Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. You’ll be pleased to hear I continued checking out some genuine new anime this week, tackling Adachi and Shimamura, Love Live! Nijigasaki, and whatever else I’ll have managed to sneak in before this article’s post date (editor’s note: it was nothing, he watched nothing else). At the same time, I was happy to chew through some more noteworthy live action films, and once again enjoy that weird sensation of watching something that you know must have been formative for the stuff that was formative for you. Our life experiences and personalities are intrinsically tethered to the media that has spoken to us over the years, so it’s always an odd sensation to meet the aunts and uncles of our childhood idols – but also thrilling, as we begin to understand the long lines of influence stretching across media, drawing us closer to meaningfully contributing to that chain. So yeah, the great astral tether of media inheritance, all today in the Week in Review!
First off, after much hectoring and general commotion from the crowd, I at last checked out Love Live! Nijigasaki, the Love Live franchise’s third iteration. To be honest, after the original series and Sunshine, I felt pretty filled up on the franchise’s signature mix of sitcom shenanigans and idol melodrama; but as it turns out, Nijigasaki might actually represent a hard turn for the franchise, as it embraces a subtler and more atmosphere-driven dramatic tone, as well as some welcome visual innovations.
In terms of layouts, lighting, and character acting, Love Live has never looked this good. This premiere created a vivid sense of urban melancholy through its beautiful staging, and only embraced fantastical flourishes for its musical performances, creating an intriguing separation between its cast’s literal and imagined lives. In terms of its tone and aesthetics, Nijigasaki actually feels far more like my sort of thing than its predecessors – but ultimately, the big question is whether Love Live’s visual maturation will be matched by an equivalent narrative maturation. If all this visual splendor is still being applied to a story with nothing to say but “school idols are amazing!”, I will be briefly yet fiercely disappointed.
I also checked out Adachi and Shimamura, an adaptation of a light novel by an author who also handled Bloom Into You’s Sayaka-focused spinoff. Bloom Into You was easily one of the strongest character dramas of the past few years, and I’d been told that Adachi has many of the same strengths. So far, that’s proven true: Adachi and Shimamura possesses a distinctive ear for dialogue and understanding of life’s often strange dramatic turns, with its titular heroines each coming across as fragile, uncertain fuck-ups who genuinely care about each other, but who are almost certain to hurt each other all the same.
It’s exactly my sort of shit, is what I’m saying, and the production is no slouch either. This premiere featured a healthy share of character acting flourishes, intelligent storyboards that made great use of both enclosed and external spaces, and generally attractive background art, establishing its own visual conversation between its characters’ mundane and mental worlds. Goddamnit you guys, it looks like I’m actually watching an anime this season.
Moving to films, my house checked out Dark Water, another key J-horror property from the genre’s early ‘00s heyday. Though it is technically a horror film, Dark Water is mostly concerned with depicting intimate, painful familial struggle, as its single mother heroine struggles to support her daughter, and avoid losing custody to a father who was never there. And though there is technically a ghost, that ghost is not this film’s antagonist – it is instead the specter of abandonment, driving a mother to desperation, as she hopes to somehow be the reliable parent that her own mother failed to be.
The film isn’t particularly scary, and though it uses its bleak apartment block setting well enough, it also lacks the visual genius of something like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s work. But as a meditation on that specific, sinking feeling of realizing your parents aren’t coming to pick you up, it’s a focused and haunting film, with plenty of heart and no easy answers. If you’re interested in exploring the aesthetics of J-horror without the threat of scare-you-senseless jump scares, this one’s a gentle introduction to the form, and a fine film in all respects.
I also finally saw High Fidelity, the film I incoherently alluded to in my intro paragraph. Having grown up reading the first vanguard of webcomics, along with embracing the easy elitism of musical hipsterism, it was extremely weird to see a film that clearly influenced my own influences. If not for Clerks and High Fidelity specifically, I get the feeling my adolescence would have been significantly different, even though I never saw either at an age where they could still speak to me. Instead, I interacted with their children, with all the snarky couch gags and pop culture in-jokes and conversational patterns they’d inherit.
High Fidelity is a film about a thirty-something manchild who doesn’t understand why women don’t love him, played with infuriatingly self-righteous excellence by John Cusack. Cusack’s character is one of the most unlikable protagonists I’ve seen in a long time; he is in every way the stereotypical “nice guy,” lording his wiz-kid pop literacy over everyone, and perpetually wondering why girls are “such bitches.” He is self-absorbed, shallow, obsessive, and oblivious to his own faults, and while the film does an excellent job of portraying a realistically insufferable manchild, it barely goes a tenth of the way necessary to redeem his character, and justify his happy ending. I got the impression that some aspects of his behavior are supposed to parse as endearing or clever, but he always felt like a twelve-year-old boy in an adult’s body, stomping his feet and demanding to be taken seriously.
Alright, so the film’s protagonist sucks. That said, High Fidelity still felt seminal and instructive in terms of its conversational patter, as much of the film centered on three pop music geeks bickering over genres and majestically announcing top five lists. Its scenes of trivia one-upmanship felt like a nostalgic precursor to online fandom, particularly since their culture was also a great deal of my own adolescence – from Pavement to Belle & Sebastian, these sounds were my sounds, and these people to some extent my people. It’s not a film I’d want to rewatch, given how it’s largely a pity party about a guy who sucks, but it was still an interesting film, and even more rewarding time capsule.
