#taiwanese new cinema | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

absolutebl · 10 months ago

Text

Top 10 Best BLs on Gagaoolala

My Beautiful Man AKA Utsukushii Kare

Japan 2021

One of the most Japanese BLs to release in the last decade, as weird and as messed up as any 2000s yaoi: emo af and hella warped, entirely true to itself with no attempt made to modify its POV for modern sensibilities or current BL fandom. It used seriously old school problematic and kinky tropes, like whipping boy, for a truly uncompromising piece that also manages to hit up themes of communication, consent, and self acceptance. It’s a wonderful BL but uniquely dirty and harsh, in the best possible way - Japanese cinema, uncompromising.

I lost my ever loving mind over the ending. This show won the Grand Prix “My Best TV Award” at the 16th Galaxy Awards.

Minato's Laundromat AKA Minato Shouji Coin Laundry

Japan 2022

A classic age gap romance where a high school student pursues the man of his dreams (who runs a laundromat). This BL is so steeped in yaoi nostalgia, not to mention a classic romance arc, that it will overload some, but those of us who love this genre for its DNA will adore it. It made me very happy because it did everything I want a BL to do - there’s not much more I could ask of a show than this. It’s the closest Japan has come to perfect live action yaoi since Seven Days (and I never make that comparison lightly).

Squee watch-along here.

My Ride

Thai 2022

Thai BL grew up with this pulp (the first ever to make my end of year top 10). It’s a truly lovely and special little show featuring the extremely rare pairing of sunshine/sunshine (AKA a cinnamon roll couple) plus mature explorations of relationships using one of the softest, sweetest, and most innocent friends to lovers vehicles. Kindly, overworked doctor meets broken-hearted motorcycle taxi driver in an “other side of the tracks” slow burn romance. The support cast is excellent, making for great friendship groups and family dynamics. With honest queer rep that adds to, but doesn’t impede, the story, and genuine conversation about the nature of class, wealth, and classism, not to mention communication, honesty, and respect for boundaries, you can’t go wrong with this show. In other news, I am a sucker for a single dimple.

Takara & Amagi AKA Takara-kun to Amagi-kun

Japan 2022 I gnawed on my knuckles and squealed a lot with this BL. Reserved cool kid who must learn to communicate to keep the tiny disaster nugget he’s madly in love with. It is beyond charming: soft and gentle, packed with cuteness and high school angst, thirst, & yearning. Was there plot? Not really. Was it emotionally tense and paced well enough for me not to notice? Absolutely. Did I enjoy the hell out of it? Oh yes.

Kiseki: Dear to Me

Taiwan 2023

The plot is totally ridiculous and slightly unhinged, but that’s normal for Taiwan. It involves all the tropes under a very casual framework of gay mafia gangs + food = love. Absolutely every character is queer. There’s a gum-ball machine of cameos, elder gay rep, great chemistry from all pairs, and a KILLER side couple. As a result Kiseki is a poster child for Taiwanese BL, and I happen to love Taiwanese BL. Bonus? They also managed to END IT WELL, which we cannot expect from Taiwan.

My Personal Weatherman AKA Taikan Yoho

Japan 2023

This style of live action yaoi really only works from Japan. Basically: boys who fell in love in college end up living together but both are so repressed they actually don't realize they're in love. It's higher heat than we usually get from Japan's HEA stuff, and that part is also very well done, but it leaned into the "why don't they just talk for fuck's sake?" trope which is only exacerbated into undiluted frustration by the fact that they're already fucking. It's great, but watching requires more patience than usual, even for Japan.

Our Dining Table AKA Bokura no Shokutaku

Japan 2023

A lonely salaryman and talented cook gets accidentally adopted by a college kid and his little brother. I was always gonna love this show if they stuck to the manga (which is very dear to my heart). And they did, paralleling it almost exactly. It’s a quiet & cozy little parable of found family alleviating loneliness. Possibly too slow for some but definitely high up there for me as the best of what Japan can do with softness (like Restart After Come Back Home). It’s only flaw (if I dare say such a thing) is that it is not really “romantic.” Lovely & sweet but the romance beats are being used to build a family relationship, not just couple intimacy, but that's OK with me. This is a very safe show for anyone to watch.

Step By Step

Thai 2023

This was Thailand’s answer to The New Employee, and everything I loved about that show I loved about this one. This office romance between a stern boss and sweet subordinate felt more authentic to cubical work than previous Thai BLs of this ilk. That authenticity added tension to the narrative and its characters development (how novel). I also really enjoyed the charming side characters and the brothers' relationship to each other (although I could have done without that brother's side BL).

Long Time No See

Korea (Strongberry) 2017

Catfishing assassins on either side of a turf war who fall in love not knowing they are on opposite sides. Or do they? Suspenseful plot, good fight sequences, mature characters, hot sexitimes and even hotter beating the shit out of each other and kissing while covered in blog (this came from KOREA?), plus an HEA. One of the hidden gems of the BL genre.

