Or, more accurately, it felt like speedrunning through several decades in one go. Loath as I am to reference Taylor Swift, of all people, it’s a little fitting that one of the prevailing pop culture moments of the year stands on the concept of eras. Specifically, what sticks out to me is this mental image of eras as a patchwork: each a discrete period not necessarily conceived in direct connection with the others, but threaded together anyway by a common denominator.
In the case of the past year’s various eras, that would be, well, the person living through them. Though at various points, “living” might have been too strong a word, haha.
Each quarter of 2023 felt like a different life.
The version of me that suffered through March is not the same one that hurtled through August. Pick a month, any month; I could say the same about every other month of the year, really.
That’s obvious in this year’s playlist too. It’s more of a bricolage than any of the playlists that came before, swinging in wider and wilder arcs from mood to mood, genre to genre. These annual soundtracks have always been impressionistic, but on subsequent listens, previous iterations always felt held together by a prevailing theme — something that haunted or hounded me throughout the year, for better or worse.
I guess there were too many ghosts this time, real and imagined.
In many ways, 2023 was the year of living through worst-case scenarios.
In hindsight, this sounds a bit dramatic to say about the same year that saw actual worst-case scenarios happen on a global scale, be it in geopolitics, public health, the environment, or any other vector of devastation imaginable, really. But I suppose it’s human to get lost in one’s personal pain for a while, especially when that pain is at its most acute.
This was the year of unexpectedly ugly-crying to a friend over the phone on some random weekday; of dissecting any and every record available to try and identify how exactly something that felt indispensable fell apart; of cycling through guilt, resentment, anger, grief, regret, all against the backdrop of an unshakeable sadness; of powering through sleepless nights and short fuses to deliver near-impossible asks; of feeling further and further removed from whatever semblance of home I ever felt like I could go back to.
It was also the year of learning, through the relentlessness of the day-to-day, that many of the things that terrified me could happen and life would go on regardless.
Funny how that works, right? The universe can punch you straight in the gut, your reserves can be depleted twice over, but nothing about that will move a project deadline or a dear friend’s wedding date.
So you keep going.
Sometimes there’s nothing for it but to look the day dead in the eye, pick out what is absolutely non-negotiable about it, and focus your energies on getting through that — quite like how our bodies, overwhelmed by cold, will dial down peripheral blood flow to ensure the little warmth available keeps flowing to our core organs.
It wasn’t so much surrender or resignation as a dogged gathering and re-gathering of whatever pieces of my life still felt solid and manageable. And an acceptance, I suppose — easier and more unsentimental each time — of how much or how little each attempt gave me to work with.
It helped, of course, that this was the year where I put active, continuous effort into identifying, drawing, and enforcing boundaries. Maybe this is my Aquarius moon speaking, but having clearer boundaries helped me make peace with what I wanted or didn’t want, could or couldn’t control, would or wouldn’t get. In aggregate, I guess that constitutes a kind of peace with who you happen to be at any given time, too.
Here’s what really surprised me about 2023 though: it wasn’t all just soldiering on. The relentlessness of life, it turns out, can be gentle too.
Funny how that works, right? The universe can punch you straight in the gut, your reserves can be depleted twice over, and flowers will still bloom. Life can bring you hot tea, a walk in a park, a surprise birthday visit — comfort, calm, and even happiness, whether or not you feel equipped to encounter them.
What is there at the end of it all?
It turns out “common denominator,” in its most mathematical sense, is a surprisingly apt turn of phrase for the throughline that ultimately threads these eras together, no matter how unrecognizable some versions might have become.
Plants have always been an important part of a good day for me. When I run into plants, that means I’m wandering around outside; and when I’m wandering around outside, that means I’m discovering bits and pieces of the world rather than getting stuck in my own head.
My aunt over here loves taking walks, and I look forward to accompanying her whenever possible. We marvel over flowers, look out for monitor lizards, try to capture snapshots of the most colourful migratory birds passing overhead. There are some constants in our weekend options: the Botanical Gardens, MacRitchie Reservoir, Gardens by the Bay.
Today we were at the Gardens, and we ran into a fruit that we hadn’t seen before, even in two years of frequent visits. I realised then that I’d snapped so many photos of plants but hadn’t really taken much time to learn more about them, beyond the ones I was already somewhat familiar with.
It’s never too late to start taking notes, I guess, so here’s the first set of what I hope will be a long-running series.
