flootzavut

Drowning by Numbers (1988). A woman, her daught, and her niece are all named Cissie, drown their husbands, and depend on the local coroner Madgett (Bernard Hill) to cover up their crimes.

This is a surrealist late-80s comedy meditating on death and also games and numbers of various kinds, which is to say it feels very much of a piece with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, except for having no Shakespeare and being more focused on female characters. It's all nonsense; nobody is really a real person here, and that's fine. It's also pretty horny in various ways, and in fact Madgett proposes to each of the Cissies in turn. You kind of want him to succeed with one or possibly all of them.

If you want a sense of what you're in for with this movie, Madgett's introduction gives you a pretty good one.

--

The Bride! (2026). Maggie Gyllenhaal directs this riff on the Frankenstein mythos, this time a sometime-musical Bonnie and Clyde story about Frankenstein's creature Frank (Christian Bale), still alive in the 1930s, and the bride (Jessie Buckley) that he talks a mad scientist into "reinvigorating" for him. The dead woman thus invigorated was a mobster's call girl, but she doesn't remember any of that anymore. Sometimes Mary Shelley talks to her for some reason.

If you get the sense from this description that this movie has a lot going on, you are correct. I would say this movie is less than the sum of its parts, but I really enjoy several of those parts. Buckley is fantastic, and Annette Bening as Doctor Euphronius is delightful. The big dance number is fun. The movie has a lot of style and is sometimes cheekily anachronistic.

The various pieces don't ever really cohere; there are too many of them. And some of the pieces I enjoyed less, like the Overboard-style plot where our revived gal thinks she's still alive and was already married to Frank before her "accident." The subplot of her being occasionally literally possessed by Mary Shelley was just baffling to me. I get that it was supposed to be thematic, but: why. But, the movie tackles all its various tones and themes with a lot of energy and verve, and overall I found a lot to enjoy.

--

Send Help (2026). A frumpy woman who dreams of competing on Survivor crashlands on an island with her horrible boss.

This is a psychological thriller by Sam Raimi, and it took me a long time to go see it because ~suspense movies about people chasing each other around trying to kill each other aren't usually my thing. (See also: every home invasion movie except You're Next.) But! We don't really get that until the end, and in the meantime, Rachel McAdams is delightful as Linda Little, who's competent and helpful to a fault until she's finally pushed too far. I love how much of a glow-up Linda gets the longer they stay on the island. There were also some late developments that I really liked.

It's not breaking any new ground, but it's fun and well-executed. If you support women's wrongs(tm), I think you'll enjoy this.

I went hunting for fic of these two a while back. Here are my two favorites.

Acts of Faith by quietly_obsessed, 4k. "I don't believe in God, but I do believe in you". Jud and Blanc fall in love during the year after Wicks' murder. A bittersweet but lovely fic in which they find some healing in each other.

fair with her firstborn on bethlehem down by hauntinghouses, 9k. Benoit Blanc comes back to Chimney Rock just in time for Christmas. In which Blanc sets out to seduce a priest and/or not have a miserable Christmas, and ends up talking a lot more theology than he wants (but no more than he ought to have reasonably expected). If you're like the religious debates in the movie were great but what if they had them while fucking, this is the fic for you.

Here are a couple of my favorite winter soup recipes. They're from cookbooks, so no handy online version to link to. So this is for you and also for me, so I can access these away from my cookbooks.

( Pork and hominy soup )

( Sausage, White Bean, and Kale Soup With Besar )

In which I’m ambivalent about several fandom-favorite shows. Oh boy!

Heated Rivalry. It was wild watching a hockey romance on my screen after writing ~350k of hockey romance fic. Literally on the tv I could see writers addressing and working within the same logistical constraints all us hockey RPFers do! And this is a show that knows hockey. From the very beginning with the joint ad shoot, I knew I was in good hands. Maybe my favorite nerdy moment of the whole show was towards the end where they’re discussing how to get Ilya on a different team, and Shane straight up starts laying out the salary cap considerations. In bed! Extremely hot of him!

