An enduring memory/scar I have from my university days is watching a documentary on the UK’s Channel 4 called Fat Girls and Feeders. It was about women who were extremely overweight (the term ‘morbidly obese’ may not be strong enough), to the point of being completely dependent on others for everything, and the (non-fat) men who liked and kept them that way. These women were immobile prisoners, either confined to bed or needing support to get around their homes, which were fitted with handlebars and accessibility fixtures everywhere. It was a saddening story of abuse and sadism in the guise of a consensual kink.
But why am I mentioning this? Well, the week got off to an awful start with Kim slipping at home and pulling/spraining/tearing a leg muscle, badly enough that she couldn’t put any weight on it without wincing. So she’s spent the last six days lying in bed resting and icing it, and I’ve been the nursemaid and caregiver helping her to the bathroom, making dinner, fetching water, just being on call for whatever. And having gone through this, let me just say! Those feeder guys are really sick if they find this fun!
Thankfully, the swelling has gone down and the pain is moderating. She can now get up and walk around slowly on her own, but sitting in certain positions still hurts. It’ll probably be a few more weeks before life gets back to normal, but this was an eye-opening preview of elderly life and if we don’t make it rich enough to afford the best AI robocare, then I hope I die before I get old.
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📺 We’ve been watching Netflix’s new Japanese reality series, The Boyfriend. I’d hoped it would be a spiritual successor to my beloved Terrace House, only with gay men, but it doesn’t quite capture the essence of what made TH great. Perhaps because of what happened with TH, the commentary panel here never goes too hard on the ‘contestants’, but more than that, I think it’s just a different sort of show. Terrace House was more about watching young people learning to live together and develop over a longer period, whereas The Boyfriend is overtly about “finding love” and takes place over just a few weeks.
📺 We also resumed and finished Season 8 of Below Deck after a break of several months. My usual complaints about Captain Lee’s leadership apply: he’s not hands-on at all, communication is poor, and his boundaries/consequences aren’t clear and can’t be taken seriously. However, because this season took place in Feb–Mar 2020, just as Covid was brewing, seeing the crew get increasingly ominous updates from family abroad and ultimately being shut down two charters early makes for an interesting document of a very strange time.
📺 The season finale of Apple TV+’s true crime/courtroom drama Presumed Innocent came out on Wednesday, and I think they stuck the landing. It’s one of the better shows on the service, and has apparently been renewed for a second season, which I assume will feature a completely new story and setting, in the manner of True Detective.
📺 I’ve started on Season 1 of The Big Door Prize, also on Apple TV+, and think it’s rather good. It’s about a small town that receives a mysterious machine that tells you what your potential is, and soon everyone is reevaluating their lives and having crises. But it’s also a comedy with surprising emotional depth.
🎬 I watched the seminal short film La Jetée (1962) on MUBI and immediately thought, ‘Oh this is quite like 12 Monkeys’, and unfortunately saw its twist ending coming. I wrote “√12 Monkeys” on Letterboxd, thinking I was very clever. Then I looked it up and hey, 12 Monkeys was explicitly inspired by La Jetée, so that makes sense. Despite that, it’s a must-watch because the form of it (a slideshow of black and white stills with a voiceover) is ingenious and works so well to create a slippery narrative vehicle: is this all a document? A memory? An oral story passed around in a broken future? —4 stars.
🎬 I also watched The Bat Woman (1968), a truly terrible B-movie, only because it was due to leave MUBI. It reminded me of some schlocky sci-fi Singaporean films from the 60s that I’ve seen at film festivals; the acting is either hammy or wooden, the special effects are often just literal toys, and the story is a nonsensical farce. A rich lady solves crimes as Batwoman, which is also her Lucha wrestling persona (I suppose to sidestep any copyright claims), and helps the police catch a mad scientist who is trying to breed a fishman monster. It ends with a sexist joke: Batwoman, in her civilian clothes celebrating victory with two male partners, screams and hides upon seeing a mouse while the men laugh. —1.5 stars.