This is the plant that set all this in motion:
It’s called Mahkota Dewa or God’s Crown. Apparently it’s indigenous to Indonesia, though it’s also found in many other countries across Asia. It can take around 12 months to start fruiting, which probably explains why we hadn’t seen these fruits before. In keeping with the usual rules of biological colouring (lol), the bright red fruit is toxic — especially the seeds.
Surprisingly, though, the plant also has medicinal uses. The fruit pulp can be dried and turned into a tea that helps control blood sugar, among other effects. The leaves and stems are also used as anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial ingredients.
Later into our walk, another plant caught my eye:
These lovely flowers look like tiny origami specimens. They’re called glorybowers, or bleeding-hearts. They’re part of the genus Clerodendrum, which is quite far-reaching: member species are native across temperate and tropical regions, with most of them found in the tropics of Africa and southern Asia.
The most interesting fact about these plants (to me, anyway lol) is that, apparently, the leaves smell like popcorn and the flowers smell like peanut butter when crushed. So much so that apparently they’re known to a lot of people as “the peanut butter trees.” This might be explained partly by the fact that they’re part of the family Lamiacea, which includes other aromatic plants like lavender, basil, and mint.
Glorybowers grow as unruly shrubs, but apparently they can be “trained” (as, say, bonsai are “trained”) to stay small, pleasantly ornamental plants. This might just be the word-nerd in me looking for meaning where there is none, but the genus name comes from the Greek words kleros, meaning “chance” or “fate,” and dendron, meaning “tree.” A tree of fate, as it were, that can grow from an encroaching mess into something more beautiful, if tended with care.
Maybe it was fate to run into these plants today. And maybe, if I’m being optimistic, seeing them in such vibrant bloom is a sign of better days to come.
This is a little over a week late. In my defence, I’ve been to the mountains and then to the sea, where reliable internet connections were hard to come by.
Not that I tried very hard to get this posted in time. These annual soundtrack posts have always been an excuse to ruminate a bit on the past year, but I’m honestly still processing a lot of what has happened.
If there’s a throughline for this playlist — and alright, who am I kidding, of course there is — then it might well be the thorny process of figuring out how people fit into your life and how you fit in theirs.
Or, no, that’s not quite the honest summary, is it?
This playlist kicks in once that process is over, and you’ve recognised that quite a lot of your life has been reduced to accommodating people who might not even deserve to be there, but you don’t quite know how to undo all the tangled knots yet. A whole other process, as it were; a protracted lesson in pushing back against that reduction, over and over again.
Life is so much bigger, I keep telling myself. Maybe this year it will finally stick.
If there are any enduring loves in my life, one of them would have to be stationery.
It’s simple: I’ve been keeping some kind of paper journal since I was twelve, and this will probably continue until I die. There have been many gaps in those pages over the years, don’t get me wrong; but even then, there was always a journal waiting patiently for me to come back. A whole life without even the option or inclination to reach for pen and paper? Unimaginable.
Do I write down anything “significant,” worth saving? Who knows. In many ways, keeping a notebook hasn’t been writing so much as thinking, using pen and paper to set out the swirl of thoughts in my head into something tangible, and therefore something easier to make sense of.
But I’ve already touched on that before. Today I’m here to think about the material aspects of it all.
Or: It is a truth universally acknowledged that any compulsive journal-keeper with disposable income must eventually develop some degree of pickiness over their tools.
What I write with
Take pens, for example. Over the years, I’ve discovered that I care about ink: colour, resistance to feathering1the tendency to get ragged edges in lines due to ink spreading across paper and bleed2the tendency to soak through to the other side of a page, how quickly it dries.
I also care, as it turns out, about how a pen feels on paper. Is there feedback—a palpable scratching against the paper grain? Is the tip thin enough to make lines feel sharp rather than clumsy? Does it flow, or does it skitter across the page?
My favourite pens have vibrant colours (even if I usually choose black), don’t smudge or run through a page, and write with precision — crisp and smooth on the paper, so it feels like I have more control over how the lines fill the page.
It’s a bit like fonts, I guess: each pen has a particular character to it.
These are the ones I’ve settled on for now. They range from disposable to not-so-much; they cover everything from “handy throwaway pen for everyday use” and “office workhorse” (the first two pens) to “dependable journal companions with archival quality ink that won’t give me a heart attack if I lose them on a trip” (the last two).
I’ve carried the Mont Blanc one with me for close to 5 years now, and I have enough Zebra Sarasa refills to make sure I will write with one for life.
They are all gel pens.
People have asked me why I don’t write with a fountain pen. The simple answer is that fountain pens overcomplicate the process for me.