I couldn’t help but think about how it must be even wilder to watch if you’re a closeted NHL player. Like damn. I was crying at the big climactic scene in ep 5, as a queer unathletic woman in her 40s; imagine what that must be like to someone who actually plays the sport and lives that environment every day. I think I saw something about a juniors player(?) coming out recently and citing the show as being part of his inspiration, and just, man.

So did I like it? Well, I enjoyed watching it and would watch it again (except probably not episode three; I feel for Scott but the whole romcom thing about murdered me, and I have negative interest in Kip). I love Ilya to little tiny pieces, and I think Connor Storrie did an incredible job with him. That “deadpan on the outside, dying on the inside” kind of character is catnip. The show also made me cry big fat tears twice, which basically never happens. I’m weak for musical cues, but actually crying over a movie or tv or book is extremely rare for me.

On the other hand, I think Shane is a much weaker character, with very little external to react to compared to Ilya’s family troubles. The entire core of Shane’s character is being anxious about things that mostly haven’t happened yet, which is difficult to build a narrative arc around. I also don’t think Hudson Williams is as strong an actor as Storrie, but it’s honestly hard to say when the material he’s working with is so much weaker. I feel like it's particularly rough because he's so clearly a Sidney Crosby expy, and Sid is so much more interesting a person than Shane is. If Shane had more Sid in him (the leadership in the room, the thoughtful and very proactive team caretaking, the weird random nerdy obsessions), I would like him a lot more.

Also, I’m sorry to say but I got bored of the sex after a while. 🙈 When it comes to live action sex scenes, less is more for me, I guess? I do appreciate, as I saw someone comment, that the show made it extremely clear what everyone’s dicks were doing at all times, even though we basically never see them.

Overall, a fun time! Not mad I saw it. Not sure it really needs a second season, when it feels like it already told the whole story, but I guess we’ll see.

--

Murderbot. I read the first book a while back and was unimpressed, but I thought a change in medium might address a lot of my issues with it, specifically a sense of worldbuilding and adding more depth to the characters, even if only by being played by real live people. And indeed, I do think the show was an improvement on that score. The live actors, the flashbacks, and the necessity of building sets all added a lot to make this feel like a real world that people live in.

To be honest, the real reason I wanted to watch the show was because I really like David Dastmalchian and because Gurathin was the most interesting character in the book after Murderbot, and I was extremely well fed on those counts. The expansion of Gurathin’s character added a lot to him, to the show, and especially to the relationship with Murderbot. Holy shit, it’s like they revamped him specifically as shipbait. ( spoiler cut for those that need it )

On the other hand, the show retains a lot of the weird tonal dissonance present in the book, and without the excuse of Murderbot as an unreliable narrator. I think Martha Wells probably has politics similar to mine, and I'm confident that her representation of the extremely queer, communal society of PreservationAux was meant to be a positive one, but what we see on screen often feels like it's making a joke at the team's expense. Ratthi and Arada are the worst, because they always feel like they're about fourteen years old, but everyone on the team frequently comes across as naïve, sheltered, and neither capable of nor interested in emotionally grappling with the reality of the world they live in. The way they are loudly protective of local fauna that has repeatedly tried to kill them or threatened their lives is a good example. They come across as parodies of people who hold their professed values, rather than serious examples of what those values might look like in practice.

The exception, for better and for worse, is Gurathin, an outsider who has joined their community only recently, barely buys into most of their practices, and notably is never the butt of the joke.

And like, I recognize that this is a relatively light-hearted show! Some of my very dearest tv shows and movies are ones that mix silliness with heart, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. I think I still haven't fully figured out why this rubs me the wrong way, when those don't.

All that didn't prevent me from enjoying it overall, though. I laughed a lot. I also thought Skarsgard did great. I've not liked him before, but tbf that was in Infinity Pool and The Northman, and it's possible I hated those in general and not because of him. Anyway, I think the more he gets to be a weird little (big) guy, the better he is, so he's great as Murderbot.

And unlike Heated Rivalry, this is clearly dying for a second season. I'm glad it's been renewed.