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Happy March, everybody! Wait… It’s March Twenty-Fourth? I cannot even deal with that. I was so braced for March this year – for the bitter cold, the disappointment, the inevitable not-spring-ness of March. But it’s like March knew I was bracing myself, and doubled down with February weather all the way through. I tried to take my dog for a run behind the truck yesterday, and it was -33 and near blizzard. He got out for about two minutes and said “I’m good.” So, I’m amending my definition of March. I was thinking of it as “second February,” but now I have accepted it as “the month that will not end until it has broken your spirit.” In like a lion, out like another lion. Blegh.

Anyway, what media have I been consuming to help pass the time this month? And also February, which was eventful and meaningful in quite different ways?

Podcasts

As I mentioned in January’s Media Round-up post, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I listed most of my ongoing favourites back there, but I’ll bring up a couple more today that I’ve been listening to – one more recent, one foundational.

The Old SwitchAroo: Gaming Retro with Mike and Jaymo: I am a sucker for a secondary source that takes you through something. When we got our Switch this Christmas, we went ahead and subscribed to the basic level of Nintendo Classics, more of which below. This opened up an overwhelming catalog of classic games that I didn’t play as a kid, because our family didn’t get into either console or handheld gaming until I was in my teens. The idea of playing through all of these old games is impossible (and largely a waste of time), but I found a podcast to help me more sample my way through it. These two dudes go through the catalog in their own somewhat random order, and discuss a few thematically-connected games with each episode. Jaymo plays with the Classics’ new features like pausing and saving anytime, while Mike plays in true retro fashion. They don’t always finish the games, and they give you their opinion on whether each is a “Ninten-Do” or a “Ninten-Don’t” to describe whether it’s worth your time or not. They have played some games from the Classics Expansion, which I don’t have (yet), but there’s at least one game I can sample from almost every episode. So far I haven’t come across many games that I want to spend more than an evening sampling, but with an hour of messing about and a podcast episode, I feel like I’ve gotten a good taste. Given how freakishly expensive most Nintendo Switch games are, this podcast is helping my weird brain get a lot of value out of the 20$/year basic Classics subscription. More on my favourites below.

Video Games

Remember above when I was talking about the Nintendo Switch Online catalog? I’m mostly playing games when they come up in Mike & Jaymo’s podcast, but MiniMighty found this game in the catalog and somehow knew I would love it. This is Mario’s Picross. This is also where I confess that I’m a rather addicted casual gamer on my phone, and these little puzzle games are what I love best. I had never played Picross before, but it’s right up my alley. According to the play clock, I’ve played about 17.5 hours of this game, and I’m about 3/4 through the puzzles. It’s just so perfect, when Jared’s doing the dishes, or I’m waiting for someone, to just pick this up and play a puzzle or two. I know what you’re thinking – wouldn’t you usually spin or knit with time like that? I normally would! But I’m usually playing this on the big screen in the living room, and busy little girls can make suggestions when I get stuck, and take guesses at what the pixel-y pictures are while I’m still puzzling. Five stars, will finish it and play all its sequels.

To return to Mike & Jaymo, I’ve finally stalled on their podcast because I’ve run into a game that I actually want to play all of: The original Legend of Zelda. I haven’t played a ton of Zelda, though I’ve certainly watched Jared play a ton of it. But I have a lot of affection for Link and his fantasy adventures. It’s a little harder to find time to play this, because it takes real brain power! And as much as I love learning about games that take brain power, I don’t have a lot of brain power to spend on games. So I’m through two dungeons of this first game. I don’t know how much farther there is to go, and I’m supposed to play Link’s Awakening before I listen to the next podcast episode. I hope I stick with it. When I was a kid, my parents were pretty against video game consoles, but eventually broke down and got one for my brother. So I ended up with this weird idea that games were for boys, even though I loved PC games all my life. I don’t regret not having Nintendo at home; I had other interests! But man, when I went over to a friend’s house who had a console, I played them like they were going out of style. (And I did eventually buy myself a Game Boy Color. Pokemon Trading Card Game, here we come.) Today, playing these games feels like an opportunity to live out some kind of alternate history childhood. Kind of potentiated nostalgia. And, with the help of pausing and saving features, and infinite online walkthroughs, I can find them into my life.

Speaking of nostalgia, when we did get a Game Cube, Mario Party was one game we played together a lot. I remembered really enjoying it. So I did my research about which Mario Party game to get to play with my kids, and Mario Party Superstars was what I landed on. It has games from all previous versions of Mario Party, and let me tell you – some of these trigger deep sense memories that I completely forgot I have. (Looking at you, exploding Bowser head game). Actually playing this game with my kids is a little less fun than I thought it would be. The mini games are fabulous, but playing through the board game takes forever (so far always longer than the estimated time, but we still have the tutorials on for minigames and stuff, so that doesn’t help). I’m guessing we’ll keep spending time with this one, just not as much as I perhaps expected!