About Youth

Taiwan 2022

A truly lovely little coming of age high school BL with a classic YA low drama but high angst and an earnest depth. I didn’t even mind the singing, and that’s saying a lot. A weak seme/uke dynamic but tons of BL tropes (both rare in a high school setting but common for Taiwan) makes this one feel both sweet and colored by real world authenticity and grit.

Some of these shows ALSO appeared on Viki or iQIYI, but these BLs will appear only once on these round up posts (here for Gaga), not on the other platforms top 10.

(source)

This list updated Spring 2024, not responsible for cool stuff that aired on Gaga (or was taken off the platform) after that date.

This is part of a series more here:

366 notes · View notes

dweemeister · 10 months ago

Text

Best Documentary Short Film Nominees for the 96th Academy Awards (2024, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)

This blog, since 2013, has been the site of my write-ups to the Oscar-nominated short film packages – a personal tradition for myself and for this blog. This omnibus write-up goes with my thanks to the Regency South Coast Village in Santa Ana, California for providing all three Oscar-nominated short film packages.

If you are an American or Canadian resident interested in supporting the short film filmmakers in theaters (and you should, as very few of those who work in short films are as affluent as your big-name directors and actors), check your local participating theaters here.

Without further ado, here are the nominees for the Best Documentary Short Film at this year’s Oscars. The write-ups for the Live Action and Animated Short categories are coming soon. Non-American films predominantly in a language other than English are listed with their nation(s) of origin.

Năi Nai & Wài Pó (2023)

Rarely do both sides of one’s family ever meet. You might expect them to mingle at weddings and funerals. But cohabitation? Such is the case with Taiwanese American director Sean Wang’s two grandmothers in Năi Nai & Wài Pó (paternal and maternal grandmother, respectively), available worldwide on Disney+ and Hulu. Wishing to live closer to family, Wang moved in with his grandmothers Yi Yan Fuei (Năi Nai) and Chang Li Hua (Wài Pó) in their California household during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. His grandmothers rarely leave the house, even for groceries, and keep their heavy curtains drawn at all hours. As thin beams of sunlight barely stream through the interior’s earthy colors, both grandmothers continue to read the newspaper, sing traditional Chinese music, do their own cooking (I assume someone drops off groceries for them), tease each other about farting in bed, and reflect on their families and their pasts. They know that there are fewer tomorrows remaining, but that will not stop them from living joyously and with love for their grandson, who, though off-screen, they converse with throughout the shoot.

Qualifying for the Academy Awards by wining Best Documentary Short at SXSW in 2023 (in addition to the equivalent prize at AFI Fest), Năi Nai & Wài Pó freely admits that its subjects are playing up their act for their grandson. Observational cinema this is not. But in their sense of exaggerated play there exists a twofold acknowledgement. First, as Năi Nai states, “the days we spend feeling pain and the days we spend feeling joy are the same days spent. So, I’m going to choose joy.” And perhaps most meaningfully to Wang, their playing for the camera is one of many ways they express their love for their grandson. It is an elevated home video, a loving portrait, and a reminder to cherish those who loved us into being.

My rating: 7.5/10

The Barber of Little Rock (2023)

People Trust in Little Rock, Arkansas is a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). In other words, it is a non-profit – partially funded by the American federal government – to address issues in creating economic growth and opportunities in some of the most underserved communities in the nation through loans, emergency financial assistance, and housing subsidies. People Trust and its President, Arlo Washington, are the subjects of The Barber of Little Rock (available for free online through The New Yorker), directed by John Hoffman (2021’s Fauci) and Christine Turner (2021’s Lynching Postcards: 'Token of A Great Day'). The film, Oscar-qualified by winning the Grand Prize for Documentary Short at Indy Shorts International Film Festival (Indiana), requires a wealth of context to the issues that it raises, but does not always provide enough – especially how municipal, state, and regional history impacts racism in banking, and vice versa.

Arlo Washington is a fascinating, wonderfully-intentioned person, but the movie spends too much time with him directly stating the piece’s thesis about financial equality and generational poverty to the camera. Most compelling of all were some of the individual appointments at People Trust of regular people simply looking for financial relief or a loan to kickstart a business or make their rent payments. So too Washington's barbering training school – especially a scene when two students are asked to look intently at the other’s faces, to understand the other’s struggles simply through quiet observation. Arlo Washington figures in many of these scenes as well, and those scenes reveal as much, if not more, about the lives of People Trust’s clients than any of his brief lectures can accomplish. Hoffman and Turner clearly had deeply cinematic material to work with that could empower their messaging, and it is a shame they are unable to fully utilize it.

My rating: 7/10

Island in Between (2023, Taiwan)

Ten kilometers away from the Chinese city of Xiamen lies Kinmen, a group of islands under control of Taiwan (the island of Taiwan is 187 kilometers away). Directed and narrated by S. Leo Chiang and distributed by The New York Times, Island in Between is Chiang’s meditation on not only Kinmen’s precarious geography and its political status, but his own identity of being American, Chinese, and Taiwanese – three separate identities that interconnect, but are forever distinct. Like many viewers, I was unaware of Kinmen’s existence before viewing Island in Between. This film is most valuable in introducing audiences to a place in some ways frozen in the mid-twentieth century, not so much capturing the spirit of the place and understanding its history.