I like the whole idea of fountain pens. They’re often great examples of practical craftsmanship, and I’ve lost quite a few hours reading about people’s opinions on ink quality, nibs, etc. But this is exactly the problem.
The best pen, at least for me, is one that can disappear into the motions of my everyday life without being fussed over.
Where I write
I will write on anything I can find, of course. When I was a kid, I’d scribble on everything—the backs of marked papers; receipts; the flyleaf of whatever book I had on hand, in a pinch. Today, I’m lucky enough to have a bit more choice in the matter, and to have tested enough options to have formed Opinions.
For example: Moleskins are overrated.
Let’s just get that out of the way. Like most stationery nerds, Moleskines were probably the first name I learned to take note of, when I was just starting to care about paper quality. The thing is that, these days, paper quality is exactly why these notebooks have been stricken off my list.
For me, a good notebook has to have thick, sturdy pages; if we’re being exact here, the minimum is 80gsm. Anything less than that is too thin. (At this point, I feel obliged to mention that Moleskine uses 70gsm paper.) Gel pens will bleed through, or there will be so much ghosting3when you can see the writing from the opposite side of the paper, even if it doesn’t quite soak through that it won’t be worth writing on both sides of the page — in short, a waste.
So: The paper must be resistant to bleed and feathering. (Ink quality is only one part of the equation!) It must be acid-free and pH-neutral, because acidic paper breaks down and turns brittle over time. There has to be some texture to it, too — some “tooth” to the surface, so that the pen has some grip while writing, and it doesn’t feel like you have to fight to keep your lines from gliding clean off the page.
I prefer blank notebooks, with ivory- or cream-coloured pages. Grid ones also have their uses; dot-grid is much more preferable to the usual full-line grids, because the dots are understated enough not to dominate the space. My handwriting is very small, most of the time, so lined notebooks are a waste of space. Whatever the paper type, I’ve found A5 size to be most comfortable. Any smaller and it feels restrictive; any larger and I feel like I’m drowning in the blank space.
Finally, a notebook has to have a stitched spine, so that it can lay flat when opened. I don’t want to have to keep fighting to write comfortably, and I resent any manufacturer that forces me to break a notebook’s spine to get it to stay put.
Most other bells and whistles are nice to have, but not essential. Many journals try to pull ahead of the competition with features like pen loops, index pages, expandable pockets on the inside covers. These can improve the journal-keeping experience, sure, but at the end of the day, it still comes down to the paper.
I’ve tested quite a few notebooks over the years. Some of the ones that have stayed with me:
These are actually refills for the Alunsina Kislap journal, which uses the same system as the popular Traveler’s Notebook journals. Essentially you get a leather cover that can be filled—and refilled!—with your notebook(s) of choice: blank, lined, dot-grid.
The full journal I used to carry was a sturdy, full-grain leather cover that housed three notebooks: two blank ones and a dot-grid. It got a bit too heavy to carry around once I’d filled all three notebooks, so the last time I was organising my things at my parents’ house, I decided to carry a few loose refills back to Singapore and just come back for the full journal next time. That was in March 2020. 🙂
Anyway, I love the Alunsina team, because they’re a small business and they handcraft all their journals with such obvious care and skill. The paper is 85gsm4Take that, Moleskine! Though there is a fair bit of ghosting on this page, since I wrote too heavily on the reverse, acid-free, and made of ecological pulp, sourced from Italy. They hand-cut all the pages and bind the refills themselves. Likewise, they treat and cut all the leather themselves, too. I exchanged some emails with them about their journals years ago, when I first got mine, and they struck me as lovely people wholeheartedly committed to their craft.
Rhodia notebooks have always received praises from most journal communities I’ve checked out, largely because of the paper quality: 90gsm, acid-free, resistant to bleed and feathering. The one I have is a softbound one with dot-grid pages, and it’s a fantastic notebook for language learning notes. Since I’m studying Mandarin Chinese and Korean (and have divided the notebook into different sections for these), the dot-grid is especially helpful for writing characters.
Midori notebooks are also widely regarded as one of the best options when it comes to paper quality, so it’s up next in my notebook queue. I don’t have much to say about this one yet, but I’m really excited to try it.
Why? Partly because of this, my current journal: a Leuchtturm1917 that’s been a bit of a letdown.
To its credit, this journal has withstood a lot — being carried in the rain, knocked around in luggage, scratched by cats, etc.
From what I can tell, Leuchtturm1917 is, like Moleskine, one of the more well-known journal brands, especially for bullet journal enthusiasts. I can see why — there are a lot of small touches here and there that make this a handy notebook to carry around. Expandable pockets, numbered pages, a table of contents/index page up front, ribbon bookmarks, even little stickers to label the spine.