Back to PC gaming, which is my home base. As much as I love learning about everything cool and new in video games, I’m never going to play Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. What I am going to play is Dinosaur Fossil Hunter. This game is both completely casual and obsessively beautiful. It was made by some folks who love dinos, and love the idea of going through all the nerdy steps of paleontology, without getting dirty or applying for grants. It’s a game that knows it is tedious. I did stop going through all the cleaning steps of all the bones after a while, but for a while I enjoyed really observing the bones. But the most fun part was getting out in the parks and digging through sites. Such an amazing fantasy – that every skeleton would have all its bones in one place, and intact?! This was a game I updated my graphics card for. It was perfect for those after-school hours or weekend days when the girls and I could listen to podcasts and veg out for a while. Especially when I couldn’t knit or spin without pain. Using WASD keys isn’t perfectly harmless on my shoulder, but it’s better than spinning.

Strange Horticulture is the game Jared and I have been playing together in the evenings. It’s a perfect little story puzzle game where you are using plants to solve people’s problems, and uncover a bigger mystery along the way. It’s not difficult, and it’s conveniently chunked into days that make it easy to stop and go to bed. Or to do “just one more day” if you’re feeling indulgent. The theming is gothic to the point of silliness, since it literally never stops raining. There are no horror visuals (so far anyway; I don’t know how far into we are), though there are some gross descriptions. We really look forward to playing this as a way to wind down at the end of the day.

Movies

Now it’s time for da Moviesh! It was a big couple of months for movie watching, as I caught a few more Oscar contenders, and we’ve also been enjoying Netflix’s catalog of family-friendly anime films for family movie night. Join me for this somewhat eclectic journey through my Letterboxd diary.

I ended January’s post talking about reading The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and at the beginning of February I watched the film. Did I like it? I guess… not a lot? It was incredibly faithful to the book, which I daresay Ms. Collins has earned. But it isn’t a pleasant story. Tom Blyth isn’t a great actor, but he carried about the correct Draco-Malfoy-with-real-problems energy. Rachel Zegler is incredible. Viola Davis was having a good time. Hunter Schafer was pitch perfect. I don’t know! I have no objection, it’s just an unpleasant story. The ending was perhaps the most distressing, as you’ve watched this young man slowly discover his own true nature, and become the sort of person who would decide quite intentionally to become a nasty oppressive dictator who makes child murder into an annual spectacle. Maybe I was just uncomfortable with the basic premise of the book, that it tried to make an evil person sympathetic, to show you the logic of his psychology. Maybe it was just too shiny. I’m not really sure.

Train Dreams was the next Oscar Best Picture contender I managed to catch, entirely because it’s a Netflix special. This was definitely the most Oscary movie of the five I watched. It was quiet, meditative, and sad. VERY sad. It was in most parts very pretty. I will say, I was quite confused about what time this movie was supposed to be taking place. With the railroad construction, I assumed we were in the post civil-war Rockies, but then at the end there were chainsaws, and I started wondering if we were doing some magic realism where he was living a super long time? But no, the whole thing is about the Great Northern Railway, which was built rather later than the Transcontinental. That was probably on me for not paying attention. But I didn’t feel bad; this movie is about 90% vibes. Oh, and I’m glad William H. Macy is still making movies; he was delightful in this.

Bugonia is easily the WEIRDEST movie I saw from this Oscar crop! OK call me crazy, but I loved this one. Incel dude becomes convinced that high-powered CEO is an alien, captures her and tortures her. That sounds bad and weird, and it is bad and weird, but it’s somehow also really funny? Plenty of horror in this one, and some gross and sad stuff, so steer clear if you don’t like that. I am the sort of person who never sees twists coming, so maybe the fact that I guessed it a little bit says it was obvious, but I don’t care. Wins the absolute prize for over-the-top knitwear.

The final installation in my Oscar Best Picture nominee series was Netflix and Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. This movie sucked me in so much. I watched it, then immediately watched the making of video, then watched it again. It won three craft categories, and that’s exactly what it deserved. The props! The knee bone installation! The dude with his back dissected! Again, this is definitely horror, but it’s beautiful horror. What do I mean by that? Even though there’s some gleefully gross stuff, it’s done SO WELL that I’m just asking myself the whole time “how did they do that?” There’s also just a celebration of the natural beauty of human anatomy, and a creative exploration of how one could depict the study thereof. Though perhaps what I loved the most was GDT’s greyed out turquoise tones throughout, and the use of colour to mark different themes and characters and chapters in the story. As a made thing, as an object crafted out of objects, I delighted in this film. (I should say, I’m not a devotee of the original novel or any previous Frankenstein films, so I was happy to have the story told to me in a new way. Podcasts I listened to kept saying Oscar Isaac was miscast, but to that I say pshaw.)

