Asakiyume mita

(about half of these are real)

Netflix content notes

Peril
Language
Noteworthy soundtrack
Brief smoking
Introverted
Unstable
Suspenseful
Mutable
Provocative
Dizzying
Loneliness
Bravado
Last chances
Gritty
Barren
Fleeting
Gone

We're watching The Makanai (舞子さんちのまかなないさん; Maikosanchi no makanai san）on Netflix; the present-day story of two sixteen-year-old best friends who leave their northern Aomori town to go to Kyoto to train as maiko (pre-geisha). One of them, Sumire is exceptionally suited to it; the other, Kiyo, isn't--but Kiyo finds her feet as the makanai, the cook, for the house.

In the episode we saw the other day, the mother of the house is walking with a male friend, and she's talking about all the good-luck charms and talismans she has all over the house. "Isn't that kind of burdensome?" her friend asks. And then she gives such a great description of why it's not, and how she feels:

( explanation in screen caps )

I love everyday beliefs like this.

Later on there's a hilarious moment when Sumire asks the accomplished geisha Momoko, whom she's been assigned to as a helper, what Momoko was praying for earlier in the day, when Sumire happened to see her at a shrine. Momoko is super sophisticated and a very cool cucumber--but in that moment she's tired and drunk. Nevertheless, she comes up with the perfect answer:

( There's only one answer to that question )

In another entry maybe I'll talk a little about Kiyo, who manages to be preternaturally sweet without being cloying--I have theories about why, or at least, why for me she hits that balance.

It snowed!

I knocked the snow off the clothesline and it fell all at once, from the entire length of the clothesline, a rope of snow hitting the ground.

I'm back from my dad's house, but while I was there, I found a tiny nature preserve that has been set up across the street from my high school. It's on low-lying land unsuitable for development: a land conservancy has bought it and made it into a preserve, so high school students can learn about wetlands and local people can go for walks.

Because it's a wetland, there are sections with plank walkways to keep you above the water. For one of them, the beams are laid out lengthwise, and when you walk on them, it's musical, like a marimba (you have to turn your sound up to hear; it's a not-great 10-second phone video):



The creator signed it:


The other walkways have the planks laid out crosswise--they don't give the same music (but are fine for walking on!)


I saw an odd but funny and entertaining movie on Netflix, Army of Thieves (2021). In it, a young German bank clerk who has been mastering safecracking in his spare time is recruited to break into a series of bank vaults designed by a master locksmith and themed on Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung operas. (The vaults are named Reingold, Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.) For each vault, the guy tells the story of that opera, and the music plays in the background, and then you get an image of all the gears and tumblers moving as he goes into a trance, listening to the clicks and slides and whirs. So cool! And the rest of the gang are hilarious characters. I feel like sartorias would enjoy it.

Weirdly, the movie is a prequel to a zombie film, Army of the Dead. This film is not a zombie film at all! Is this a thing that happens often? A prequel that's a totally different genre from the original film? The only way zombies figure in Army of Thieves is that you hear news stories about this zombie outbreak in Nevada, and sometimes the hero has bad dreams about zombies. I think he's the only carryover from one film to the other...

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy (Matthew 6:19)

That's a common enough adage and moral lesson, but for some reason the portrayal of it in our current Colombian series was visually super affecting and got me thinking.

One of the secondary characters is an army officer, undercover in a mission to take down the supply portion of a drug operation, but he seems at times to have lost himself in his role, though he insists to one of the main characters that that's not the case. In a scene about halfway through the series, he hies himself off on his own in a canoe, drags it ashore, and heads off into some portion of the rain forest armed with a map. He digs into the wet earth and uncovers two pots that contain guns on top and underneath---

Cash money! Benjamins!



Cackling with delight, he plunges his hand in and pulls out a fistful.



And then...

It comes apart in his hands. Turns out a shallow grave in a humid location isn't the best storage decision for paper.



And the character is almost driven mad ...