The construction is impeccable. The paper quality is not.
And like I said, in the end, it all comes down to the paper. Despite supposedly using 80gsm paper, the notebook I got suffered from a fair bit of ghosting, to the point that I decided not to write on the reverse of each page. The texture of the paper itself was also a bit off—smooth and somewhat “damp,” in that it seemed to resist ink absorption and felt turgid to write on.
Here’s What Our Parents Never Taught Us by Shinji Moon. The full poem is lovely and can be read here
Strangely enough, because I didn’t like the journal quite as much, I’ve found myself using it more — or at least, being freer about pasting in bits and pieces of tickets, photos, etc to go with what I’m writing. It’s a bit like my aversion to fountain pens, I guess: when I like a journal too much, I fuss over the material to the point that I hold back from using it to the fullest. The Leuchtturm, in this case, can get carried along in the bruising currents of everyday life precisely because I’ve found it so dismissible, lol.
The only good tools are the ones you’re using
The Leuchtturm, I guess, has been a lesson in the limits of pickiness. Paper quality, ink resistance, and other preferences aside, the real bottomline here is drawn by practicality — or, if it’s fine to sound loftier, purpose.
How useful are these tools to you?
Do they allow you to do what you want to do?
These are the only questions that really matter. I can write several hundred words about what I’m looking for in a pen or a notebook, but if the ideal journal can never be carried with me and is absent when I need to write something down, then what’s the point? Even matters of quality ultimately bow to expedience.
Earlier this year, a friend and I challenged ourselves to write more. We were blindsided by 2022 — these first few months have been tough on multiple fronts — but I figured I’d try to revive that modest aim anyway.
We’d previously set different themes for each month. I’ll try to post at least once a month then, though I’ll be shuffling the themes around as I go. For March, though, we’re sticking with the original one: unpublished drafts.
This was a short piece I was asked to write for a job application to a branding and research agency that specialises in ethnographic and culture-focused approaches to market strategy. There are more thinkpieces coming out these days about social commerce / social selling, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to put another one out there.
The prompt was: “An important shift in society / culture, and what it will mean for related brands / industry.”
With livestreaming, Southeast Asia’s new e-commerce frontier revisits old territories
At their simplest, shopping livestreams entail nothing more than a seller standing in front of a camera, hawking products, answering questions, and offering deals over the course of a real-time video broadcast. Yet in China, mega-platforms like Taobao and Tmall have transformed this approach into an e-commerce model that racked up more than US$61B worth of transactions in 2019 alone.
Now, platforms like Shopee and Lazada are striving to adapt this approach to Southeast Asia. Both platforms have notched considerable successes since launching their respective livestream features in 2019: In less than a year, Lazada had reported 27M active viewers on LazLive, its in-app channel; Shopee Live, meanwhile, boasted 30M hours watched in just one quarter of 2020. With competitors like Indonesia’s Tokopedia, Thailand’s Pomelo, and even TikTok offering their own versions of the feature, livestreaming seems poised to dominate e-commerce in the region.
The question now is: Will it stick?
Circumstance has expanded the potential audience for shopping livestreams. Across the region, the Covid-19 pandemic led to many countries imposing lockdowns, forcing the closure of many physical stores and services. Seeking out alternatives, forty million people took to the internet for the first time, boosting Southeast Asia’s count of internet users to 70% of the region’s combined population. In 2020, such new users accounted for a third of all e-commerce sales, according to a report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company; more importantly, this shift to e-commerce is set to last, with 8 out of 10 new users intent on continuing to buy online.
In this rapidly growing pool of online buyers, social media, videos, and messaging are currently the main channels for discovering new brands or products. Livestreams offer a venue to knit these together into one experience. Viewers get the immersiveness of online video, as well as the social dimension of interacting with both the seller and fellow buyers through real-time chat.
This immediacy and simultaneity of experience lies at the heart of livestreaming’s potential appeal to Southeast Asian audiences: the digital approximation of offline marketplace interactions. Rather than clicking through algorithm-driven recommendations by themselves, users who tune into a livestream can ask the seller questions, trade opinions with fellow buyers in chat, or even participate in activities to score limited-time deals. All of this fosters a sense of intimacy and community, akin to visiting a bustling market with friends.
