smart girls talking

This was such a quick read, I literally started and finished it while waiting for my car service to be completed. It's a humourous semi-memoir by Zarqa Nawaz, creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie, a Muslim Pakistani-Canadian who has an irreverent view of life. I say it's a semi-memoir because the stories in her book are totally embellished one way or another to the polished sheen of a tumblr post or stand up routine, and that's fine, it doesn't offer accuracy, only self-deprecating neurotic humour and emotional insight of her experience as a Muslim woman in a Western world.

I laughed a lot, I cringed a lot, I went "oh nooooo" a lot, but I also got some useful understanding here and there to chew on. Zarqa details growing up the only brown girl in her school and envying the blonde white girls who wore miniskirts, wrestling with body hair, using religion as the means to rebel at her parents, dealing with family expectations regarding her career and marriage, and her various misadventures in journalism, amateur filmmaking, making waves in her local community and eventually kicking off Little Mosque on the Prairie. The kernels of the stories may be true but parts where she details her cluelessness (like her being unprepared for her journalism interview, or Hajj, or cooking for Eid) made me so stressed on her behalf, but her successes are also fun to read about, and there is freshness, I suppose, in Zarqa detailing the many many things that went wrong on the way to learning something about herself. There's an Ally McBeal kind of feel in her confidence to do things her way and fall flat on her face as she does.

It's a good thing by now I've read enough books by Muslim peeps who live in the Western world, so I'm not as alienated by their expressions of faith as a modern person in the modern world. I think the best thing was a few books back that pinpointed our specific SEA-flavour being influenced by animism and it's like, YES THERE'S A TERM FOR IT. So I can read Zarqa stating that "Muslims don't believe in ghosts" and just be like, speak for yourself, sister! (Instead of getting hurt and confused.)

I didn't finish watching The Devil's Plan season 2, but I did see other shows similar to TDP and The Genius mentioned in various discussion spaces - reddit, youtube and Taran's patreon. Bloody Game in particular got recced a lot, with people saying to skip seasons 1 and 2, and head on straight to 3, which they say has a bigger budget and is presumably more exciting.

A reddit comment linked to an online stream, so I watched a few minutes of Bloody Game season's 3 before deciding I should watch season 1 instead, so I'd know the format of the show going in, the way that the season 3 players obviously did. Season 1 appeared to be similar to The Devil's Plan in that the players are made to live together over a short period of time and play games each day, but there are some differences in that format as well. (Note: TG aired over 2013-2015, BG over 2021-2023, and TDP over 2023-2025.)

Unfortunately I got a few episodes into BG's season 1 when I realized that the ratio of game : social was way more weighted to the social aspect, i.e. the mechanism where players vote who gets kicked out of the main house Survivor-style means that a great deal of time is spent following negotiations and alliance plotting, which I just don't care about as much. TDP and The Genius are more my thing because eliminations are based on gameplay, so negotiations do play a part but happen simultaneously with the games and can get derailed by gameplay.

( Spoilers for Bloody Game season 1. )

I hoped that Taran would cover Bloody Game because then I'd get to follow an abridged version of that show with his entertaining commentary on top, but he's decided to start commentating on the OG The Genius instead. Which is great because I get to experience that show again, but leaves my Bloody Game consumption hanging.

I got food poisoning! I haven't gotten it in years and forgot how absolutely miserable it can be even after the worst is over. My appetite is back, which is nice, but I'm still feeling a little wary in general, which is a shame because the restaurant that I got it from (from the salsa!) was fancy, instead of some stereotypical dinky eatery, which just goes to show you can never be sure.

While feeling bleh I managed to finish reading Malaysian Cinema and Beyond: Genre, Representation and the Nation which is a relatively recent get at a local bookstore (I do have exceptions when adding to my carefully-controlled to-read book shelf). I don't think I've ever read anything about local media except a P. Ramlee biography from way back when that I can barely remember, so I jumped on this one, which is a recent 2024 publication, and features seven essays from different authors covering various local cinema topics.

The essays are short-ish and as a layperson I found some of them a bit too technical for my understanding, but I totally respect that because editor Wan Aida Wan Yahaya (who also contributed one of the essays) is totally right in that there's a dearth of scholarly analysis about our movie output and they should be as in-depth technically as they can be. The topics are: an overview (yay!) of trends through the pre-golden, golden and post-golden eras as they are generally understood; the use of CGI as flash to compete with Hollywood-made expectations vs. to actually say something; two essays about Dain Said's Bunohan; trends in representation of Malay women; war films in mythmaking of the modern nation-state; and films that look at the permeability of borders in the Nusantara region.

These were great, and while reading it I did watch some of the movies the essays discuss! Of course I had to check out Bunohan which, besides already being the topic of two essays, is mentioned in THREE other essays in the book. It's one of those few times when Netflix actually does have the thing I want to watch, and they tagged it as "understated", "art house", "rivalry", and I went -- oh no art house. I am not an art house person, and I think if I watched Bunohan without being preempted for what Said Dain was doing, I would have been lost, because I don't think I would've understood the supernatural elements of the movie until the very end (i.e. that the main characters' mother has become a supernatural creature, and their father is in possession of a saka) and from there wouldn't have been able to reflect retroactively on the film that came before it. I would've understood the encroachment of capitalism on the traditional ways, though! But the supernatural elements are a huge part of it and the film gives no context for that. That said, the camera work and framing choices are brilliant even if I wouldn't be able to get all of them, and I do love the strange opening scene.

A lot of the book's topics were fun (eg. we love melodramas and horror movies, and Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam was the turning point for modern horror -- I actually saw that in the cinema!) but my main enjoyment was in learning the older history in the early decades. Like how our movie industry was kicked off by outsiders, hence why the early films looked like Bollywood or Hong Kong-made output because they effectively were, even if the actors used were local, and that it took a while for local voices to become part of the industry and be able to tell our stories effectively, and that P. Ramlee being at the right place at the right time to absorb skills like a sponge gave the entire industry a boost. I did not know Filipino directors and crew were a strong influence as well, as that relationship doesn't seem to have carried forward much, unlike our greater overlap with Indonesia.