🦻 Very little music was played this week, but I enjoyed a run-through of Jesse Malin’s first album, The Fine Art of Self Destruction, in preparation for Silver Patron Saints, the tribute album due out in September to raise awareness and funds for his recovery. It will feature covers by Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, Bleachers, Counting Crows, Dinosaur Jr., Lucinda Williams and Elvis Costello, The Wallflowers, Spoon, and many more.
Oh I nearly forgot! XG released Something Ain’t Right, the first single from their second mini-album (out 8 Nov) and it’s another banger!
I managed to go a whole week without visiting the Apple Store.
We did visit a new branch of Go! KBBQ at Bukit Timah Plaza; the original on Amoy Street is perpetually busy and comes recommended by the Korean community (so I’m told), and even has its own aging room in the back with a viewing window. The new one lacks the aging room but IS in an aging suburban mall, which increases your chances of getting a table. We overestimated as usual, and ordered a 690g set of pork belly, neck, and jowl. They do the cooking for you — there are illustrated STOP! signs telling you not to even attempt it yourself — and everything was perfect.
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I was saddened by the passing of another senior relative, aged 86, apparently from heart failure. The shock was compounded by the fact that I had just seen him a few weeks ago for the first time in years, at another uncle’s memorial, and he looked in great health. I remember him for hosting some of the more enjoyable Chinese New Year get-togethers of my childhood, where I learnt to play blackjack at the dinner table together with adults, spinning the lazy Susan around to draw cards off the pile, sweeping the pot (ashtray) of coins into my arms after winning a big hand, then experiencing the pain of losing everything — great preparation for the Terra Luna collapse decades later.
Due to a contagious illness at my parents’ place, I attended the wake alone and discovered a massive 9-storey building in Woodlands with multi-faith halls and columbarium facilities. The majority of these that I’ve attended have been at Singapore Casket in the Lavender district, a much humbler affair. Woodlands Memorial feels modern, which is to say efficient, cookie-cutter, and almost soulless. That joke is nowhere as distasteful as the marketing position I found on one of their posters: “Singapore’s premier one-stop afterlife venue”.
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I spent almost all of Monday installing Windows XP on my iPad and MacBook using the newly approvedUTM SE app from the App Store. The goal was to play an old Windows game that I have fond memories of: High Seas Solitaire. It’s really not much to look at, and the entire package weighs in at under 800kb. Published by ZapSpot, the game was part of a series of ad-supported titles that make Flappy Bird look like a big-budget production.
But in the early 2000s, I was stuck in a dreary clerical job that involved juggling Microsoft Excel and Access, stacks of official papers, and a cabinet full of file binders. High Seas Solitaire was on my Win95-powered computer, and it might as well have contained an entire 3D metaverse. When I found the above gameplay video on YouTube, I was shocked at how much detail my nostalgic brain had invented: I remembered a calming nautical world with ocean sounds, a creaking wooden ship, and seagulls flying overhead. In reality, the game has like four SFX clips that it plays at various times and that’s it.
I’ve forgotten the exact rules, but it wasn’t your standard solitaire game. You had to match cards that added up to 14, but pairs could also be matched, I think? It was just very satisfying to complete, and easy enough to do that a few times during each lunch break. I haven’t found any game based on the same mechanics since, but I dream about it.
Alas, while I managed to get Windows up and running, the game itself would not run. This led me to install VMware and try other online emulators, repeatedly install Windows, and even create CD-ROM images containing the game file for the virtual machines to mount. But each time, the game wouldn’t get past the loading screen. Finally, I asked Ci’en if she would try running it on her PC, and when even that didn’t work, I threw the whole project out of the window. Small comfort: perhaps even if I had succeeded, the CrowdStrike BSoD debacle this week might have wiped out my VM.
When I’m rich, I’ll bankroll the creation of a new, truly immersive version for visionOS.
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I watched two video essays from the Digging The Greats YouTube channel which usually focuses on music history and song breakdowns, but these were about an “experiment” where the host tries to only listen to music off an iPod for a month. He deletes streaming apps on his phone, commits to use aux cables for in-car listening, and eventually goes down a rabbit hole where he also quits social media and starts using a dedicated digital camera and prints photos in lieu of Instagram (why? It’s not as if he was using Instagram to take the photos).
