IMO) and side character development has to be sacrificed. In the manga Arisu only plays the King of Clubs and Queen of Hearts, so we spend more time with new side characters, but you can't do that in a TV show format. On the flipside, the TV show does get rid of a lot of faff, drops the manga's focus on game strategy, integrates characters across games better, and follows its chosen emotional throughline about living well and survivor's guilt more closely than the manga's exploration of different themes.

I still enjoy the show but what I miss most of what was lost was the glimpse into the King of Spades, the only face card who isn't motivated by a sense of superiority over other players or a desire to play the games to their most extreme conclusion. He doesn't want to play at all, and that's super interesting to me! In the TV show the King of Spades is positioned into a boss fight figure who takes out most of the gang in order to leave Arisu and Usagi alone to handle the final Queen of Hearts game, so he's a shadowy military man who has been traumatized by the games, and that's all he needs to be.

But in the manga there's specificity in King of Spades having witnessed the horrendous suffering of someone he loved in the games and having to mercy kill them. In the aftermath he made a conscious decision to snipe other players as quickly as he can before they can suffer any more in the gamescape. But in rejecting the games and all its macabre rules (he is the only face card not constrained by an arena!), the King of Spades tragically becomes a face card himself, and it's a shame that in the TV show he's a terminator with no face until his last episode, and no interiority save a glimpse at the literal last moment. :( I love him as a character! He is a dark mirror to Arisu, driven by a corrupted hero complex that has him believing that a quick death at his hand is kinder than the torture of the games! But alas.

PS. What is my timing! I just found out that there's going to be a season 3, which I thought at first was a fan concept but nope, it's legitimately dropping in September this year. I'm tempted to read the manga sequel that covers Arisu's return to the Borderland, but it might be more fun to go in with no expectations whatsoever. I have read the Alice on Border Road manga though, and I wonder if season 3 will incorporate anything from there. If they do, I'm at least mostly confident that the show won't port over much of Border Road's increased violence against the female characters, wooff.

Also curious is that when I looked up responses to season 2, people thought that the season 2 finale was more open-ended than I interpreted it to be. Like, it was obvious to me that the Joker is the psychopomp running the Borderlands (a trickster in charge of games that are as vicious as they can be unfair? you don't say) and, following the previously established mechanism where upon clearing a game the equivalent card is revealed, that the reveal of the Joker card as the final shot means that the equivalent game has been cleared, i.e. the Borderlands as a whole. But what felt so obvious to me is not so to many people! And I guess season 3 will/may do something else with that.

PPS. Talk about a fandom that's difficult to get content that threads a fine line for my own enjoyment. :/ I enjoy the AiB games but am not that interested in game strategizing, and I love the cerebral elements of the show but I don't think it's that deep, either.

PPPS. I made the mistake of reading the comments on the season 3 teaser. Media literacy for this show is dire. (Not uniformly, there are people who get it, but there's so many confused comments about the s2 finale.)

Andor Season 2, oh my!

Jun. 24th, 2025 12:30 pm[personal profile] grey853
grey853: (Earthhug_dhamphir)
I watched season one of Andor when it first came out. I liked it well enough and felt it was the best of all the SW series they've created. However, two weekends ago I binged watched Andor Season 2 and OMG, it was one of the best series I've watched in forever. Nobody was talking about how good this was, so I'd put off getting Disney Plus. But I've now seen it and it was terrifyingly close to what's happening now with the rise of fascism.

I personally thought it was brilliant, great script, great acting, a perfect lead in to Rogue One. The only question I have is about the baby at the end. I mean WTF? Why leave us hanging?
oneiriad: (Default)
One advantage of having a cold - watching Murderbot in the morning.

Preservation culture: oversharing in fancy restaurants.

Gurathin - that doesn't sound very sweet, you know.

Snarky Murderbot. Earnest Murderbot. Awww.

Awww, Ratthi = puppy. SecUnit = great conversationalist.

Ah, Gurathin, you are so very paranoid.

Murderbot - not becoming a tree because it needs more media.

Oh look, another centipede - and a - uhm? Oh no.

Chekov's egg sacks?

Inferior model. Can't even handle a single centipede.
scaramouche: Bruce Boxleitner as Alan from Tron (tron: alan is a nerd)
Partway through watching The Devil's Plan season 1, I did a quick search on youtube for TDP-related content to get an idea if TDP is/was popular. The algorithm fed me a video by [youtube.com profile] TaranArmstrong commentating over Genius Game, a UK version of the original The Genius, which I forgot existed but at least knew existed at all because David Tennant is the "host". (Not really, he's in prerecorded video footage explaining the games and tallying results, but he's not physically there to host.)

I watched bits of Taran's videos and really enjoyed his commentary! He has a good handle on strategy and figuring out game mechanics to explain them in ways that I can understand (a blessing!), plus he has a good grip on the social aspects of the game. Most important though, I think, is that Taran's enthusiasm is nice and he gets invested in a fun-to-watch way, with good humour, and it's fun to see him so critical of Genius Game's mostly wishy-washy players and the UK audience's dislike of complicated games. The reason the algo fed me his videos is because he mentions that he loved TDP season 1 and wants to do commentary over TDP season 2. He couldn't upload the videos to youtube, so he put them on patreon instead, so I figured hey, once I started watching TDP season 2, I can intersperse that with his commentary videos.

TDP season 2 I think starts strong, there's a good selection of contestants, some of whom are well familiar with board games and/or card games, and the showrunners changed the format up where instead of two players going to prison at the end of every main match, half the players would go there, and instead of a prize match that all the non-prison players have to play to get prize money, there's a death match where all the prison players have to play to survive. Plus because the thing about season 1 was the hidden prison game, both sets of players immediately get on trying to figure out the hidden games in both areas, which are found pretty early in the season.

Unfortunately as the season went on, the flaw in the overall game design had an accumulative effect, and I found myself enjoying the show less and less, and ended up mostly (though not always) watching Taran's commentaries instead of the actual episodes. I bailed entirely in episode 10 of 12. I might go back, I might not, but it's just not fun anymore.

Cut the rest for length. )

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