At the same time, the livestreaming format taps into familiar trust-building dynamics. In the Philippines, for example, the suki system abounds: over time, buyers adopt certain sellers as their mainstays, trusting them to give personalised recommendations and exclusive discounts. With the introduction of livestreams, online platforms come closer to approximating this relationship, as sellers are no longer faceless, and viewers can develop trust over multiple direct interactions.
Likewise, livestreams are accessible to all kinds of sellers, from established brands to one-man side hustles. In fact, everyday app users made up 40% of new LazLive registrations in April 2020. While the biggest channels may involve significant production costs, then, a significant number of streams remain simple, unvarnished affairs. Combined with the format’s inherent resistance to extensive editing, this imbues livestreaming with a sense of authenticity that can also help foster trust. As one Shopee seller notes, “Viewers appreciate genuinity and truly want to know what you have to say about the product and service.”
These resonances with longstanding purchase behaviours and expectations indicate that shopping livestreams can keep pulling in viewers post-pandemic. For brands, the format’s growth presents several opportunities to build stronger connections with potential customers, as well as deliver rich, immersive user experiences that can capture the attention of increasingly information-savvy, sophisticated shoppers.
With the relatively low cost to conduct livestreams, brands can consider running a range of broadcasts aimed at various niches or communities. Livestream hosts, as well as the style and structure of the broadcast, can then be tailored to specific audiences, giving brands more flexibility in how they communicate with different segments. This can be especially promising in countries where strong regional or demographic differences make for a fragmented audience. In the Philippines, for example, brands could consider running separate livestream channels to cater to Tagalog-speaking audiences in the Metro Manila area and Cebuano-speaking audiences in the southern urban centres.
The dynamic, interactive nature of livestreams also offer a space to solicit rapid feedback from consumers. For brands, then, livestreams can also serve as a space to gauge uptake of new products or experiment with promotions before rolling these out on a larger scale.
Brands can also consider stretching the use of livestreams beyond direct selling. As a recent example, the British Museum partnered with Alibaba to showcase various galleries via livestream for 300,000 Chinese viewers. The livestream format lends itself well to more experiential offerings which can help cultivate brand awareness and loyalty. By investing in this potential and crafting creative experiences tailored to specific audiences, brands can stand out in crowded e-commerce spaces.
To make the most of livestreaming’s promise, however, brands must also look into developing an ecosystem that can sustain the engagement sparked by livestreams. Robust fulfilment processes, post-purchase engagement strategies, and insight collection systems can help create a seamless flow from initial conversion to retention.
All together, livestreaming has both circumstance and context working strongly in its favour in Southeast Asia. The format presents an opportunity to bring dynamic, social aspects of offline shopping experiences to digital spaces. Brands who lean into the format may find it a valuable tool for winning over users by imbuing e-commerce with a vibrant, familiar touch.
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Movie Logs
At this point, I should start calling this a movie backlog. Seven months after the last one, I’m back with sixteen films — and have avoided a more embarrassing number only by omitting titles from the holiday movie roulette.1Every weekend last December, some friends and I would hop into Discord, spin a wheel, and watch a random holiday movie from the category we’d landed on. Good fun! Weird movies.
This is going to be long. Let’s get started 🙂
Happy Old Year (ฮาวทูทิ้ง..ทิ้งอย่างไรไม่ให้เหลือเธอ)
I watched this film last August, a few months before its themes would even start feeling particularly relevant to me. It hit hard anyway.
Happy Old Year is about moving on and how thorny a process that can be, no matter how determined or well-intentioned your efforts. We accrue a surprising number of possessions over time, and that may lead us to believe that growth (whatever that may mean) is a simple matter of clearing out what’s no longer useful. In that light, the protagonist Jean’s ruthless decluttering looks perfectly reasonable.
But the film (and the characters surrounding Jean) spends its time quietly reminding us that it’s not that easy. Whatever things we want to clear out are inevitably tied to people, and disentangling ourselves from those objects and memories can never be simple, because we aren’t lone owners. 2Jean tries, but as her ex-boyfriend points out, even the attempt to clear out bad memories with an apology can be more self-serving than considerate. What do you do, then, when letting go turns out to be less a process of disposal and erasure, and more of a protracted re-negotiation of these objects’ — these memories’, these people’s — place in your life?
I probably should have watched this film a little later. I’m glad I didn’t.
Us and Them (后来的我们)
Speaking of entanglement, this is another film that I watched some time before it ended up becoming personally relevant. Am I grateful for this pattern of missed opportunities to suffer? Maybe, haha.
The same question lingers for this film’s protagonists: what to make of the missed connections that have marked their relationship over the years. Cutting between the past and the present, the film gives the impression that they hadn’t really addressed that question until circumstances threw them together again. Like Happy Old Year points out, there are some resolutions that you cannot reach alone.
