Ayo Edebiri Is Special To Me Because Bluntly Speaking, Every Time A Young Actress Of Colour Blows Up

The Quiet Girl ‘An Cailín Ciúin’ (2022) dir. Colm Bairéad

really love dynamics that are like 'it honestly doesn't matter if you view them as romantic or platonic, the point is that they love each other. the type of love is inconsequential, all that matters is that it's there'. gotta be one of my favorite genders.

“Eun-hee… When you’re tired or sad, try looking at your fingers. Then, one by one, move them around. It’ll feel very mysterious. You feel like you can’t do anything, but you can move your fingers.”

House of Hummingbird (2018), written and directed by Kim Bora

I miss Jude.

Sometimes I don’t know what I really mean by that. At least right now what I mean is that I miss reading his dialogue. A good amount of the book is about his thoughts and actions. But his conversations —his innocent questions, his sarcastic humor, his petulant stubbornness, his lengthy discussions about law and math — are precious to me. I miss reading him speak.

Some days I miss his routines, other days I miss his introspection. Today I miss his voice, even though I’ve never heard it before.

The thing about Wes Anderson's films is that I don't always connect with the stories he is telling, but by fucking god do I appreciate the craftmanship that went into making them.

Watched/read

Feminine and feminist cinema.

House of Hummingbird: the main character, Eunhee, was in eighth grade in 1994, which is to say she – and Kim Bo-ra, the director – are nearly exactly my age. It’s a sensitive, Proustian evocation of a ‘90s South Korean female adolescence, parts of which I relate to (those pagers!), parts of which I knew nothing about (one date chyron I won’t spoiler, that drew gasps from the audience), and parts of which are evergreen (dysfunctional Asian families where the only love languages are verbal abuse and food, and emotional support is non-existent even for favoured first sons). The sporadic outbursts of domestic violence, in particular, are so true to life as to be triggering; it made me think of people IRL to whom I’d only recommend the film with a warning. The actors are all very good but the one I’ll think back to is Kim Sae-byuk, who plays Eunhee’s mysterious yet relatable Chinese tutor and imbues the supporting character with a vast sense of inner life. The camera watches her face and you feel what she’s feeling for this girl, from the other side of the unidirectional gulf that is the Tired Adult™ looking upon an eighth grader much like she once was.

21st Century Girl: a thematic omnibus of short films commissioned from emerging female Japanese filmmakers, each of which has to be about love, gender, or sexuality in some way. One does what one can with the running time: some oblique love stories, some LGBT themes, some in media res snippets of what might eventually end up as feature-lengths with a beginning and an end, lots and lots of photographic montage and manifestos in voiceover. I liked “Your Sheet,” a gender-fluid erotic story that was also the most successful bit of standalone short fiction, and the rom-com concept of “Sex-less Sex-friends.”

Dare to Stop Us: for once I would have liked a Q&A session with the director and writer, because I have questions. The film is a dramatization of the late ‘60s-early ‘70s imperial period of Wakamatsu Studios, the “pink film” (experimentally x-rated, but also raging leftist pink-o) outfit founded by Wakamatsu Koji, an enfant terrible of Japanese cinema who used to be yakuza and purportedly turned to film so he could kill off cops without getting arrested. The main character is Megumi, a hippie girl who joins the studio at the age of 21 and works her way up to first AD within the year, not least due to the other ADs quitting. Megumi comes off as a designated-naif entry-point POV, possibly – I thought – a composite of women who worked for Wakamatsu, and the arc of her story seemed to bend toward surviving (gender-neutral) workplace hazing and becoming a successful indie director in her own right, as Wakamatsu promises when he hires her. Spoilers: she is not a composite! She existed, and what happens to her is gut-wrenching! It’s a rug-pull, honestly, especially since the director Kazuya Shiraishi worked with Wakamatsu and the initial vibe is “feel-good biopic of characters and environment I have huge nostalgic affection for.” In retrospect, one has to conclude he was half making that movie, half interrogating how the guerrilla filmmaking milieu can chew up the people who love it most, and is particularly unforgiving to women even when their bosses and peers aren’t overtly sexist.

(I also have questions about the slickly urbane portrayal of Oshima Nagisa, sitting in a cafe with his sunglasses telling Wakamatsu not to push his pro-Palestinian documentary too hard because the film world is “run by Jews,” because hoo boy was that a Moment.)

You think disaster just falls over the sky? No. We have come step by step towards this fate.

FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE 霸王別姬 (1993, Chen Kaige)

I feel like I've never seen anyone talk about one of the reasons that being aro is so lonely is that we aren't really allowed to form deeper connections with people.

I'm not allowed to be too close to my friends because if I am then they'll read it as romantic. Their partners will think they're cheating on them with me.

I'm not allowed to touch other people in a way that's too friendly. I'm not allowed to cuddle with people. I'm not allowed to bare my heart and soul to people. I'm not allowed to hang out one-on-one with anyone. All of those things are reserved for people who aren't me. People who can't be me.

Yeah "more than friends" is stupid and friends can be just as important and close as romantic partners but what non-aro actually believes that? What non-aro would let go of their ownership of their partner for long enough to allow me to have any form of affection?

[Do not tag as ace/aroace or derail]

BETTER DAYS  少年的你 (2019) dir. Derek Tsang

THOMAS SHELBY + smoking