I saw fully half of the Best Picture contenders, which is a personal record. I’m really glad I saw the ones I did. One Battle After Another and Sinners both had big nights; One Battle came out on top and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Sinners was an achievement, but One Battle is undeniably about the current moment in history that is hard to ignore. I didn’t watch the ceremony though. Maybe I’ll watch it next year when it’s on Youtube.

Jared and I are still very (very) slowly watching our way through the films of Christopher Nolan. Dunkirk we managed to fit in February. We saw it theatres when it came out, and I had completely forgotten the timey-wimey aspect of it. There’s nothing quite like this film. There are other films that show the horrors of war, the desperation of survival, etc. But, perhaps because the main protagonist on the beach is such a non-person, it feels more honest to what it would have been like. To just be a grunt, going from A to B, surviving mostly on luck, rescued by the bravery of a few. This had a massive cast, but Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh stood out as the solid older men with big hearts who anchored the stories of younger people. Oh, and that little plane landing at the end was a showstopper.

Just last week, we finally got around to watching Tenet. This is the only Nolan film that I barely heard of, and of course it’s because Covid. This film was very strange. It’s got some classic Nolan timey-wimey stuff going on, of course; that was weird but not unexpected. What was strange was the combination of high quality stunts with low quality dialogue. I don’t know if it was the editing or the acting or what, but the talky scenes were oddly paced. It felt like they were just rolling through some words with no emotional stakes. Elizabeth Debicki’s character was supposed to provide emotional stakes with how much she cared about her son, but that was a nothingburger. At the same time, the stunts were all so clearly real that I just kept thinking this looks so expensive. (In fact, the film has fewer CGI shots than the average rom-com, and is the most expensive original film to date.) Clearly, the important things in this movie are not the characters; it’s the puzzle. The rules of time inversion, and trying to follow what’s happening at any given moment. It was the rare film that I felt benefited from watching it over two nights (which is the only way Jared and I can get through an entire movie anymore). We stopped in the middle, I puzzled out what I thought I was seeing, and ended up being correct. I felt very clever. And how can you not appreciate a movie that makes you feel clever? “The game’s the thing,” I say, in an ellission of Hamlet and Holmes.

Hold the phone, folks, we actually got to watch a movie in the cinema! During the winter! Stringbean’s birthday occurred during our stay in Yellowknife, so we went to Yellowknife’s soon-to-close Capitol Theatre. GOAT was playing, and while it was exactly the plot you’d expect from beginning to end, it was populated with colourful characters – and just colour. Plus I was amused by the world-building of an urban environment populated by actual animals. But Modo was the absolute winner. Weird weird weird. MiniMighty found an Uno Reverse card somewhere that now lives in our car , and I delight in yelling “Uno REVERSE!” at anyone who notices it.

Now we’ll get into some of the anime films we’ve been watching lately. Netflix is really invested in anime, which I love; we watched through all of Miyazaki a couple of years ago, and that was a landmark film experience for all of us. We’re being a little choosy with the rest of the anime we’re watching, partly because there are genuinely different standards and norms around stories for kids.

A Whisker Away is about a girl who can turn into a cat. But it’s actually about a girl with a crush. But it’s actually about a girl who masks her trauma and insecurities in ways that are not normally seen in media, but are very developmentally appropriate and relatable. At home she’s dealing with a stepmom she doesn’t want, a birth mom she feels has abandoned her, and all the normal pressures of schooling. At school, she’s dealing with this by developing a massive crush, which she expresses in goofy, extroverted ways. It’s this slow revelation of the inner world of a young teen, which is revealed to herself as much as to the viewer, that captured my heart.

Drifting Home is another made-for-Netflix anime film that deals with themes of loss and change, and also digs into magic realism to express it. (There must be a term for the Japanese expression of magic-realism in Latino literature. Help me out?) While beautiful and creative, this was much harder to watch, largely because of the continual conflict between the children. They were constantly yelling at each other about the same issues, which made the 2-hour film feel very stuck. I have seen a lot of incredibly emotionally mature anime children’s films, so my standards are high – and this was the most poorly calibrated I’ve yet seen. But then, it could also have been the limits of translation; we watch dubs only as my kids are not interested in reading subtitles.

Suzume is a film with a cute little cat as its mascot, but it is not chiefly about a cute little cat! Although the little cat saying “suuuzuME?” is a core sense memory from this film. I would describe this as a supernatural mystery film, set deeply into the questions of what Japan is, what it used to be, and what it is becoming. It combines the stakes of saving the nation with a personal mystery of forgotten trauma. It rides the line perfectly of not explaining too much. I would like to go back and watch this one again, maybe with subs without my kids!

