Notes on "Spy x Family" and "Uncorked"

"Spy x Family":

- I rec this. Sometimes sweet, usually pretty funny. Well-made.
- I’m constantly going ‘what decade is this?!’ because it’s Every Decade, and also every country in Europe (flashbacks to the Russian Sherlock Holmes). That is a personal issue, though. It’s fine if Japan doesn’t give a shit about the London-Austria frankenstreet scenes they have wrought here.
- It is weird how even in Europe everyone’s still Japanese, tho. Like the fuck is this omelet rice breakfast? Y'ain't finding that on a random table in Graz.

"Uncorked":

- Excellent, precise evocation of family dynamics and romantic relationships throughout, with banter that felt engaging, real. Lively, charming character work.
- Relatedly, a great, subtle interplay between white and black space in the South and depiction of its impact on power even in private relationships.
- The switch to French rap in Paris was great, as was the in-passing but astute attention to France as itself a raced, classed environment.
- An excellently written movie--to be honest this probably did the bulk of the work for me that "Whiplash" did for other people and then extended out in other directions, without relying on all of "Whiplash"'s fucking tedious, overdone, only-semi-critical portraiture of toxic masculinity (which it also lavished attention on, thus undoing the work of the film's only ever vaguely critical treatment).
- I love the attention to the craft involved in running this family restaurant, on the cooking and administrative ends.