november?!
Dec. 1st, 2022 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dayflies
movies and tv 📽️
swallow ★★★.5
i have a mubi subscription bc i decided to try out film nerd-dom for a minute, and swallow was on their halloween list. it's a movie about a newly pregnant housewife who begins to swallow objects (marbles, thumbtacks, needles, batteries etc.) to cope with her increasingly controlling husband. it was interesting! it was pretty heavyhanded with its symbolism, which isn't always a problem, but i feel like this one was perhaps a bit too on the nose with its metaphors. on the other hand i feel like i would be very heavyhanded with my metaphors as well if i made a movie, so like. whatever. my main issue with it was the whole scene with the father which felt very strange and kind of like it was working against the message the movie was trying to tell me otherwise? i won't spoil in case you wanna watch but yeah. watch this if you wanna impress a gender studies major i guess
x ★★★★.5
SLAY!!!! every time i mention this to an irl i am painfully reminded of how chronically online i am because NO ONE KNOWS THIS MOVIE i swear it only exists to people who spent the entirety of this autumn seeing mia goth fancams on their twitter tl or whatever. anyway, i've been meaning to watch x and pearl for the longest time, and i finally did and it went so hard. x follows a group of young porn stars + their camera crew who travel to rural texas to shoot a porno - shenanigans ensue. and with shenanigans i mean creepy old people who are also murderers. i think the choice to have mia goth play both maxine and the old lady (pearl) was sooo cool, not just bc it's kind of a flex from mia's side, but also it rly emphasizes the relationship between the two characters - how pearl envies maxine for her youth and her beauty and her sexuality - and the whole theme of sexuality and age. very awesome!!!!
hamilton ↻ (unrated (read more to find out?!))
okay so like. i actually wrote a way too long review of hamilton on my letterboxd account which i will just paste here:
rewatched this with some of my hamilhead friends and okay, do i think this story aged well? no!!! do not get me wrong, the actors are insanely talented and the music and scenography is super cool, and hamilton DID have a huge impact in terms of poc casting in broadway, and i WOULD take a bullet in the chest for lomls phillipa soo and daveed diggs, but it also tells a version of the creation of america, which, ironically, is incredibly romanticized. it constantly lets us know, perhaps unsubtly, that this is a story of legacy; who gets to tell your story when you are gone, which bits do they leave in and which do they discard, how does their perception of you color the story, and so on and so forth. but for a story which asks all of these big, important questions about history and immortalization and legacy, it completely ignores america’s legacy of westward expansion which came at the cost of countless indigenous lives. what about the fact that racism towards black people is infused into pretty much every part of the american system - a legacy that is still felt to this very day? who, exactly, tells these stories?
get out ↻ ★★★★.5
SLAY PT 2!!! i've been meaning to rewatch this for the longest time and i finally did, god bless. i def noticed more things the second time around, like for some reason the significance behind the gf's death on the side of the road completely went over my head the first time i watched it BUT NOT THIS TIME!!!
also daniel kaluuya is so good at microexpressions, it's insane. like everytime his gf's family are being very weird and are overcompensating to show how Not Racist they are he does this subtle smile and i can just see everything that goes through his head, he's just so good you guys. i need to watch nope and like every other movie he has been in.
pearl ★★★★★
SLAY PT 3!!! this movie is just everything to me. she's a colorful bloody beaut!!! mia goth is so cool and the projectionist is hot and pearl was, to me, one of those movies you want to watch again immediately after finishing it. pearl is the origin story of the old lady in x and the thematic tie ins to x were so good and interesting, i was considering watching pearl before x (so chronologically) but i'm really glad i didn't lol. they were def made to be consumed in the order they were released in.
