Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! Last week I just barely managed to scrabble together enough airing shows to return to my traditional streaming-focused Week in Review model, but since then, my circumstances have taken a couple major turns that make that style significantly less tenable. For one thing, I’m dropping God of High School, because it’s not a good show and I don’t really enjoy watching it anymore. But more importantly, and far more positively, I’ve received some extremely generous reader donations directed towards Oregairu S3 writeups – meaning that from here out, I’ll hopefully be jamming out full weekly Oregairu articles, just as soon as I marathon the entirety of the first two seasons to refresh myself.

Considering the only thing you can really say about God of High School is “animation good, story bad,” hopefully all this counts as a net positive for you folks. And meanwhile, after a slight cooldown period to rekindle my engine after Preview Week, I’ve resumed munching through classic films in earnest, and have plenty more reflections to share with you all. Let’s dive into another Week in Review!

First off, after two episodes that each pretty much served as the ambitious, information-packed premieres to two different shows, it was actually kinda shocking how normal Deca-Dence’s third episode was. Taking place largely from Natsume’s perspective, this episode offered a fairly traditional training arc, while taking a likely necessary break from the dramatic animation highlights. Building off the already-strong dynamic of our two leads, episode three efficiently shuffled Natsume from total newbie to semi-skilled combatant, while also laying out the intriguing mechanics of combat in this world.

At the same time, this episode also offered plenty of worldbuilding and thematic meat to bite into. We at last received the full explanation for life in their current world, which felt perfect for both this show specifically and our own global moment: pollution and unregulated capitalism had turned humans into a purchasable commodity, now owned by a corporation within a far more stable society of cyborgs. I’m used to having to tease out the thematic implications of a show, but Deca-Dence is pretty in-your-face about all this; there aren’t really any ways to interpret this show beyond “if humanity keeps fucking around and valuing capital over either the environment or human life, they’re going to end up on a demented post-apocalyptic game preserve.”

As if this show’s reflections on capitalism, society, and mortality weren’t enough, I was also thoroughly intrigued by Natsume’s monologue about what she owes to her robotic arm, and how that seemed to convince Kaburagi to help her. It’ll be interesting to see what this show might have to say about transhumanism, or what it is to be a “person,” in the context of a society where cyborgs are already the dominant species. Right now, our leads serve as a bridge between two oppressed worlds, and with the show already having demonstrated such clear thematic bite, I’m eager to see where their story goes from here.

After being seriously impressed by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, I dug further into his catalog with the highly-recommended Pulse, which was absolutely fantastic. In terms of its premise, Pulse fits pretty neatly into the early-00s Japanese horror wave, exemplified by anxious ghost stories like Ringu and The Grudge. All these films are pretty great, but in Kurosawa’s hands, Pulse is elevated into a grand statement on alienation, demonstrating once again the man’s absurd talent for cinematography. Pulse is composed of a thousand perfect little compositions, each shot a delightful maze of visual geometry, and an evocative cage for its central characters.

Kurosawa’s awareness of symmetry and visual blocking constantly reminds me of the perfection of Bong Joon-ho’s layouts, and at the same time, Pulse is a genuinely terrifying film, featuring some of the most effectively alien, menacing ghosts I’ve ever seen. The story proceeds with a dreamy, only vaguely contiguous sense of inevitability, set in a world that seems to be perpetually sinking into anonymous fog. Pulse succeeds as an exploration of modern alienation, as a gorgeous series of alluring setpieces, and as a pure, deeply discomforting horror film. Whenever I put together some sort of “best horror films” list, Pulse will absolutely be in attendance.

I also watched Coming to America, one of Eddie Murphy’s most beloved comedies, which I’d somehow missed seeing at some point in my childhood. As it turns out, Eddie Murphy is really goddamn funny, and Coming to America is an absolute delight of a film. I’ve mentioned a number of times how I tend to prefer positive comedies to negative ones – ie, I prefer stories where the characters actually like each other, and build jokes out of their camaraderie or charm, rather than their ability to drag each other down. Coming to America is a proud example of this form, with Murphy’s Prince Akeem standing as an incredibly charming lead, and even the film’s theoretically “antagonists” largely being pretty likable people.

Murphy is one of those comedic actors who has ascended to the highest peak of physical self-control, able to sell a joke purely through subtle expression shifts, like Steve Martin or Charlie Chaplin. He’s a perpetual delight on-screen, and with strong supporting performances by Arsenio Hall and James Earl Jones, there is basically no point where Coming to America drags in any way. It’s nice to see Eddie Murphy on the top of the world, and I’m glad he used that stage to make such a warm, endearing film.