During visits to mainland China in the late 2000s, Chiang, Taiwanese-born and American-raised, was struck by how vibrant the mainland was – something unrecognizable from “the communist wasteland [he] learned about in school.” In the years since, the crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and increased political tensions between China and Taiwan have complicated his feelings towards the mainland. As a Vietnamese American, I easily saw parallels between how the younger diaspora views our so-called “motherland”, what we are taught, and how older generations perceive their original home. Even among generations, there are divisions in how we feel about the motherland. But Chiang has the additional complication of being caught between three nations important to his being. If anything, his mentions about his parents and their views feels far too cursory, as they are the ones most responsible for shaping his views about American/Chinese/Taiwanese tensions. One hopes this film is not a harbinger of things to come, as beached tanks rust on the placid Kinmen shore.

My rating: 7/10

The ABCs of Book Banning (2023)

As of the publication of this omnibus write-up, bans and challenges to books in libraries and schools have spiked since 2021. These book challenges, often taken up by parents and certain religious organizations, have disproportionately targeted books by and/or about LGBTQ+ and non-white (especially black) people. Stepping into the debate is MTV Documentary Films’ The ABCs of Book Banning (available on Paramount+), directed by Sheila Nevins, Trish Adlesic, and Nazenet Habtezgh. Unfortunately, the film advocates against book challenges in the most stultifyingly artless way. Early on, a title card reveals that the filmmakers will ask about book banning and restrictions from a group that we have heard little from: children. An honorable approach, but the interview snippets found in The ABCs of Book Banning are repetitive and seem rehearsed – children, aghast at the notion that a selected book is a target, offer reasons why book banning is a terrible idea. Nothing Americans have not heard before. Breaking up their interviews are images of book covers, followed by a brief quotation from said book, and an amateurish “BANNED” or “CHALLENGED” banner in red over the book. Sometimes, cheap animation depicting that book’s passage appears; the placement of these animated sequences has no rhyme or reason.

Damningly, this is a film in search of a structure. A handful of authors whose books have been banned from libraries or schools show up to introduce themselves over what appears to be an interview over Zoom. They say a few sentences about why book banning is terrible and we never hear from them again in the film – a complete waste. I suspect these authors recorded longer interviews, but there is almost nothing that remains of those interviews in the final product. This is a film for those who agree with its premise, have no cinematic taste, and are tediously self-satisfied in how they express their political views.

My rating: 4/10

The Last Repair Shop (2023)

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is the last major city school district in the United States to offer free musical instrument repair to its students. From the Los Angeles Times and Searchlight Pictures comes Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers’ The Last Repair Shop (also available on Disney+ and Hulu), which takes us to LAUSD’s repair shop. Just short of the 40-minute limit for short films, The Last Repair Shop curiously tells the viewer preciously little about the shop itself (what are the challenges it is facing, and why is the last of its kind?). Proudfoot and Bowers – both previously nominated in this category for A Concerto Is a Conversation (2021; also available online thanks to The New York Times) – adopt much of the same style as their previous nominee. Both films share talking heads in shallow focus and snappy editing. These aspects sometimes made A Concerto Is a Conversation incohesive, but they work immensely better for The Last Repair Shop. It also helps that The Last Repair Shop, which slowly reveals itself to also be a portrait of a rarely-seen side to L.A., has a clear structure that the viewer can discern early on.

What carries The Last Repair Shop are the life-affirming conversations we have with the four principal interview subjects, all of whom work in a different department at the shop – Dana Atkinson (strings), Paty Moreno (brass), Duane Michaels (woodwinds), and Steve Bagmanyan (pianos; also the shop supervisor, and who inspired the film as he tuned pianos at Bowers’ high school). Whether they play an instrument or not, all four recognize music’s ability to better understand ourselves and others, and as “one of the best things that humans do.” The addition of student voices to the film – especially when one realizes that the repair shop employees almost never hear back from the children whose instruments they repair – strengthens a connection, however distant, through music. The Last Repair Shop’s final minutes provide it that final cinematic touch you might have anticipated, an affirmation of why those who speak the language of music hold it so dear.

My rating: 8.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.

From previous years: 88th Academy Awards (2016) 89th (2017) 90th (2018) 91st (2019) 92nd (2020) 93rd (2021) 94th (2022) 95th (2023)

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

#Nai Nai and Wai Po #The Barber of Little Rock #Island in Between #The ABCs of Book Banning #The Last Repair Shop #Sean Wang #John Hoffman #Christine Turner #S. Leo Chiang #Sheila Nevins #Trish Adlesic #Nazenet Habtezgh #Ben Proudfoot #Kris Bowers #96th Academy Awards #Oscars #31 Days of Oscar #My Movie Odyssey

3 notes · View notes