In the later half of the film, Xiao Xiao notes that maybe she and Jian Qing were destined to meet, and maybe they were also destined not to end up together. This point hews closest to the themes of Happy Old Year, I think: at some point, you have to learn how to accept and make peace with certain realities that you might have preferred not to think about at all.
It’s a well-acted, well-crafted film, though I wish the script had fleshed out the protagonists’ shifting perspectives more, or paced the evolution of their relationship better. That said, the real highlights of the film have little to do with the romance at all: Mark Lee Ping-bing’s cinematography is breathtaking, and the storylines and performances involving Jian Qing’s father arguably steal the show in terms of emotional heft.
Where is the Friend’s Home (خانه دوست کجاست)
It is extremely difficult to find a slow film that does not portrait a lonely character, removed from his or her environment.
Mai’s assertion about the genre of slow cinema comes to mind here because this film, directed by one of the genre’s originators, seems to go so stoutly against it. The first in the director Abbas Kiarostami’s “Koker trilogy,” Where is the Friend’s Home follows a schoolboy, Ahmad, on a quest to return his classmate Mohammad’s notebook in time to save him from punishment at their strict teacher’s hands. Along the way, Ahmad weaves through the landscapes, alleys, contradictions, obligations, and hierarchies that make up the world of the adults he desperately seeks directions from.
In short, Ahmad is the farthest thing from removed: he is, instead, repeatedly caught up in the intricate and chaotic systems that can transform even the most well-meaning person into an unhelpful mess. From authority figures giving out misleading advice, to naive acquaintances burdened with responsibilities that keep them from knowing any better, Ahmad’s attempt to do good runs into obstacle after obstacle. What carries him through is a firm, uncomplicated morality: loyalty to his friend, and a resolve to do right by him.
Ahmad’s journey, then, plays out as a gentle but clear-eyed critique of his environment. Consider the Koker that Ahmad — and the rest of the trilogy that this film is part of — inhabits: a village in northern Iran, caught in the middle of the country’s lurch from authoritarian rule to revolution. In this web of contradictory rules, muddled duties, and unquestionable impositions, Ahmad’s insistence on returning Mohammad’s notebook offers a quiet suggestion: the way to make a difference is to do our best to care for one another.
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (サイダーのように言葉が湧き上がる)
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop is mostly quiet. The protagonists themselves are various shades of muted, anxious to keep key parts of themselves away from the rest of the world; the conflict is mostly internal, revolving around the characters’ respective insecurities. But the film’s charm lies in how it uses fresh, vibrant animation that draws out the emotional intensity its characters struggle to express.
I’d like to think this film is less about teenage romance than about the possibility of building lasting connections with the people around you. The story plays out over a summer, with the season’s approaching end colouring every relationship — romantic or otherwise — with impermanence. Each character’s arc then proceeds to unfold through small but persistent efforts to push back against that impermanence, deliberately or otherwise. Whether through seeking out a long-lost vinyl record for one of their elders, or tagging the streets with haiku for a friend who’s moving away, they carve out space in their lives for the people they’ve come to care about. It’s not a new story by any means, but the film’s great accomplishment is in its vivid portrayals of the enduring warmth that runs through these characters’ efforts.
The Farewell
It’s impossible for me to watch this film from a safe emotional distance. I have no living grandparents left; I was able to help care for three of them as they faded away. The complicated question of how to accept and ease the impending passing of a loved one will always sting like a fresh bruise.
There are different ways to tackle that question, and one of the film’s strengths is how it considers opposing answers without judgment (for the most part). Small, telling moments colour in the dynamics between various members of the family, presenting a careful portrait of the motives and backgrounds informing each character’s stance on, well, the prospect of death. (There are some slips into that false, simplistic dichotomy of “West vs East,” but the film doesn’t linger there.)
Zhao Shuzhen is the standout here as the luminous matriarch at the heart of the story. Hers is the one character who doesn’t have to grapple with the question the film poses3 (Considering it’s her impending death that everyone’s struggling with), but there’s an ever-present glint in Zhao’s eye that suggests her bracing, heartfelt performance is also an attempt at an answer.
Love Hard
Holiday movies follow a pattern. So do romantic comedies. When these genres overlap4See also: Happiest Season, it’s a matter of fulfilling long-established expectations while finding ways to do something new.
