Well folks, it’s Wednesday again. Normally, this is when I offer some scattered thoughts on the previous week in streaming anime, but for this season, that process seems kind of superfluous. I’m currently watching My Hero Academia, Chihayafuru, and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, and among the three of them, I’m already writing episodic articles about each new Chihayafuru and Eizouken article. I doubt anyone’s particularly excited about hearing me dutifully report on My Hero Academia’s extremely loyal and generally unremarkable adaptation each week, so instead I’d like to expand my focus a bit, and talk about some of the non-anime media I’ve gotten to recently. I’ve been making a concerted effort to watch more acclaimed films and whatnot, and if I can’t turn all that personal fulfillment into Content, then what the heck am I doing?

First off, I did watch one excellent anime film this week: Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You, the followup to his blockbuster Your Name. In contrast with Your Name, Weathering with You felt like a more intimate and more desperate film, and I really loved it for that. Your Name was largely about the fading, underappreciated beauty of rural life, and possessed a great reverence for its central village’s old places and beautiful traditions. Weathering with You, on the other hand, felt like a film precisely about this present moment, but still filtered through Shinkai’s combination of intimate stories and bombastic romanticism. Its protagonists feel almost buried under the weight of their responsibilities, cast into a world that’s falling apart due to forces entirely outside their control, yet nonetheless expected to effortlessly pull themselves together into socially approved adults.

It’s beautiful, heartfelt, and absolutely brimming with swing-for-the-fences tear-jerking moments, but those are all things I’ve happily learned to expect from modern Shinkai. What struck me specifically about this film was how Shinkai was able to make what felt like a “political film” without directly addressing any specific political situation; like in all his films, he’s able to tap into a universal sentiment, and express it not as a political thesis, but as a series of relatable, poignant character moments. While I’ve been greatly enjoying films like Parasite and Us, which tackle the fundamental conflicts of our age with frankness and ferocity, it’s also nice to see a film like Weathering with You, which is about kids simply trying to live their own lives in the context of our modern apocalypse. Living for yourself can be its own form of rebellion!

I also burned through the first season of Twin Peaks, which counts as my first exposure to David Lynch’s work. Lynch is a director I’ve been meaning to get into for a while, as his combination of surrealist narrative techniques and weird fiction quasi-horror always seemed right up my alley, and I’m happy to report that I was entirely right. Twin Peaks kicks ass, and stands far apart from the hardboiled action/thriller paradigm that has come to define western prestige television. It’s centered on the death of Laura Palmer, a beloved high school student in the remote town of Twin Peaks, and catalogues both the police’s efforts to solve her case, as well as the whole town’s transformations in the wake of her death.

The show maintains a tight episode-to-episode pull through its well-executed procedural core and plentiful mysteries, but Twin Peaks is so much more than that. The town itself is a bizarre wonder – a relic cast between decades, simultaneously embodying ‘40s noir, ‘50s Americana, and ‘80s capitalist excess, with different townspeople seemingly plucked from entirely different worlds. The strange timelessness of this town merges naturally with the show’s lightly distributed supernatural elements; it’s clear that this is a place where the old forces of the world are a little closer to the surface, but what forms those forces may take are unclear, leaving the audience with a perpetual sense of unfathomable danger just around the corner.

At the same time, the show embraces goofy sitcom gags and an endless array of soap opera-ready love triangles, fragmenting its tone to the point where you feel any scene could change its intent in a moment, shifting to either strangely irreverent comedy or seething despair. These discordant elements and traditionally disparaged genre influences echo the strange fusion and sunny not-quite-rightness of the town itself, and when fused with Lynch’s phenomenal eye for scene-setting and eerie use of repeated visual motifs, add up to a gripping drama that’s like little else I’ve seen. Also, Kyle MacLachlan is a goddamn electrifying actor, and his Dale Cooper is a fascinating protagonist. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

Finally, on a lighter note, playing through Death Stranding has convinced me that Mads Mikkelsen is one of the most impressive actors of the present moment, and thus I’ve joined my housemates in a journey to Watch All His Shit. In recent weeks, I watched two separate movies whose premises were basically “Mads Mikkelsen acts stoic in snowy weather,” called Arctic and Polar. Having watched both of them, I can conclude two things: that Mads’ profound talent means he is able to lend a certain degree of pathos and dignity to even the most rote or obnoxious productions, and that he desperately needs to hire a better agent.