(The actor's name is Toto Vega. The show is called La Ley Secreta/Undercover Law)

In that moment, the money goes from being a symbol and source of power to rotted paper. When an authorized agent prints money, it's like it imbues the money with a kind of soul. A soul of commerce, I guess. A soul of exchange. No longer a piece of paper, now it's a token that gives you access to things.

But he went and buried it in the ground, like a dead thing, and deprived of its role as a token of exchange, it did in fact die. And now he's holding mere corpses.

.... Well then! That concludes my weird meditation on cash.

I talked about this Brazilian SF show once before, in 2017, when just one season was out and I started watching it. It's now complete at four seasons. The premise is that 97% of the world (or at least the portion we're focused on) live in poverty in a desertified "Inland" (Continente), but 3% live in a tropical paradise, the Offshore (Maralto; probably based on the actual island of Fernando do Noronha based on its location on the map that plays in the opening credits). When people turn twenty, they get a chance to participate in "the process," a series of tests that separate the worthy 3% from the unworthy 97%.

Over the course of the four seasons, the characters find out the hidden history of how this process started and put into action various plans to counter the injustices of this system. All the characters end up doing things they deeply regret, in a way that sometimes feels like the creators jerking them around, but on the other hand gives them all a chastened human fallibility that's identifiable even when the decisions it resulted from are hard to credit.

There are problems with the setup that I could never quite get past (how both these places are provisioned, mainly), and one direction for a solution that's actually explored in the middle seasons (creation of an alternative to the Offshore) seems like it could have been explored more, in more different ways--basically I thought there were always more directions for change than the characters imagined--but within the limitations that the show marked out, I really wanted to see how the characters were going to sort things out--both societally and personally.

Brief aside: Everyone in the inland dresses in improbably fabulous rags--take a look at these sneakers!



I was super moved by the final episode (in spite of a plot mechanic that frustrated me) because it spoke to how I feel about the social situation in the United States right now (even though the show is Brazilian). It gave me the ending I want for us. Spoiler cut ahead! But if you're not going to see the show or don't mind about spoilers, read on ahead, or better yet, just watch the first few moments of the video of the final scene, because it's beautiful and uplifting.

( spoilers )

These days we're watching two Spanish-language shows on Netflix. One is La Reina del Flow (The Queen of Flow), an 82-episode-long revenge tale that we're only 30 episodes into. Talented teen lyricist Yeimi Montoya is invited by her best pal, Juancho, to join Soul and Bass, a duo consisting of Juancho and another teen, Charly Cruz, whom Yeimi has a huge crush on, but who has never even noticed her. (Juancho, in turn, loves Yeimi, but she only thinks of him as a friend.) All three of them are barrio kids on the outskirts of Medellín, but Charlie has a pretty face, and Soul and Bass has a good tunes--with Yeimi's lyrics they might just get a recording deal. Unfortunately Charly is a self-absorbed narcissist with a crime lord for an uncle.

We need to spend a moment on the uncle, Manín. He is likely to have killed Charly's dad (though at episode 30, that's still not certain) in order to put the moves on Charly's mom, who eventually does acquiesce and marry him. He's ordered Yeimi's bakery-running parents killed when they're unable to make a protection payment. He slouches everywhere and is usually eating something, or drinking.

Manín has been in the habit of strong-arming Charly into doing jobs for him, and in one of those jobs, he ends up killing someone--and Yeimi witnesses it. She insists Charly turn himself in, but *that* certainly isn't happening--instead Charly asks his uncle for help, and next thing you know, Yeimi is in prison in the United States for acting as a drug mule (Charly having planted drugs on her when they head to New York to meet a producer). Charly also steals her notebook of lyrics, so he can keep on creating hit songs. Oh, and he seduced her, so she gives birth in prison and then gives the baby to her grandmother--but Manín kills the grandmother and steals the baby, because Charly's mom--now Manín's wife--wants another baby. He doesn't say anything about the baby's parentage, so now that child, who's actually Charly's son, is being raised as Charly's brother. The same actor plays this child, Erik, and young-Charly (glasses and a different hair style distinguishing them).

