July 4th, 2025
scaramouche: Hudson Leick as Callisto (callisto has an offer)
posted by [personal profile] scaramouche at 11:09am on 04/07/2025 under , ,
I didn't finish watching The Devil's Plan season 2, but I did see other shows similar to TDP and The Genius mentioned in various discussion spaces - reddit, youtube and Taran's patreon. Bloody Game in particular got recced a lot, with people saying to skip seasons 1 and 2, and head on straight to 3, which they say has a bigger budget and is presumably more exciting.

A reddit comment linked to an online stream, so I watched a few minutes of Bloody Game season's 3 before deciding I should watch season 1 instead, so I'd know the format of the show going in, the way that the season 3 players obviously did. Season 1 appeared to be similar to The Devil's Plan in that the players are made to live together over a short period of time and play games each day, but there are some differences in that format as well. (Note: TG aired over 2013-2015, BG over 2021-2023, and TDP over 2023-2025.)

Unfortunately I got a few episodes into BG's season 1 when I realized that the ratio of game : social was way more weighted to the social aspect, i.e. the mechanism where players vote who gets kicked out of the main house Survivor-style means that a great deal of time is spent following negotiations and alliance plotting, which I just don't care about as much. TDP and The Genius are more my thing because eliminations are based on gameplay, so negotiations do play a part but happen simultaneously with the games and can get derailed by gameplay.

Spoilers for Bloody Game season 1. )

I hoped that Taran would cover Bloody Game because then I'd get to follow an abridged version of that show with his entertaining commentary on top, but he's decided to start commentating on the OG The Genius instead. Which is great because I get to experience that show again, but leaves my Bloody Game consumption hanging.
Music:: Outer Wilds OST - Space
Mood:: 'rejuvenated' rejuvenated
July 3rd, 2025
scaramouche: P. Ramlee as Kasim Selamat from Ibu Mertuaku, holding a saxophone (kasim selamat is osman jailani)
posted by [personal profile] scaramouche at 06:00pm on 03/07/2025 under , , ,
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.
Mood:: 'tired' tired
June 30th, 2025
alierak: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] alierak in [site community profile] dw_maintenance at 03:18pm on 30/06/2025
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.
June 27th, 2025
rivkat: Rivka as Wonder Woman (Default)
posted by [personal profile] rivkat at 02:02pm on 27/06/2025

no good, very bad thing: for the first time ever, I carefully concealed my Star of David scrunchie to do an interview in case it became a distraction. I try hard not to self-censor, but ...


June 26th, 2025
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.)
Mood:: 'excited' excited
June 23rd, 2025
rivkat: Rivka as Wonder Woman (Default)
posted by [personal profile] rivkat at 01:08pm on 23/06/2025
Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945: China fought imperial/Axis Japan, mostly alone (though far from unified), for a long time. A useful reminder that the US saw things through its own lens and that its positive and negative beliefs about Chiang Kai-Shek, in particular, were based on American perspectives distant from actual events.

Gregg Mitman, Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia: Interesting story of imperialist ambition and forced labor in a place marked by previous American intervention; a little too focused on reminding the reader that the author knows that the views he’s explaining/quoting are super racist, but still informative.

Alexandra Edwards, Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom: fun read )

Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins: Wide-ranging argument that claims about prehistory are always distorted and distorting mirrors of the present, shaped by current obsessions. (Obligatory Beforeigners prompt: that show does a great job of sending up our expectations about people from the past.) This includes considering some groups more “primitive” than others, and seeing migrants as a “flood” of undifferentiated humanity. One really interesting example: Depictions of Neandertals used to show them as both brown and expressionless; then they got expressions at the same time they got whiteness, and their disappearance became warnings about white genocide from another set of African invaders.