american vandal ↻ ★★★★★
SLAY PT 4!!!!! i feel like you could say so many smart things about american vandal, like yeah it IS a show about dicks and shitting your pants but also it's such a good and intelligent show with so so much heart. it only ran for two seasons before netflix pulled the plug on it and i mourn it every single day, but basically it's a mockumentary made by high schoolers peter maldonado and sam ecklund, where they try to solve the Crime of the Season. it's genuinely the best thing to ever happen to me. i forced my roommates to watch it (and i really had to force them at first lol) but we just finished season 2 and they all really love the show now, but for different reasons which is p interesting and cool to me. i prefer s1 bc [explanation will follow in next paragraph], while one of my roommates prefers s2 bc he thinks the mystery is better
personally, before i rewatched av, i had always been of the very firm belief that s1 was better than s2, simply bc i remember it better lol, and now that i've rewatched both seasons back to back i have come to the necessary realization that I WAS WRONG kind of. i still personally prefer s1 over s2 BUT it's like. the show is perfect the way it is and things were never going to be any different. in s1 you have this mystery of trying to figure out who vandalized the teachers' cars, but surrounding this you also have this boy who just wants to create a groundbreaking documentary so badly, and is so so passionate about integrative journalism and figuring out The Truth that the documentary and its repercussions unintentionally bleeds into his own life and the lives of the people around him, and i loved how the show explored these different layers. s1 is several stories within stories, and it subsequently functions as both a commentary on the ethics of true crime through peter's character, and a look into these very genuine and real characters and the relationships they have with each other which overlap and continuously impact each other
s2 is a lot more mystery/investigation oriented while peter and sam mostly fade into the background due to the professionalism they have gained from working on s1 and it's just!!!! this is the way things should progress, this is what makes the most sense for the show and its characters - s2 is different from s1 because the characters are dynamic. and even though the personal lives of peter and sam are further removed from the plot of s2, the very fact that they are able to fade into the bg adds another layer to their characters because now we get to see how much they - especially peter - have grown, we get to see how much they have matured as filmmakers; they were never meant to be static. and then, of course, there's also the question of what was left out this time, what happens between the margins, because we know that unlike in s1, the boys are less personally involved. it's all just such a cool form of storytelling to me.
also s2 has demarcus which is another plus (and this is another topic altogether, but i think the way the show subtly deals with demarcus' experience with being a black person raised in a black neighborhood while attending a wealthy, mostly white school really really well. like his codeswitching and feelings of alienation, the part where he recounts the first and only time he accidentally said the n-word around his white peers... i just want to give this boy a very warm hug
bottom line: av is just the fuckingest show to ever and i'd love to write an analytical essay about it at some point, 1) because i think there's plenty of material to work with 2) because i love it and 3) because it would be hilarious
chucky ★★★★
i kind of went into this not expecting much, but it's sooo entertaining and it slays so hard. not only is there an unhinged killer doll on the loose, the show also doubles as a coming of age story for the main character, a young queer boy who is weirdly into dolls and he has a huge crush on a local kid who has a TRUECRIME PODCAST. i love them dearly. right now i'm at season 2 and i feel like the creators notched up the camp-level by like 500 and although i love when things are ridiculous and camp i do think i prefer s1 a bit more bc s2 felt a little too silly. s1 was already pretty funny, i don't think it necessarily needed to be even more silly than it already was. basically s2 is funnier than s1, while s1 is grittier while still being funny.
a few quotes that i enjoyed tremendously:
jake (whisper-yelling at devon while at a catholic private school): the catholics aren't exactly down with the gays!