Got the picture? So 17 years later, when a DEA agent offers Yeimi a chance to get out of prison if she helps to catch the uncle, she agrees, reasoning that she can use this chance to get revenge on Charly, who's now the successful reggaeton star Charly Flow,** with a beautiful wife and daughter. In the guise of Tammy Andrade, music producer and talent scout, she intends to take away from Charly everything that he's taken away from her.

So... you sympathize with her, and Charly really is a self-involved asshole. But the story takes you into the lives of Charly's wife and daughter, too, and it's clear that Yeimi's mission is going to have profound collateral damage. Juancho is still around, running a recording studio, and when Tammy reveals that she's actually Yeimi, he urges her to get the ultimate revenge, which is to lead a happy life and to forget about revenge. So the show has this tension, because on the one hand it invites you in for vengeful wish fulfillment, but on the other hand, it highlights the problems with this. But if you begin to truly think it's a problem, then you can't root for Yeimi wholeheartedly. Or maybe at all?

I'm not a huge fan of how the actress who plays grow-up Yeimi portrays her--but it's probably in part down to the writing and the directing. I'm hoping they'll add something to enrich her character. I suspect they will--the trailer shows her recording her own songs, and that hasn't happened yet, and we still have 52 episodes to fill. Right now I have more sympathy for Charly's wife, whom we're meant, I think, to see as self-absorbed the same way Charly is, but who's struggling to raise their daughter and put together a life for herself ... she feels more three-dimensional to me that Yeimi.

The other Spanish-language show we're watching is Frontera Verde, a *completely* different type of show, which takes place in the Amazon--but I'll talk about that another time.

Trailer for Reina del Flow

**Based visually on Colombian reggaeton star Maluma:

grown-up Charly


Maluma


... ughh, and while I don't usually care about spoilers, in looking for those images I've inadvertently seen one I sort of do care about.

I never watched the original 1980s She-ra (though I was aware of its existence), but I'm loving Netflix's reboot. It's a real delight! The characters are mainly teens, and there's a friendship-oriented, work-together quality that reminds me of My Little Pony or Steven Universe. Instead of the female characters having identical Barbie-doll bodies and features, everyone's unique, and their personalities are a lot of fun.

The set-up is that Adora (OMG the names, but they're artifacts of the original show) and Catra are best friends who grew up in the Horde, but one day Adora discovers a magic sword and also that the Horde, rather than quelling rebels, has been destroying innocent villages, etc. etc., and so she switches sides. She invites Catra to come along with her, but Catra, who's been more aware of the true nature of the Horde all along, doesn't feel inclined to--maybe because she didn't get to find a magic sword, or maybe because Adora's realignment coincides with meeting two rebels, Glimmer and Bow, whom she pretty instantly becomes close friends with. It's a lot for Catra to swallow; she feels deeply betrayed. So now she has a personal reason to be against the rebels. But Adora being gone also lets Catra come into her own a little; she's kind of been in her friend's shadow.

In one episode, Catra (left) and Adora (right) see visions of their childhood selves


Glimmer and Bow



... As you can see, I'm pretty invested in the bad guys, and the thing is, the show lets you be. It kind of reminds me of Team Rocket in the Pokémon cartoon--there's just a lot to like about the bad guys. Another awesome bad-guy character is Scorpia, a super-cheerful Horde force captain who desperately wants to be besties with Catra.

Scorpia on the right


But the good guys are lots of fun too. It's hard to be the straight-arrow main character, but Adora does a great job. Her transformation into She-ra owes a lot to Sailor Moon's transformation sequences, and I watch it with delight each time.

There's also a social justice–oriented winged pegasus and all sorts of incidental humor. Adora tipsy as an after-effect of being infected by an evil-making virus makes for some great moments in a late episode in the second season, as does an episode in which attempting to make a battle plan devolves into a roleplay.

I've watched all that's available, but another season apparently will arrive in August. I can't wait! Those of you who've seen it, what things do you like best?

Initially I hadn't been thrilled by the notion of this film; I think because I feared (completely unjustifiably) that it would be purveying trite truths of one sort or another. But several of my friends reviewed it favorably, and finally last night I got to see it--and really loved it.

