and whatever walked there, walked alone

A quirky, stylish, and emotional Japanese movie about food, a woman determined make the best ramen she can, and also, in its own way, a Western, as a handsome drifter rides into town, starts a (noodle) bar fight, and shakes up the complacent townsfolk. This was wild and wonderful. It mainly focuses on the owner of the ramen shop—the titular Tampopo—and the band of weirdos she accrues to help her improve her cooking and her business, but while it's doing that it also weaves in short vignettes about the ways other people connect with, and through, food. Recommended!

Contains: lingering shots of food and people eating, first person dentistry (root canal), a murder, two fistfights, some of the weakest bullying I've ever seen on film (almost hilariously so), and a sex scene that incorporates—among other things—live prawns.

This book is very silly. It's like creepypasta with floor plans.

But it's briskly written and quickly read. And unique, if that counts for anything. What it isn't is scary, suspenseful, or atmospheric. Read this if you enjoy troubling floor plans and baseless speculation, or if you want to see what all the fuss is about. Probably best on paper so you can reference the floor plans on the facing page.

Contains: murder, suicide, child abuse, child death, incest, ableism, polygamy.

More screen time. I watched all of these on Netflix.

Hostage: The British Prime Minister's husband is kidnapped in French Guiana while working with Doctors Without Borders. I watched two episodes across several days, mostly for Julie Delpy as the President of France, but I just didn't care about these people's problems. And then Julie Delpy did a public end-run around the prime minister to get French troops stationed on English soil to stop migrants from entering France from the channel and my entire being just shriveled up and died with how much I didn't like that.

Minx: The evolution of an erotic feminist magazine in the early 1970s. A fun and raunchy show that wants people to succeed and be kind to each other—mostly. The main character, Joyce, is kind of a pill, but part of the fun is watching her become more flexible as she's exposed to new perspectives. The first season is about building a team and putting a magazine together, but the characters lose their way in the second season as they give in to fame and power (or are alienated by it) and the show similarly becomes muddled; appropriate, maybe, but it also felt very unfocused and even cruel at times, quite a departure from the first season. Contains: drug use, nudity, and lots of dicks.

The Staircase (2022): The thing about The Staircase (2004) is that it will make you detest Michael Peterson. Did he kill his wife? Well, an owl certainly didn't do it. Guilty or not, the man is an odious narcissist, and Colin Firth nails him right down to his way of speaking. So I hated him immediately of course. But not in a fun way. The series also stars Toni Collette! And wastes her! Outside of a death scene so raw I wanted to look away, she mainly spends her time drinking and being quietly sad, except for a scene with a leaf blower and two more death scenes that are similarly awful, but similar enough to the first that it kind of dulls the effect over time. The whole thing is pretty tedious, which might be excused in a documentary, but not in a drama. If you've seen one The Staircase, you don't need to see the other, and really, you probably don't need to watch either. It was really great to see Juliette Binoche again, though. Contains: a lot of blood; violence.

fancake's first theme of the year is Crack Treated Seriously! We've already got recs in The Magnus Archives, Disco Elysium/Death Note, Our Flag Means Death, Bungou Stray Dogs, and Star Wars.

Over at the comm, full_metal_ox gave us a delightful glimpse at the character in the banner, writing:

The model has the distinct air of a little kid whose obsessions are the War of 1812 and raccoons, settling in to compose her Magnum Opus alternate history: what if the War of 1812 had been fought by raccoons?

(The history and biology will draw upon rigorous research—including thick ponderous tomes from the Grownup Section, interviews with real live zoologists and re-enactors, and get thee behind me, ChatGPT, thou Devil's Easy Button!—with the result that the text will be as footnote-riddled as Discworld. Writing is Serious Business, for which she dons her Official Serious Writing Jacket—and what other color could it be? Yellow is the hue of intellect, as well as yet another of her Special Interests.)

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

I picked this up knowing nothing about it except that it was science fiction, and I spent the entire book trying to figure out where it was going, but in a good way. It starts out with a raid, so I was thinking military SF, but then it quickly transitions into a mystery, and from there we go through some spy shit, a bit of romance, a Mission Impossible-style heist, a miner's strike, and, finally, cyberpunk. It's quite a ride. It's got unremarkable queerness (people are queer! it goes unremarked upon!), the protagonist is a woman of color of........complicated origins, and there's a fascinating relationship between her and an AI. Cohen, as he calls himself, is hundreds of years old, controls dozens of networks, and has expensive tastes.

In part, this book is about memory, what your memories make you, and who you are without them, and at times I felt like it was messing with my memory because it seemed to be skipping over important things in the investigation and in the spy shit. Like how did Li get her Beretta back? They took her knife, but left her with that gun and the ammo for it? No. It's also the kind of science fiction that comes with a ten page bibliography at the end in case you want to read up on quantum entanglement, but just tosses you into the world, dumps a bunch of new terminology on you, and lets you figure things out on your own. Which I mostly did, but it's a bit of an uphill trudge at the beginning.

This is the first in a trilogy, a fact I discovered when I was 82% through this one, and happily my library had the other two ebooks, as well, so I checked out the second book as soon as I was done with this one.

Contains: sexual assault, attempted rape—brief and not lingered upon; (sexual?) slavery—underpins a side relationship in the book.