This sort of modern tech consequence confluence happens over and over throughout the videos. He says this experiment changed his life and his whole outlook on music, especially regarding the influence of algorithms. Because he has an iPod with finite storage and no internet connection, he has to make choices about what music to buy and load onto it; he can’t just rely on an omnifarious cloud library. Thus he makes it into a whole personality: he introduces the idea into his everyday conversations and asks musicians and DJs he meets for music recommendations. He thinks ahead about what music he’s going to listen to. And music takes up even more space in his mind (if that were even possible).
None of these benefits actually required an iPod! He could have conducted the same experiment on his iPhone with some self-discipline, e.g. only listening to music downloaded offline, which can only be done at home near a laptop. But the iPod is a physical object that makes limitations tangible and the experiment is a construct that reminds you of a goal — these sorts of things are great for creativity and focus. It’s the intentionality and “mode setting” of what he’s doing that’s producing the results. And this is something we can and should all practice from time to time.
A few years back, I committed to taking only black-and-white photos for an entire month. I can now identify that period very easily when scrolling through my photo library. It was an exciting, liberating, and frustrating exercise all at once that forced more conscious decisions and felt like I was working with new gear (sans the expense). When you keep a mission like that at the front of your mind, you look out for interesting photos everywhere, which is why so many people take their favorite photos on holiday.
The same applies to writing (“I will blog every week”), music (“I will write an entire album in one key”), or anything that gives you joy (“Let’s do an Arnie movie marathon this weekend”).
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Media activity
💿 Apropos of the above: I listened to that new Travis album during a long cab ride and it was okay but didn’t make a huge impression. I considered deleting it, but then thought, “if I’d bought this on CD years ago, I’d listen to it at least a few more times, and the songs would probably stick in my head and years later I might even be thrilled to hear one of them come on somewhere in public”. That’s how my relationships with many of my favorite albums began anyway. This endless queue of options and dopamine-driven consumption pattern is not good for culture.
🎮 Ghostopia Season 1 continues to be an intriguing journey on the Nintendo Switch. It reminds me a little of Doki Doki Literature Club, not in content but in manner: layers of subversion and unexpected metaphorical depth under cuteness and comedy. I will be sad when it’s over (soon).
🎬 The following were all watched on MUBI.
Saw a Tsai Ming Jiang short, The Night (2021), which is nothing more than a series of still camera takes of nocturnal Hong Kong street scenes. The bright, digital-looking aesthetic resists the traditional romantic notion of Hong Kong as a neon-soaked, tattered metropolis. It’s dirty, yet cold and empty. Perhaps that was the point, but it did nothing for me. 1 star.
Saw One More Time with Feeling (2016), the first of the two Nick Cave films by Andrew Dominik. The inconsistent use of black-and-white footage upsets me. I probably should have watched this before This Much I Know to be True, but coming off that one I’m feeling that Dominik has a limited approach to getting things out of Cave, and when you hear him in the background asking questions, he can barely articulate them, sometimes letting his fumbling interrupt Cave’s train of thought, and that to me is an awful shame. He and the film crew also seem to greatly irritate Cave, which sadly continues in the sequel. They’re also transparently making a film, not a documentary, directing naturalistic actions to be repeated so they can be shot on the 3D camera. 3.5 stars.
Saw 24 City (2008), another pseudo-documentary, this time about the closure of a long-running factory in China. As you may have heard, the scale of these operations makes them cities in themselves, with the children of workers attending school within their walls and identifying more as ‘of the factory’ than the communities around them. There are interviews with real people recounting their lifelong experiences at the factory, including some devastatingly emotional stories, interspersed with actors being interviewed as characters for reasons unexplained. This dilutes the effect and makes it hard to stay invested as you never know when you’re being ‘lied to’. One scene has the legendary Joan Chen playing a factory worker who grew up with the nickname “Little Flower” because of her resemblance to a character in a film played by Joan Chen. I mean, that’s some genius casting but also too much. 3 stars.
