Welcome or welcome back! I’m starting the second month of my One Per Week challenge. So far so good! I’m hoping to record and post a video recap of the music, movies, and books I consumed in January. I will share it on here as soon as I publish it on YouTube.
Below are my reviews for this first week of February:
Album: Leave the Bones by Joseph Ray and Lakou Mizik
5/5 stars
My mom recommended this album to me. Thank you mom! This album is beautiful. I don’t know how she found it, but I’m really glad she did. This album is a collaboration between multigenerational Haitian roots band, Lakou Mizik, and Grammy-winning electronic musician Joseph Ray. It is powerful and it has some great rhythms.
To learn more about this project, I recommend you check out the album’s website and read its story here: https://www.leavethebones.com/story/en
You can also learn more about the meaning behind each song here: https://www.leavethebones.com/music
I recommend you listen to the whole album, but at least listen to “Ogou (Pran Ka Mwen).”
Book: Almond: A Novel by Sohn Won-pyung
5/5 stars
This week’s book was recommended to me by one of my cousins. Thank you for the great recommendation! I think this is the first novel I read by an author from South Korea. This is a coming-of-age novel about a boy, Yun-jae, who has a condition that makes it difficult for him to recognize emotions in himself and others. At first I thought Yun-jae might be on the spectrum, but the story explicitly explains that he actually has alexithymia. This novel is both tragic and heartwarming. I loved how it analyzes emotions and the importance of empathy.
Give it a read! It’s not too long, and I think you will really grow to care for Yun-jae and some of the other characters.
Movie: Persuasion– Directed by Carrie Cracknell; Screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow
3/5 stars
I know this movie was kind of a flop, and it’s definitely not a good adaptation of its source material, which is the novel of the same name by Jane Austen, but I still didn’t hate it!
Why is this a 3/5 stars for me? I don’t know, maybe I’m just starving for more romcoms and this was something to help fill my craving momentarily. I know I read the novel in a course about Jane Austen that I took for my MA, but I honestly don’t remember much about it, so I watched this movie with 0 expectations of it living up to its source material.
Here’s all the bad things I can say about this movie: It’s very cringe at times with its anachronistic expressions (“He’s a 10.” or “I’m an empath”), so I’m sure it will not age well. Anne breaks the fourth wall several times throughout the movie, which also gets old after a while. Worst of all, the chemistry between Anne and Fredrick isn’t great. I would have much preferred she had more scenes with Henry Golding’s character.
If you want to watch a video essay explaining more in depth why this movie isn’t good, I recommend this video:
If like me you need something to scratch that romcom itch, go ahead and watch it. Remember though, you will not enjoy this movie if you compare it to the novel it’s based on, so treat it as if it were its own thing.
You can also ignore me and just skip this movie altogether and just watch any other movie adaptation of Jane Austen’s work. Go watch Clueless again.
One Per Week 
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