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I went to see The Phoenician Scheme yesterday, and alas, it's a fizzler. The opening is so strong, that I was genuinely excited! I felt that I was in capable hands. Very Wes Anderson, but the music gave the opening a sense of urgency and Benicio del Toro's physicality brought a degree of menace to it that I genuinely don't expect from his work. And then... it turned out to be a stiff, surface-y lukewarm rehash of the sort of thing he's already done in The Royal Tennenbaums and The Life Aquatic & etc. etc. Shitty patriarch reconnecting with child, sets that make everything feel like a dollhouse, a bunch of celeb cameos, a bunch of monotone line delivery. The comedy doesn't land. Mia Threapleton's acting style is too casual and monotone, to the point that sometimes it feels like a humorous juxtaposition to everyone else's OTT acting and sometimes she just seems like a bad high school drama student. And this is on the higher end of orientialism for his films. This felt like maybe he's entering a Tim Burton-esque bad parody of himself era.

It's a shame, because I actually really enjoyed his last two films: to me they felt like he was using his style to do slightly different things and evolve, and while they were certainly more niche than his most popular, they had just as much heart. Asteroid City felt like it connected so well with lockdown grief, and The French Dispatch is such a charming blend of styles in what is blatantly a love letter to The Paris Review. But this felt like it was missing its heart, just going through the motions. And why would you waste a guy like Benicio del Toro on bad comedy.

It's not all bad - Richard Ayoade's bit as the leader of a humorous stylish freedom fighter/thief gang is delightful, and Riz Ahmed's bits reminded me that he's very good looking. And the beginning really is so good, stylish and urgent with a dark humour underlying. The afterlife segments scattered throughout the film are also a highlight for me, and they felt like that was where the real story was. Honestly, I felt like he could have done more with those and less with the wacky mid century basketball nonsense.

It kind of makes me want to see Anderson do a film about a character with genuine menace. If this had turned expectations on their head, and instead of being another unnecessary shitty patriarch becomes less shitty through reconnecting with adult children story had been about a villain who stayed a villain and didn't reform it all, it would have been a much better story. But this is more of a deflated balloon of a film.

I'm still going to watch the next one he makes though 😂

I also finally went to see Sinners last night. I'm sure everything that could be said about that film already has, and I'm not particularly qualified to say it, because I discovered while watching it that my hearing loss is worse than I thought because I couldn't understand a lot of the dialogue. I'd like to watch it again once it's on streaming and I can use subtitles. It's obviously in dialogue with other vampire films, along with everything else it's doing. Great sound design; I felt especially wrapped in the music, but the way it used sound as an auditory flashback overlaid over the present of the story was also a highlight. Charismatic actors. I was especially compelled by Wunmi Mosaku as Annie.

There were parts that didn't work as well for me - Michael B Jordan passing something to Michael B Jordan did not, in fact, look as convincing as I'd hoped. I can't tell how much it's fair for me to judge characters for doing dumb things in a horror movie, when people doing stupid things when scared is often the fun of the genre for me.

But really, I need to watch it again with subtitles to truly judge the film because I couldn't understand half the dialogue.

I did burst out laughing at HelloChinese teaching me how to say 'New York is extremely clean' in Mandarin.

纽约非常干净 ...I was like, infamously not, though. Unless it has the cleanest pizza rats around!

I've been trying to watch less YouTube the past week (hahaha, good luck self), and I'm cleaning out my Netflix queue (which works about as well as you'd expect; I try a thing on there, don't like, remove it, and then add two other things to the queue).

So I finally gave the Yu Yu Hakusho live action a try. The first two episodes are a lot better than I expected. The lead actor is well cast, and the visuals are nice! The fight scenes are mostly good! I still don't understand why Kuwabara couldn't have red hair, but w/e w/e. The shot composition is often really lovely, and I do like that they jettisoned the sexually harassing Keiko stuff from the beginning of the original. The Kuwabara scenes don't have him being funny often enough, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, even if it wasn't what I was expecting. And while I like Kuwabara/Yuusuke, I sort of felt like Yuusuke and Kuwabara should kiss... Listen I've never felt that with any other version of the story, but they have a shippy vibe.

The real problems are mostly with the next three episodes, IMO, which make some choices, that are maybe not the correct ones. Mostly the fight scenes are cool, but there's some effects wonkiness. I get not wanting to hire a child actor, but Koenma is just funnier if it's a little guy. And the pacing is the big issue - if it were ten episodes instead of five, there'd be enough time to build up enough emotional resonance for the stuff with Genkai, for example, to really work, but it would still be short enough to skip all the boring arcs. I'm in favour of shorter series generally, but this felt too short.

Karasu did look a lot cooler than I expected, honestly! And I've seen Shison Jun be better elsewhere, but he was fine as Kurama, and I thought a lot of the other cast suited their roles fairly well. So it's not a terrible adaptation, but it just needed a bit more.

Ah, but then the blood moon came upon me this weekend, and I've only wanted to watch nonsense since. It's that time of the month, I'm tired and want to heckle shows. Honestly the ideal shows for when you're feeling under the weather and want to watch something dumb you can make fun of: bad romance dramas that operate on bad romance drama logic instead of normal human logic, badly written palace dramas where everyone's plans make no sense and everyone's an idiot, pulpy action/adventure like dmbj that's going to be like 'that's not a ghost it's a swarm of jellyfish' when it's trying to give sciencey explanations for the supernatural.

I picked Blossom back up, not sure if I was going to get into it, but it has a pleasantly soap operatic quality to it that means I've now watched to the end of episode 10. The writing and acting are not brilliant, but it's lavishly filmed, like the best night time soap operas. Meng Ziyi and Li Yunrui aren't good actors, and I don't think I noticed before 😂 but right now I don't mind too much.

I also watched a bunch of First Frost, something like ten episodes, which has standard romcom issues (I see that they are slowly revealing her tragic past through flashbacks to show what emotional wounds she has to heal before they can get together and/or commit, but it's failing to show why they should actually be together in the present beyond throwing a bunch of tropes at the characters. Do they actually like each other? What do they have in common beyond a living space? What do they want out of life? Who knows, honestly), so I will probably not watch it once I've stopped feeling blah.

And I knew it was vaguely related to Hidden Love in the sense of some of the same characters but an entirely new cast, so I gave that a try. After struggling through a few episodes of a high school girl getting a crush on her older brother's friend and dealing with the embarrassment of getting her period in public & etc. I thought, ah, unlike First Frost this is aimed at 13 year olds, and therefore I am nearly three decades too old for this nonsense, and dropped it.

Luckily, The Next Prince -- a Thai BL about a guy discovering that he's secretly a prince and getting thrown into a tropey fight for the throne with OTT gold outfits and dramatic attempts on his life and sexy tension with his bodyguard who is also an art professor -- dropped another episode, so I got to enjoy that. It's definitely not deep, but I do enjoy how it plays with the different ways the main character and his love interest have power over each other.