🛣️ I also rewatched David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and ended up writing a longer review, below:
This film made a huge impression on me as a teenager, the early scene with the Mystery Man’s wide-eyed mask of a face staring spookily at Bill Pullman like Ryuk the ‘shinigami’ in Death Note — so grotesque and caked in unearthly tones that I remember it as employing special effects, but no, it was just Robert Blake’s face — talking to him from both sides of a phone call, surreal and inexplicable just like much of this entire film, it scarred me deep.
It seemed like a shockwave of audacity to have a main character morph into another person completely without any satisfying followup, just rolling into a new story completely. I remembered that, but mostly forgot the ending where the two halves converge. Making sense wasn’t the point anyway, it was a vibe. It’s jazz cinema.
I don’t think I had much early exposure to challenging art and I was making up for it through a phase into which Lost Highway fit perfectly, like William Burrough’s cut-up texts and visual poems like the Qatsi series: peering into randomness for meaningful patterns, meditating on nonsense to glimpse truth. Maybe even more than the film itself, I was really into the soundtrack, which featured David Bowie right in the middle of his Outside/Earthling era (which is where I started with him), the Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, The Smashing Pumpkins. Teenager catnip. Was it also the first time I heard Antonio Carlos Jobim? Maybe!
Rewatching it now over two decades later, I expected to understand things at a deeper level, but maybe I’m just a boring old guy now or got stupider because all I can focus on is how ugly or sloppy things are from a craft perspective: Pullman’s tacky LA apartment with odd furniture, the awkward fight scene between Pete and Andy that ends with a forehead embedded in a glass table, the VHS look. Sure, I have theories about what it’s all about but come on, who casts Gary Busey as a caring dad? It’s all corny af. The cinematic vocabulary hasn’t aged well and the once-cool cyclical timeline where the end is the beginning is the end isn’t mind-blowing anymore, just lame. Marilyn Manson’s inclusion in a snuff porn excerpt isn’t edgy, it’s enabling a sex offender. The Mystery Man has lost all menace and looks pathetic in his white makeup; I bet I could take him. Yeah I’m boring now. 3 stars.
My weekly ‘Going to the Apple Store’ streak continued on Monday when I accompanied my dad for his demo of the Vision Pro. Rather than use my unit with an imprecise fit, I thought it’d be better for him to get the proper experience, and sure enough, he had completely different strap and light seal sizes from mine. He’s had some experience with immersive headsets, mainly from flying his FPV drone and other vehicles, but in terms of interacting with spatial UIs and XR objects this was a first. He came away very impressed, apart from the usual complaints (weight, price). He wasn’t planning to buy one going in, but I wonder if he’s thinking about it now.
Aside: One hobby I’ve been meaning to play around with in the Vision Pro is sculpture, which is much more intuitive (read: idiot friendly) to do in 3D space with your hands than on an iPad with a Pencil. There’s just not a great app for it that I’ve found yet, although it’s possible at a blobby sort of level in AirDraw — Finger Paint, so I’m starting there.
If Apple still made their AirPort wireless networking hubs (many smart people still say to this day that discontinuing them was a strategic error), I might have had cause to visit a store again next week. Since they don’t, I bought a set of TP-Link WiFi mesh routers instead and set them up over the weekend. One of the power adapters was faulty out of the box, but fortunately our old system’s were compatible, so that’s sorted.
Aside: There was a tense moment on Friday night when a ‘pop’ was heard just before the power cut out in one section of the home. It turned out a wall-connected USB charging hub had burnt out, fortunately without damaging anything. It was a Lencent brand 65W GaN thing that I bought off Amazon Prime last October, with a 4.6-star rating. I was complacent to attribute trust based on its Amazon profile rather than my own knowledge — I’d never heard of Lencent and haven’t since — and won’t be making that mistake again. It’s only slightly more reputable Chinese brands from here on out!
FWIW I’ve had mixed experiences with Anker, but they’re probably the best/safest from a brand equity perspective. I’ve also seen a lot of people using Ugreen products. I have a charger and a couple of cables from them, but their website has typos like you’d find in a phishing email.