J.C. Sharman, Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World: Challenges the common narratives of European military superiority in the early modern world (as opposed to by the 19th century, where there really was an advantage)—guns weren’t very good and the Europeans didn’t bring very many to their fights outside of Europe. Likewise, the supposed advantages of military drill were largely not present in the Europeans who did go outside Europe, often as privately funded ventures. Europeans dominated the seas, but Asian and African empires were powerful on land and basically didn’t care very much; Europeans often retreated or relied on allies who exploited them right back. An interesting read. More generally, argues that it’s often hard-to-impossible for leaders to figure out “what worked” in the context of state action; many states that lose wars and are otherwise dysfunctional nevertheless survive a really long time (see, e.g., the current US), while “good” choices are no guarantee of success. In Africa, many people believed in “bulletproofing” spells through the 20th century; when such spells failed, it was because (they said) of failures by the user, like inchastity, or the stronger magic of opponents. And our own beliefs about the sources of success are just as motivated.

Emily Tamkin, Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities: There are a lot of ways to be an American Jew. That’s really the book.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (tr. Annette Lavers & Richard Howard): A bunch of close readings of various French cultural objects, from wrestling to a controversy over whether a young girl really wrote a book of poetry. Now the method is commonplace, but Barthes was a major reason why.

Robert Gerwarth, November 1918: The German Revolution: Mostly we think about how the Weimar Republic ended, but this book is about how it began and why leftists/democratic Germans thought there was some hope. Also a nice reminder that thinking about Germans as “rule-followers” is not all that helpful in explaining large historical events, since they did overthrow their governments and also engaged in plenty of extralegal violence.

Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York: Mostly about La Guardia, whose progressive commitments made him a Republican in the Tammany Hall era, and who allied with FDR to promote progressivism around the country. He led a NYC that generated a huge percentage of the country’s wealth but also had a solid middle class, and during the Great Depression used government funds to do big things (and small ones) in a way we haven’t really seen since.

Charan Ranganath, Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters: Accessible overview of what we know about memory, including the power of place, chunking information, and music and other mnemonics. Also, testing yourself is better than just rereading information—learning through mistakes is a more durable way of learning.

Cynthia Enloe, Twelve Feminist Lessons of War: War does things specifically to women, including the added unpaid labor to keep the home fires burning, while “even patriotic men won’t fight for nothing.” Women farmers who lack formal title to land are especially vulnerable. Women are often told that their concerns need to wait to defeat the bad guys—for example, Algerian women insurgents “internalized three mutually reinforcing gendered beliefs handed down by the male leaders: first, the solidarity that was necessary to defeat the French required unbroken discipline; second, protesting any intra-movement gender unfairness only bolstered the colonial oppressors and thus was a betrayal of the liberationist cause; third, women who willingly fulfilled their feminized assigned wartime gendered roles were laying the foundation for a post-colonial nation that would be authentically Algerian.” And, surprise, things didn’t get better in the post-colonial nation. Quoting Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas: “Defending women’s rights ‘now’ – this now being any historical moment – is always a betrayal of the people, of the revolution, of Islam, of national identity, of cultural roots . . .”

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: American history retold from a Native perspective, where interactions with/fears of Indians led to many of the most consequential decisions, and Native lands were used to solve (and create) conflicts among white settlers.

Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl : How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves: Read more... )

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message: Short but not very worthwhile book about Coates navel-gazing and then traveling to Israel and seeing that Palestinians are subject to apartheid.

Thomas Hager, Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison’s American Utopia: While he was being a Nazi, Ford was also trying to take over Muscle Shoals for a dam that would make electricity for another huge factory/town. This is the story of how he failed because a Senator didn’t want to privatize this public resource.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World: What is the role of records in imperialism? Under what circumstances do imperialists rely on records that purport to be about the colonized people, versus not needing to do so? Often their choices were based on inter-imperialist conflicts—sometimes the East India Company benefited from saying it was relying on Indian laws, and sometimes London wanted different things.

Thomas C. Schelling The Strategy of Conflict: Sometimes when you read a classic, it doesn’t offer much because its insights have been the building blocks for what came after. So too here—if you know any game theory, then very little here will be new (and there’s a lot of math) but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t vital. Also notable: we’ve come around again to deterring (or not) the Russians.

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