It’s a tough job, and Love Hard doesn’t always succeed. The premise is a transparent attempt to be trendy, what with its take on dating apps, catfishing, and all the troubles of modern love. The problem is that, in attempting to be fresh, the film also unwittingly sets itself up for romances fuelled by attempted deceptions that are dealt with a bit too lightly. If someone catfished you, would you agree to stay and enlist their help to catfish (sort of) somebody else? Come on.
But there are charming moments (for example, a cute duet with a modified version of Baby It’s Cold Outside), and the cast do their best to salvage a subpar script. Dobrev and Yang, in particular, have great comedic timing, and they build up a convincing chemistry as the film goes on. A lot of threads remain unresolved or unaddressed (e.g., the awful sibling dynamic between Yang’s character and his older brother), but this does feel like the kind of film that doesn’t expect audiences to care by the time it ends.
Double Dad (Pai em Dobro)
This film operates in a world that’s kinder than the one we live in. Haha. It’s a bit of Mamma Mia for the Gen Z crowd, with a little less ABBA and a little more overt effort to subvert expectations. (A savvy financial advisor almost immediately accepting a long-lost child showing up out of the blue? Yeah, duh, it’s 2021, you can almost hear the film say.)
What I appreciate most about this film is how refreshingly un-cynical and wholesome it is, and how it manages to do that without being annoying. That’s largely thanks to Maisa Silva, who takes on the lead role with aplomb, playing a hopeful, yearning teenager with so much earnestness that you can’t help but root for her. Vicenza could easily have been insufferable, her optimism hewing close to naïveté often, but Silva sells the heck out of the role. The rest of the cast complements her performance well: Vicenza ends up surrounded by people who are similarly sweet, kind, and open without feeling like they’re trying too hard.
Tick, Tick…Boom!
It’s all in the title: A crushing sense of anxiety pervades this film about Jonathan Larson, the talented and ill-fated creator of Rent who died shortly before that hit musical premiered Off Broadway. Based on Larson’s autobiographical work of the same name, Tick, Tick…Boom! talks about an artist’s urgent, often-frustrating drive to share meaningful stories with the world.
If that sounds a bit self-important (musical theatre doesn’t really save rainforests, as one of the characters points out), it is. Or, well, the particular artist here is. Andrew Garfield puts in a superb turn here, deftly capturing the burning desperation to create a worthy piece, but even then, his Larson doesn’t quite stay within the realm of “sympathetic.” There are too many consequences to his single-minded pursuit of his artistic dreams — too many relationships burned, too much asked that feels somewhat unearned — that it’s hard not to tip into cynicism. Can somebody earn success by throwing so much away?
But that might just be my bias against “great man” types of stories. I’ve always hated the trope of the tortured artist, as if the ambition to produce astonishing creative work somehow excuses arrogance and thoughtless behaviour. In the particular realm of musical theatre, where a successful production relies on so much more beyond a single creator, I would’ve thought the lure of such a storyline would’ve been easier to resist.
The Handmaiden (아가씨)
There’s an aspect of The Handmaiden that reminds me of Parasite. No, it’s not just because both happen to be some of the biggest Korean titles to blow up internationally in recent years. It’s the geography of these films: similar to the dizzying rooms and streets that set out the economic disparities that Parasite critiques, The Handmaiden‘s lush puzzle-box of an estate perfectly reflects the dense, intricate mechanisms of control and deceit that its characters try to manipulate in their respective bids for freedom.
What that freedom actually looks like varies, as the film delves into the codes and constraints of economic class, colonial occupation, and good ol’ sexism and misogyny. The film leans into that by letting different characters take on the role of (terribly unreliable) narrator, allowing audiences to peel apart not just layer after layer of ingenious scheming, but the circumstances that have made these shifting tactics and allegiances necessary for each character in such particular ways.
The film can be brutal, violent, perverse. It is — from its sly camerawork to its tight script — frankly untrustworthy. But there’s also an incredible precision at work here, dissecting so many variations of excess with impossible restraint. It’s what allows the film to maintain a steady emotional core, and to be genuine and tender. Amidst all the spectacle, the project remains the same: to unravel these characters enough to expose the fears and vulnerabilities they are trying desperately to shield, to peer at the hopes they would go to such lengths to make real.
Silver Skates (Сере́бряные коньки́)
I refuse to include a photo of all the absurdity they put on skates.
This marks the start of a long (possibly ongoing) period when I didn’t have energy to watch anything but the most ridiculous, undemanding films. 😂 Sometimes you just don’t want to think, you know? Then you find a film with an absurd premise, and you just nod along as young people run around on magical skates, finding love and spouting revolution in 19th-century Saint Petersburg.