Our old pre-COVID system was WiFi 5, and we had nearly 30 internet-enabled devices on it, which I think might have contributed to recent connectivity issues. I have bored Kim to tears with explanations and theories all week, so I’ll spare you. In short, I spent $400 I hadn’t budgeted for to upgrade us to a WiFi 6E mesh that claims to have self-learning AI and support for 200 devices. The app is miles better than our old Netgear Orbi’s, letting you configure nearly everything from your phone — it’s bizarro world over at TP-Link because the web-based admin panel has nearly no settings. Anyway, we’re future ready and could move up to 2Gbps internet when our current contract expires.
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🎮 I’m still checking into Zenless Zone Zero daily to claim log-in rewards and farm materials. I’m observing that this routine is actually a barrier to getting more stuck into proper games. Devious.
🎮 Nevertheless, started on a charming and well-written visual novel about the afterlife called Ghostpia: Season 1, on the Nintendo Switch. I saw launch ads for it during our last trip to Japan and bought the global release late last year, but I’m only starting it now. I think it’s pronounced Ghost-o-pia in Japan, and the name implies “ghost town”, like the Latin topos for place, as in utopia. It’s the rare visual novel that doesn’t ever feel like it’s wasting time or insulting your intelligence.
📺 Started watching Sunny, Apple TV+’s new show starring Rashida Jones and a robot that kinda looks like a Pepper 2.0. It’s an A24 production, set in a surreal other-universe Japan that feels like a variant of the world in Severance. Such an odd vibe, which I suppose adds to the “nothing is what it seems” mystery here. She’s an American expat whose Japanese engineer husband and son supposedly died in an accident, leaving her an advanced AI robot to figure things out with.
📺 Absolutely thrilled that Jinny’s Kitchen has returned for a second season on Amazon Prime Video, sending Korean celebrities to run a restaurant in Iceland this time. Like before, each episode is essentially a two-hour movie, and there’s something about this formula that makes even the most mundane moments (restocking a fridge, taking orders, dicing vegetables) so watchable. Other reality shows can only dream of including this much detail on a weekly basis without losing an audience.
🎬 Saw In the Realm of the Senses (1976) on MUBI despite warnings from Nic not to watch it. Is it uncomfortably, unbelievably graphic? Yes. It’s also a very powerful and competently made film based on a bananas true story. 3.5 stars.
🎬 Saw Heroes of the East (1978) next, a classic Shaw Brothers kungfu flick by Lau Kar-Leung starring Gordon Liu, both in top form. It’s actually a cross-cultural martial arts romcom, with action scenes so good I don’t think we know how to do them anymore. One of the best I’ve seen, up there with Dirty Ho (1979). 4.5 stars.
🎬 Saw Friends and Strangers (2021), a very enjoyable indie Australian film. Gorgeous photography, care evident in every shot. The story meanders and discharges detail wherever it feels like it, leaving so much off screen, and the result is “dreamy”? Aside from the Australian identity crises, I was surprised it felt a bit like Singapore, where everyone knows someone you know, and nobody has figured out what life’s about. I much preferred the first half with Emma Diaz in it; the second felt like a portrait of bumbling male incompetence that no one needs to see more of, really. 4 stars.
🎬 Saw Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024) and wasn’t as disappointed as I expected to be! It took a little warming up to, but Eddie Murphy looks like he’s having fun again and that’s enough for me. 3 stars.
🎬 If you’re in the mood for a mellow drama shot entirely on an actual luxury cruise ship on an actual voyage, Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk (2020) has got you. Meryl Streep, Gemma Chan, Candice Bergen! Oh it’s about a writer trying to write a sequel to her best work, and catching up with two old friends she hasn’t seen in decades. 3.5 stars.
🎬 I also really enjoyed Upgraded (2024), an Amazon Prime Video original romcom about the art world starring Camila Mendes, Marisa Tomei, and Giles from Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Anthony Head). It’s derivative AND fun! 3.5 stars.
🎧 Tons of new music this week but I haven’t had time to hear Eminem, Cigarettes After Sex, Tori Amos, or Travis yet. I’ve heard Griff’s debut album, Vertigo (polished pop from Sigrid’s side of the aisle), and Clairo’s Charm (a lush, beautiful vintage sound).