catholic nun: he is our lord and savior (THE HE IN QUESTION IS CHUCKY)
(that's all i rmbr atm because it was so funny to me it just burned itself into my retinas but i will get back to you)
books 📚
the island of missing trees ★★★★
this is hard to summarize so i won't but i read this for my lit course on the anthropocene and loved it!! it has so much to say about the experiences of immigrants and intergenerational trauma and trees and roots/being uprooted (in every sense of the word) and climate change and i just loved it, even more so after analyzing it for class. the prose is breath-taking and gorjus and poetic and i would rec this to everyone
into the drowning deep ★★★.5
this follows a group of marine biologists and the like, who travel to the mariana trench to investigate the existence of mermaids, who may or may not have killed and eaten the crew of another ship a year prior lol. once again inserting a longer review i left on my goodreads account:
this poked at a very specific part of my brain (half-joking dreams of becoming a deep sea-oriented marinebiologist), because the fact that so much of the ocean is still unexplored i.e. ANYTHING could be down there, is super cool and fascinating to me. like yeah, this is fiction but there COULD be eldritch horrors beyond our mortal comprehension in the ocean yk, who am i to say humans are the apex predators of the world? anyway this was very slay, i especially loved the insane siren lore - the ecosystem in their scalps, their biology, the idea that they have a shared culture, their intelligence, their languages, the whale sized matriarch etc etc, it was all very awesome to me, and i am not saying i would be on that boat if given the opportunity but i would consider it very heavily.
this book was made all the more interesting because i have a lit course right now about the anthroposcene and i didn’t pick this up with that in mind, but it did make me consider the relationship between the human characters and the siren species (and reader and sirens) a lot more than i otherwise would have.
i do have a few complaints: i think it was longer than it needed to be, and the language, albeit beautiful, felt, to me, a little too flowery and had the unfortunate effect of lessening the suspense. i also didn’t care much about most of the characters, which might be attributed to the fact that the cast was too large for me to properly connect to all of them, but i do appreciate its diversity and mira grant’s ability to give us insight into the ways the characters are marginalized without having their entire arc revolve around their identities.
overall, this was a very solid read and i think there should be way more books in the world about predatory sirens which goes into great, unnecessary (or necessary, i’d argue) detail about their biological composition and evolutionary origins <3
ace of spades ★★★.5
ate this up in like two days lol. this is the first ya novel i've read in a minute, and it was sooo nice to just be able to fly through a book?? it's a dark academia novel which follows the only two black kids at this otherwise white private school, who become victims of targetted, very creepy, anonymous harassment. it's very good and p creepy and horrifying, and probably also one of the dark academia novels which are the most faithful to the genre in its critique of academic institutions, for virtue of it dealing with the various forms of racism embedded in academia.
the main characters are also rly great; there's devon, a really sweet gay kid, and then there's chiamaka who is queer and also happens to be THEE high school Mean Girl [trademark]. while i connected the most with devon, chiamaka's social standing at school was one of my favorite aspects of the novel because the role of the high school mean girl has usually been one reserved for white girls, so this was just very cool overall
she who became the sun ★★★★
wanna start out with saying that i cracked this open on the bus and the chapter i had reached started out smack dab in the middle of a hardcore sapphic fisting scene and there was a person sitting next to me. with that out of the way, she who became the sun is a historical fantasy novel which takes place in 1300s china, and the plot is hard to summarize but we follow zhu who has assumed her brother's identity after his death, and ouyang, an eunuch general who is the last surviving member of his family. this novel is the most devastating, tragic and beautiful tale of queer desire, duty and gender identity and you should definitely read it!!
music 🎵
music has been weird this month because i lost one of my headphones and my other pair broke, so i haven't really been listening much to anything at all lol. i CAN tell you that what i have been listening to has been an overwhelming amount of carly rae jepsen <3 her new album is so insanely good you don't understand. my favorite tracks right now are keep away, so nice, bad thing twice, surrender my heart and talking to yourself but i don't think there's a single song on there that i don't like. except maybe shooting star and beach house (but beach house is campy enough for me to accept it anyways)
other songs i've been listening a lot too lately are poppy by stayc, 28 reasons by seulgi, vivid by rich brian ft. $not, nonsense by sabrina carpenter, antifragile by le sserafim, kim petras' slut pop ep and moscow mule and después de la playa by bad bunny. i have yet to listen to the new weyes blood album because i feel like it's an album which doesn't work without a pair of working headphones lol, so i've been putting it off.
okay anyway, this was gucci, i am hoping for a good december for all of us, ily all and i'll talk to u later. take care! <33