Silver Skates approaches turn-of-the-century Russia the way Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock films approached 19th-century London: history isn’t a guide so much as an aesthetic to borrow costumes and visual cues from. Characterisation is thin, plot is largely predictable, and both serve as excuses to stuff romance and coming-of-age tropes into a superficially “new” skin. That’s fine, because the film invites no expectations about historical accuracy or depth in the first place. Not noteworthy by any means, but a fun enough way to burn through a couple of hours.
Tall Girl and Tall Girl 2
Is there a concept too dull, too insubstantial to turn into a film? Apparently not, if the existence of these titles is any indication. I have no idea why Netflix turned “I’m taller than most of my peers” into a 102-minute-long story, let alone two movies, but it did. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
There’s no point debating whether these movies deserved to be made — they’re already here anyway. Let’s just say I went into these wondering how Netflix tried to pull things off. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. The paper-thin premise allows little room for meaningful character growth, so the film has to fill out its runtime by whipping up contrived problems to keep its characters occupied. This gets even worse in the sequel, when any halfway-interesting situations have already been used up in the first film and the scriptwriters have to try even harder to find anything new to do with the story.
(The only way I’ve found to redeem any viewing experience involving these films is to make sure you watch with friends. Then, at least, you can poke fun at the gigantic mess unfolding onscreen.)
Out of My League (Sul più bello)
Italy tries to do Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain and stumbles. This film’s whimsical protagonist and her quirky haircut invite comparisons to the French classic, but the films are in different leagues. (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)
That much whimsy needs something to ground it — some kind of grip for audiences to latch onto. In this case, the film tries to use another trope: debilitating illness, and a protagonist whose quirkiness stems from feeling like she has nothing to lose. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t quite sell it, and its paper-thin development of the central romance, as well as the ridiculous subplot it gives its supporting characters, further strains disbelief. Ludovica Francesconi salvages the film with an endearing turn in the lead role, but her efforts can only do so much.
Work It
By all accounts, this film should have been a clunky mess. Cobbling together bits and pieces from well-trodden teen movie and dance movie plots, Work It could’ve just settled for throwing a fresh coat of paint on its patchwork premise and called it a day.
Instead, it speeds along with genuine energy. The cast throw themselves into their assigned stereotypes and ridiculous dialogue, and their earnestness is endearing. The stakes are low5The protagonist wants to stand out among the cookie-cutter high achievers applying to her dream university; the outcomes are predictable. The film’s biggest surprise is that it still manages to be a heck of a lot of fun.
Cats
Fun fact: this film drove Andrew Lloyd Webber to get a therapy dog. After watching this disaster, I wanted one too. Anybody curious about the limits of human rationality should watch this film and ponder how — despite all the decision-makers involved, and the layers of approval a project like this needs to pass through — it still got made.
There are no answers to be found, but the film does raise endless questions such as:
Who thought grafting people’s faces onto grotesque CGI cat bodies was a good idea? How did enough people ever agree with them?
Who managed to convince luminaries like Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen to still be part of this?
Why did Tom Hooper get the green light to direct another musical when he had already demonstrated a staggering misunderstanding of genre, theme, and even the basics of camerawork and music direction in Les Miserables?6That film was, on the whole, a mess, saved only by specific performances.
How long will it take somebody to recover from watching this cinematic trainwreck?
I don’t have answers to any of these either, especially that last question. (I don’t think I’ll ever recover.) What I can offer is this video essay that a friend shared, which talks about the many things Cats does wrong:
The Summit of the Gods (Le Sommet des Dieux)
The Summit of the Gods is a gorgeous meditation on ambition and obsession. The film swoops around snow-capped mountain ranges and zooms in on rugged cliff faces, capturing both the wonder and gristle of mountain climbing. It carries that keen eye to its characters as well, delving into the particulars of their respective fixations: the protagonist Makoto Fukamachi, whose quest to recover the ill-fated explorer George Mallory’s camera leads him to track down a mysterious climber named Habu Joji; and Habu himself, who’s driven by an almost inexplicable need to scale Mount Everest.
But that’s where the film’s cinematography and its writing diverge. The latter sketches out character detail, but it never quite elaborates on the why that all these present-day details stem from. The psychological underpinnings of both Fukamachi’s and Joji’s obsessions are left vague and unexplored, to the point that the pursuits we see them undertake garner little sympathy. Here are the lonely characters of Mai’s slow cinema, ironically cut off from their environments even with — in fact, because of — their resolute attempts to understand and master these.