So in January’s media round-up, CC commented with some of her family’s recent films, and I fully misread her recommendation of Panda Ku Panda as being Pom Poko. (I can’t seem to find Panda Ku Panda but I’ll keep an eye out.) Anyway, Pom Poko is a Studio Ghibli oddity from 1994. It’s placed during the period of Japanese history when suburbs were being swiftly developed, destroying forests and displacing animals. In this story, the racoons (Tanooki) are fun-loving animals that have to re-learn their traditional shape-shifting powers so they can fight the humans for their forest. This has many of the sad elements that you might expect in an environmentalist fantasy set in real history, but the tone is dominated by the fun-loving silliness of the racoons. There are some odd moments (e.g. during one battle when the anatomically correct-ish racoons make their testicles enormous as some kind of weapon – I went to the bathroom during that part so I’m not sure what happens), but mostly it’s beautiful, heartfelt, and bittersweet.

I must give honorable mention to a TV show, Spy x Family, that we have been enjoying heartily for the past week or so.

In this comedy series, a spy (dad), assassin (mom) and telepath (kid) all become a fake family, for reasons of their own that somehow they keep secret from each other. (Except the telepathic 6-year old, who picks up everything.) Netflix describes this as an “offbeat comedy,” and this is highly accurate. The spy and assassin have both so completely devoted their lives to their crafts that they truly have no measuring stick for what is normal, and end up doing and accepting the weirdest things from each other. It ends up being a show about parenting and family, as they are all learning the basics with different stakes and privileges than a traditional family would. There are several seasons of this show, and with 20-minute episodes, it’s easy to fit one or two in after dinner. There are also some differences in what might be considered appropriate for humour? Like several instances where getting drunk is played for laughs in ways that would not be considered appropriate in American TV. There are also a few swears – so even though it stars a 6-year-old, I would describe this as more of a PG-13.

Books

I am still reading Stephen King, but I have slowed down a lot.

Night Shift is King’s first book of short stories. I only had access to this in e-book form rather than audio book, so it was very, very slow going. Still, I think I like Stephen King best in short form. It was quite enjoyable to read a story in one or two evenings before bed, even if many of them were very creepy. I also brought my kindle out of the bedroom for once and read out in the living room instead of looking at my phone – imagine! As you might expect, it’s a very mixed bag, but there were lots of good ones. The Just King Things podcast went through them one at a time, quickly, which was a great way to do it. My favourite was probably “Gray Matter,” which was about an alcoholic who turns into a murderous blob monster. A little on the nose, but evocative.

When The Stand became available as an audiobook from my library, it became my mission to listen to the whole thing. It’s a 47-hour-long book, and I had two weeks to listen in. (I don’t listen to things sped up, no thanks.) This was basically two books – the first half is about a pandemic that kills 99.5% of people, which was a fascinating ride. The second half was about the people who were left, who find each other and discover they’re all having the same paranormal dreams. What congeals is a battle between good and evil that is very religiously coded. There are some major of-its-time issues, where Stephen King ends up undercutting his own good intentions by creating a magical black woman and a magical mentally disabled person. I really liked Mother Abigail, and thought she was actually a pretty convincing Christian character in some ways, down to the hymns that she knew. But the Just King Things boys had some incisive analysis on just how problematic some of King’s re-writing of American history here is. Also, as someone living outside the US, it was truly incomprehensible how much this book was only interested in the US, and even those in Maine had no connections with their northern neighbors. I managed to finish the listen with two days to spare, and as a thriller with moments of horror, I really enjoyed it, despite its problems. The titular “Stand” was an epic moment, but was ultimately unnecessary. I can’t really complain about it without spoiling it, but the book is older than I am, so maybe you don’t care? And the very ending made me randomly angry – this woman who just went through a traumatic Cesarian is going to go live with her man across the country, pregnant, and just expect her VBAC to just be fine? Annoying. Anyway, an American Lord of the Rings this is not, but as a two-week immersive audio experience it was something special. I hope you don’t mind my take, Deniz!

I’m taking a break from King and very slowly reading a Jack Reacher novel. As you can probably see, I do like a thriller, and I appreciate how stand-alone these volumes are. I’ve read the first three, and they’ve all melted into a sort of pleasant mush in my memory. I’m just getting into the fourth one, The Visitor, and so far it hasn’t sucked me in. My pattern with books like this is I read a little before bed each night – something like taking in a roller coaster by walking the tracks – then at some point, it sucks me in and I swallow the rest of it whole. Mixed metaphors if ever there were mixed metaphors.

Thank you for coming along on this month’s media journey. I’m looking forward to warm weather; I haven’t despaired of it! Hopefully I’m out of doors so much in April that I don’t have time for movies, haha. For now, I’m catching up on all the podcasts I missed while I was mainlining The Stand.

What have you read this last February and March? Hopefully more of the pictures turn up this time, CC!