It's a totally different kind of film from Winter's Bone (by the same director), a very **gentle** story, and quiet, even though elements of the story aren't gentle at all. In fact, all through the movie there were moments when, primed by what Hollywood often does, I was on the edge of my seat expecting something horrible to happen--and it didn't.

The situation is that Tom (a girl) has been living with her PTSD-suffering war-veteran father in a national park, foraging, growing their own food, collecting rainwater--and occasionally going into town to buy things (which they finance by dad selling the medication he gets from the VA to other vets). They get found out and forced to reassimilate into society. Tom is adjusting, but her dad is not, and he announces they're taking off again. Reluctantly, she leaves with him, but things are much harder and grimmer this time around.

What I loved about it most were the moments with animals and the sense of how healing and enriching sharing time and space with animals can be. There's a scene where the dad is stroking a horse, and the horse rests its head against the dad, and the dad rests his head against the horse, and they're just still together for a moment, and oh my heart! Same with Tom stroking a rabbit she finds hopping along the road and returns to its owner; same later on when an older woman shows her the miracle of a hive of bees.

The beauty of the natural world resonates through the whole film, too, but the film understands that it's beauty that will kill you if you're underprepared--and Tom and her father understand that; in fact, everyone in the movie understands the situation and everyone else pretty well: the problem is what people can live with.

Thinking about everyone understanding brings up another thing I liked about the film: there wasn't really a villain. Even the state isn't villainous: it tries its best to accommodate Tom and her dad's unique needs within a framework of what's societally acceptable. It's just that it won't work for the dad.

I think that's the saddest thing in the film--that the dad just can't feel at ease in, apparently, any situation near other people, except his daughter, whom he loves very much, whereas she's growing into a person who wants to be near other people, though she loves her dad very much. But I'd call the ending happy: it's a good one for Tom, and it's set up in the film as one that's not doom-and-death for the dad either.

The healing angel and I watched this--I liked it a lot, especially in the sense that it's a family dealing with deep, ongoing trauma and loss. I'm vaguely aware of people expressing discontent at the ending, but I found it satisfying. What did dissatisfy me was the logical mechanism of the malevolent supernatural element, but the healing angel and I hashed it out at length, and I feel like like we arrived at (slightly different) ways of understanding it that made sense. For those of you who watched it, what were your feelings?

The ending of this show was intensely satisfying and mainly (maybe not entirely) realistic. Thinking back over the entire story arc and all the characters, I do have a few criticisms, but mainly so much love and so much admiration for the storycraft and the character development. It would be an excellent show to use with kids to get them thinking about how characters grow and change (and why this is important) and what motivations are--but beyond all that, it's so engaging!

My main criticism was that the main conflict for Belky, the protagonist, gets sorted out three-fourths of the way through the show, and then, rather than simply focusing on remaining conflicts/difficulties, which are not as high-color but very important (things about how she relates with her boyfriend and her family--that sort of thing), a whole new existential threat is introduced, one that's kind of cheap and tired compared with everything else in the show. Furthermore, it involves Belky, who's generally wary and mistrustful, trusting a simply odious character, and while the show's at pains to show how that character wins her trust, it still just doesn't seem likely. And, it's very hard to focus on the very interesting stories of the side characters when there's this existential threat hanging over Belky. I would have been happier without that storyline, honestly.

BUT STILL. The remaining storylines develop the main supporting characters wonderfully. People make bad decisions for good reasons and then have to extricate themselves. People have to take emotional risks, and it isn't easy. There are lots of excellent heart-to-heart conversations.

And the show is really progressive, too: there's a young lawyer who's wheelchair bound who gets to be heroic and who gets a happily ever after: he's just the right person for the woman he ends up with. There's a gay guy who's portrayed as an accomplished, brave, smart person, who's always wanted to be a father and is able to co-parent with a single mother, while maintaining his romantic life separately. Belky has a moving conversation with the older of her two younger sisters about becoming sexually active and making it be about her choice and not something she's pressured into. Public, pressureful marriage proposals and apologies are shown to be NOT A GOOD IDEA.

And more and more--but this is enough for now. Gotta get back to the day's tasks.