This Fourth of July, I eagerly awaited the launch of Zenless Zone Zero, the new action-gacha-anime game from the Singapore-based, Chinese-owned developer HoYoverse (also known as MiHoYo).
Gamespot’s review noted that their smash hit Genshin Impact has grown too large as an open-world game to be effectively played on mobile, and is now best on consoles and PC. Their last game Honkai Star Rail was more mobile friendly in comparison, since it’s a turn-based combat game (yawn), and ZZZ comes in somewhere in between.
It’s got fast-paced dodge and counter gameplay with a sizeable cast of playable characters — most of them needing to be ‘won’ through awful gacha mechanics that will bankrupt weak-willed fans (not me, I hope) — interspersed with pretty animated cutscenes, comic panels, talking head visual novel-style dialogue, Sokoban puzzles, and a charming town where you can shop, do fetch quests, and engage in all that RPG-lite fun.
If I sound a bit skeptical, it’s because I think this could have been a great paid game instead of a cynical free-to-play profit machine. I’m actually having a great time with it so far, mostly playing on the PS5. Just on the basis of its modern (read: non-fantasy) theme and setting alone, I think I’ve finally found a live-service game I can get into. It’s extremely polished, mindless fun designed to please a certain kind of millennial nerd: the city of New Eridu celebrates film buffs (your character runs a video rental store), ramen lovers, gamers, hackers, and its whole vibe is techno-stylish yet cozy. Right now, you mainly do battle in a few repetitive environments, but if this game is half as successful as HoYoverse’s other titles, they’ll probably add a lot more over the next couple of years.
The Fourth also brought the surprise release of Kendrick Lamar’s music video for Not Like Us, and the wait was worth it. What a victory lap, as if Drake’s grave wasn’t already bottoming out all the way to the earth’s core. It’s packed with visual jokes and callbacks to Drake’s lines/lies, memes, and other moments from this historic battle. Do they still give out MTV video music awards? Surely not, but if they did, this should win some. It should be Song of the Year at the Grammys.
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This week with Vision Pro
Last week, I said that I’d gotten too narrow a light seal for my Apple Vision Pro and was due down at the store to swap it for a better fit. It’s been a minute since I visited Apple Orchard Road, and the space still looked as great as on its first day seven years ago. They’ve set the store up with a dedicated Vision Pro seated demo area, using the new curved couches and white demo tables as documented by Michael Steebler, Apple Retail historian extraordinaire.
Since I don’t intend to move mine around much, I decided against the official Apple travel case (S$299), and found a great deal on the Spigen Klasden Pouch. It was somehow just S$62 on Amazon with free next-day Prime delivery. That’s a lot less than the $119 USD retail price on Spigen’s own site. I used that to bring my unit down for my appointment, and in the middle of my conversation with the specialist, a man interrupted to ask where I got my case! I looked at the Apple employee beside me and said, “Erm, I don’t think I can answer that within the Apple Store, but you should consider the official case; it’s a fine product!” 🤡 I need to stay in their good graces; I’ll be visiting again next week when I accompany my dad for his 30-minute demo.
Over the weekend, I got one more Vision Pro accessory delivered, hopefully the last chunk of change I’ll need to spend on this thing: the ANNAPRO A1 Comfort Head Strap that I’ve seen several people on Twitter promoting. It’s meant to be used with the Solo Knit Band and fits over the “audio straps” on either side of the unit, creating a second load-bearing point on your forehead (as opposed to the Dual Loop Strap which sits at the top of your head). I’ve found that this removes almost all pressure from around your eyes and cheeks, as advertised, transferring it to your forehead instead. This isn’t a magic solution for the Vision Pro’s weight but it may be preferable for many people. After all, it’s a proven design similar to that of the PSVR headset. I’m gonna use it as my default for awhile and see how it goes.
An app recommendation: I discovered that Longplay, which I’ve been using as a living room music controller on an old iPad, has been updated for visionOS. On top of using it as a music player in a window, you can enter an immersive mode that surrounds with a giant wall of your album covers to choose from. The screenshot above is blurry outside the focal point because of the Vision Pro’s foveated rendering, but rest assured when you’re using it, everything you look at is sharp and you never notice blurriness in your peripheral view.
