Livre d'Or

A weird but interesting Israeli film, I love you, Rosa (1972, written and directed Moshe Mizrachi).

( detailed review )

In contrast, We are Lady Parts (2021, Nida Manzoor) is a brand-new TV series with a totally awesome premise: some young British Muslim women form a punk band. Hilarity ensues.

( detailed review )

So jack and I hatched a plan to expand our cultural horizons by watching films from as many different countries as possible. We're working our way down the list of countries from the biggest by population. I don't expect we'll get very far; we don't watch more than half a dozen films in a typical year. But even if we watch films from 20 new countries we wouldn't have seen otherwise, that's still a win.

Of course, we ran into an edge case at the very first step because it turns out that a lot of famous "Chinese" films are in fact made in Taiwan or Hong Kong. And I'm reasonably convinced that Taiwan ought to be defined as a separate country, and HK probably too. We ended up with House of flying daggers, directed by Yimou Zhang, which is at least partly Chinese from China.

I enjoyed House of flying daggers. I loved the stylized and very beautiful martial arts scenes, and the amazing costumes, and the chemistry between Jin and Mei. And I loved the first two thirds of the plot, where everybody is multiply double-crossing everybody else. I particularly liked that Mei gets to be a hyper-competent martial arts fighter, not just a damsel. What I didn't love was the ending where it turns into a stupid love triangle, and Mei ends up sacrificing herself for no particularly meaningful cause, since the jealous man who is in love with her kills her true love anyway and it doesn't particularly help the rebellion.

We plan to watch an Indian film this evening. Does anyone have any favourites to recommend? I have a somewhat low tolerance for explicit onscreen violence, and for a date we'd prefer films that aren't about horribly depressing bits of history. Otherwise, even if it's a really obvious classic there's a pretty high chance I haven't seen it, though jack might have (we didn't pick Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for China, since he's already seen that.) Equally we've left it a bit late to plan, so ideally something we can stream instantly this evening, rather than something we'd need to order from the internet.

(I wouldn't say no to recommendations from the next several large countries. I think we can probably come up with an US American film on our own, but I have no idea what's good from Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan or Nigeria.)

Reading: I just finished The masked city by Genevieve Cogman. (c) Genevieve Cogman 2015; Pub Tor 2015; ISBN 978-1-4472-5625-0.

TMC is a romp, with a wonderful swashbuckling librarian-spy-magician as the protagonist. It's a bit middle-book in some ways, there's a lot of drama and jeopardy packaged up as a nice episode. The main antagonist is barely mentioned, and the book ends with the immediate crisis resolved but the characters in trouble. I love the portrayal of exactly how dealing with the Fae is so dangerous. Nobody much is straight, and there are a lot of platonic relationships as well as flirting and sexual yearning. Looking forward to where this series goes from here.

Watching: Wreck-it Ralph 2: Ralph breaks the internet. I enjoyed the original, which I watched on a plane some time. And the sequel is everything I hoped for. Lots and lots of jokes, most of them just in the background scenery. Lovely exploration of the tension between Ralph wanting to be with his friend and keep her safe, and Vanellope wanting to have adventures. And the ensemble of Disney princesses is just brilliant (they reunited all the original actors except Snow White's). A very good film for a mixed age audience, which is how I saw it, with my OSOs and their children. There are two absolutely brilliant bonus scenes after the credits, so if you see it in the cinema, do stick around.

Playing: Tabletop, a bit of Codenames which I continue to love, and which Judith is rediscovering with a bit more world-knowledge than a couple of years back when it first came out.

And video games, a lot of Alphabear 2, the very worthy sequel to the best mobile word game ever. They've improved on the original by introducing rotating types of bears so that you don't keep playing the same top three all the time. I also like that levelling up the bears is more intentional and less random. I'm a bit annoyed by the story mode not letting you replay levels, but it's a pretty good story mode. The difficulty ramps up very nicely; I'm ludicrously good at word games and I was finding it challenging by level 4 or so. Its monetization model is a bit odd; it does have microtransactions, but not in a pay to win way and it genuinely doesn't degrade game play if you ignore them. I made a one-off payment to remove ads, because I've easily had £4 worth of fun out of it. But the ads are, admittedly, more intrusive than the ones in the free version of the original game.

Also Stellaris on PC; I've started a co-op multiplayer game with jack, and we rarely have an evening free to get stuck in, but we're having fun. I was impressed with how multiplayer mode via Steam just works.

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to watch a film with jack for our date night, and browsing through what happened to be available on a convenient streaming service, we picked Attack the block. I had heard good things about the film when it came out a few years back, and I liked the concept of an alien invasion through the eyes of teenagers from a dodgy south London housing estate. I did in fact like the film a lot, but I was not prepared for close-ups of ravening monsters devouring people.

( detailed review )

And then yesterday I went to the film festival with jack, and we picked Rafiki. It's billed as a touching love story, and it sort of is, but it's also about two teenage girls trying to navigate a massively homophobic environment, and there's a very high ratio of awful, including violent, homophobia to sweet touching love scenes.

