hamburgergod

I caved! Sort of. I didn't really want to watch the rest of Bloody Game's season 1, but based on the episode thumbnails it looked like the cast who got sent to the basement would be able to get out, and I was curious how it happened. So I ended up skipping through the rest of the episodes to find out how the switch happens (which is that once the two groups have equal numbers, the games turn into team matches instead of individual ones) and who gets eliminated along the way to the finale. I also watched bits of two games: the math expression game and the mine betting game.

A couple of takeaways! The have vs. have-nots situation was IMO handled better here than in The Devil's Plan's season 2, because upward mobility was not dependent on an accumulative mechanic, i.e. the haves do not already have an advantage going in to the games that helps them stay on top. I think also having them play as teams (basement vs. ground) instead of as individuals forces the basement players to not sabotage each other crab-bucket style, though of course it also means that reward and punishment is collective, and they could have just as easily lost all the team challenges. Still, I got the feeling that the gamemakers took care to make sure the basement players got multiple chances to turn things around, even before the team matches started, but the players were unable to take full advantage of them, eg. they didn't solve the black puzzle that Na-yeong had since day 1, which is why I think they gave them the safe as a back-up. (As a puzzle person, I'm like, sure it's one colour and the pieces are in an unusual configuration, but it's not that big! But... I am a puzzle person.)

( Cut for length, aka I can't believe I'm watching enough of this genre to have opinions )

This was such a quick read, I literally started and finished it while waiting for my car service to be completed. It's a humourous semi-memoir by Zarqa Nawaz, creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie, a Muslim Pakistani-Canadian who has an irreverent view of life. I say it's a semi-memoir because the stories in her book are totally embellished one way or another to the polished sheen of a tumblr post or stand up routine, and that's fine, it doesn't offer accuracy, only self-deprecating neurotic humour and emotional insight of her experience as a Muslim woman in a Western world.

I laughed a lot, I cringed a lot, I went "oh nooooo" a lot, but I also got some useful understanding here and there to chew on. Zarqa details growing up the only brown girl in her school and envying the blonde white girls who wore miniskirts, wrestling with body hair, using religion as the means to rebel at her parents, dealing with family expectations regarding her career and marriage, and her various misadventures in journalism, amateur filmmaking, making waves in her local community and eventually kicking off Little Mosque on the Prairie. The kernels of the stories may be true but parts where she details her cluelessness (like her being unprepared for her journalism interview, or Hajj, or cooking for Eid) made me so stressed on her behalf, but her successes are also fun to read about, and there is freshness, I suppose, in Zarqa detailing the many many things that went wrong on the way to learning something about herself. There's an Ally McBeal kind of feel in her confidence to do things her way and fall flat on her face as she does.

It's a good thing by now I've read enough books by Muslim peeps who live in the Western world, so I'm not as alienated by their expressions of faith as a modern person in the modern world. I think the best thing was a few books back that pinpointed our specific SEA-flavour being influenced by animism and it's like, YES THERE'S A TERM FOR IT. So I can read Zarqa stating that "Muslims don't believe in ghosts" and just be like, speak for yourself, sister! (Instead of getting hurt and confused.)

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.

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.)