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Media activity
I did a quick playthrough of Love On Leave on the Nintendo Switch, having bought it on sale a few months back. It’s a slightly ecchi visual novel that I only wanted because of its premise: a burned-out salaryman quits his job in the city and decides to take a two-week vacation in the countryside town where he spent some time as a child. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the inn he wanted to stay at is closed for the summer, so he has to live with three sisters who were his childhood friends instead. The eldest’s a momma type, the second is a tsundere martial arts type, and the youngest is a spoilt gamer/streamer college student. I spent most of my time fishing and farming.
We watched Lulu Wang’s miniseries, Expats, on Amazon Prime Video. It’s headlined by Nicole Kidman, based on a novel, and set in Hong Kong on the eve of the 2014 protests. I thought Wang did a fantastic job with The Farewell (2019), leaving the right amount of things said/unsaid for emotional impact, but this TV effort is a little clumsier. Still, overall worth seeing at just six episodes — the penultimate one is a film unto itself at 1hr 40mins, and spends time with the Filipino domestic workers who are only background characters up to that point. The show’s description tells you that it’s about three expat women (one white, one brown, one yellow) connected by a tragedy, and it’s so easy to forget that their helpers are technically expats too. 3 stars.
Rewatched Gravity (2013) in 3D with the Apple Vision Pro after buying it on sale for just $7 USD, and it was even better than I remembered it being a decade ago. And it was remarkable then; a miracle film with so much implied complexity that one can’t imagine how it was made. Yet, the movement is so simple and pure, the whole film is essentially a single continuous scene. Like Mad Max Fury Road, it doesn’t build or boil, it just goes hard from the start and doesn’t let up. 5 stars.
Saw This Much I Know to Be True (2022) on MUBI. It’s a concert film (but in a studio) + documentary about Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, working through their newer material — 2019’s Ghosteen and 2021’s CARNAGE — during the pandemic. A lot of it deals with the death of his son in 2015, and showcases Cave’s working relationship with Warren Ellis, who looks like an insane homeless math professor who wears nice suits and expensive watches. I especially liked one part where he describes them in the studio as producing loads of horrible stuff with occasional transcendent moments, “but they’re just snippets in an ocean of bullshit”. A perfect description of the creative process. 4 stars.
Saw Irma Vep (1996) on MUBI. Weird, funny, enchanting. I don’t think I’d ever seen young Maggie Cheung in a film before this, certainly not speaking English, and it’s something else. She’s magnetic, unbelievably apart from the world. You can feel it when she comes in frame for the first time; suddenly everyone else is a normal person and she’s clearly the movie star she’s supposed to be playing (herself). 4.5 stars.
While logging the above on Letterboxd, I discovered that Olivier Assayas made a TV sequel/reboot of Irma Vep in 2022, also titled Irma Vep. It stars Alicia Vikander and is apparently an unflinching assessment of his own failed marriage to Cheung after the original movie, and revisits its themes in the light of our current day disdain for cinema. But I could be wrong. It’s on my list to watch soon.
On Sunday we managed to see a hat trick of recent LGBTQ-themed movies!
It started with Challengers (2024): The ending is on some anime finishing move shit, you see it a mile away and they drew it out a little too long. Apart from that, this is the tennis romance drama the world has been needing. It’s also shot so so beautifully. 4.5 stars.
Then Love Lies Bleeding (2024): Damn, this movie does what it wants. Unfortunately half the time it wants to be a frustrating oversexual drama set in small town hell (you could set a Reacher novel here), but the other half is a beautiful drugged out fantasy I don’t really get but must respect. 3.5 stars.
The last one was All Of Us Strangers (2023), a film that Hideo Kojima raved about on Twitter, and after seeing it, I know why: it touches on two of his favorite themes. I won’t say the second one because it’s a spoiler, but the first is men’s butts. Those aside, the core of the film is a really interesting, beautiful narrative device for exploring loss and lost time, one I don’t think I’ve encountered before, handled softly and naturally with great performances (from one guy that looks like Harry Potter and another who looks like The Incredible Hulk, pre-transformation), and it really makes it worthwhile. 4 stars.
sangsara.net 