( spoilery review )

Someone on Twitter linked to this article: How I broke, and botched, the Brandon Teena story by Donna Minkowitz. It's about the real life rape and murder of a trans man depicted in the film Boys don't cry.

( transphobia and violence and some identity noodling )

More on this hopefully soon, I have loads and loads of thoughts bouncing off that article and other stuff I've seen or watched recently.

Reasons for watching it: my general social media circles described this a film about a mute woman who falls in love with a monster, and there was that interesting quote by del Toro about relating to monsters: Monsters are evangelical creatures for me. When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was... an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted. So I expected it to be pretty and thought-provoking and possibly sexy, and was keen to see it.

Circumstances of watching it: I just managed to squeeze in a date with jack between Valentines' Day when I was babysitting so another couple in our polycule could have a date, and my partners' kid's birthday celebration. So we went out for somewhat rushed, though delicious sushi after work, and then to the cinema.

Verdict: The shape of water is an amazing spectacle.

( detailed review, somewhat spoilery )

I'm extremely glad I saw this on the big screen. I wouldn't recommend it to all, but it was a really memorable experience.

Reasons for watching it: As soon as I started seeing this talked about on the internet, I knew I had to see it. What a brilliant idea to make a film about the African-American women involved in the technical aspects of the US developing manned space flight!

Circumstances of watching it: I wasn't at all sure I was going to find time to go to the cinema while this was on, and indeed the first date I set aside to see it turned out to be before it was showing locally. And then ghoti suggested taking Judith, who is really into space exploration and all things astronomy. I had thought the film would probably be too talky and generally not interesting to a child, but lots of Ghoti's friends said similar aged children had enjoyed it. And she also managed to squeeze some time when we could go to a matinée together the last weekend it was in cinemas, yay.

Verdict: Hidden figures tells a great story really well.

( detailed review )

Apart from Arrival, I managed to find a bit more time over Christmas than usual to watch shows.

( brief reviews, including very broad general spoilers for _Rogue One_ )

Also, Ghoti suggested that if she'd dragged me into watching Christmas movies, she should reciprocate by watching a chanukah movie with me. Which is a really sweet thought, but I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a chanukah movie! Does anyone have any suggestions? I mean, that whole New York Jewish custom of eating Chinese food and watching a movie on Christmas Day, is there any particular film that's traditional? Or failing that, perhaps a Jewish themed film (I thought of Yentl or maybe the film of Potok's The Chosen, which I haven't seen), or one that's about identity and resistance to assimilation and rebelling against an oppressive régime. Preferably not Holocaust-related, that really doesn't seem a suitable topic for a date movie. It did occur to me that Rogue One could be considered a pretty suitable thing to watch during chanukah, since it's about a miraculous victory for a no-hope strike against an oppressive empire...

Reasons for watching it: It had sounded really intriguing from when it first started being talked about, and Ghoti in particular really wanted to see it.

Circumstances of watching it: Ghoti actually managed to find a time when everybody was free, so the whole quad and the younger kids and fivemack all went to the Light cinema together Sunday afternoon. It was a bit annoying because I had to rush away straight after the film ended to travel back to Keele, and couldn't discuss it with everybody, but still such a great treat!

Verdict: Moana is just delightful!

( detailed review )

Reasons for watching it: It sounded cute and jack and Judith wanted to see it.

Circumstances of watching it: ghoti was super organized and managed to book tickets for all of us to see a popular new release on bank holiday Monday when every family in Cambridge wanted to go to the cinema. Which meant I got to sit next to Judith and she could cling onto me during the scary bits. That was somewhat of a novelty, up to now she's never really come to me for comfort. Though being pleasurably scared by a film is not the same as being actually scared, but even so.

I'm super proud of myself because I cycled to the cinema, the one in the leisure park behind the station, from our home in north Cambridge. That's my first attempt at cycling through town; the roads were mostly fairly quiet due to the bank holiday, but not completely without traffic. And the longest distance I've cycled in one go, not quite four miles out and I still had just enough energy to come back. jack was really helpful at coaching me in dealing with tricky junctions and other road awareness stuff, which is what I most struggle with at the moment, and also took charge of the navigation so I didn't have to worry about that.

I'm really slow, but I always knew I was going to be a slow cyclist, and cycling to the cinema was still faster than taking a bus. Also more convenient and companionable because we could all cycle back together; my people have been really accommodating about taking the bus because of me not being confident at cycling, but it's clearly easier for everybody if we can all cycle. The advantage of being slow was that we could actually chat at the same time as travelling in a little convoy. Andreas noted that I'm not very good at cycling, so I told him that's why I need practice, and having done that once I now feel pretty confident that I will fairly quickly get to the point where I can use the bike as a viable means of transport.

I did completely crash when I got in in the evening; I knew I was hungry and tried to eat enough to replenish my used up calories, but I was still pretty shaky and exhausted. I think that's something that will get better with more experience, or else I need to increase my estimate of how much extra I need to eat on days I spend a couple of hours cycling.

Verdict Zootropolis is really sweet, but probably doesn't want to be thought about too hard.

( detailed review, discussing metaphorical racism )

So I don't know, it's all good fun, but I wasn't able to turn off my brain quite enough to fully enjoy it.