Hello everybody, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. My heart was stolen by a videogame again this week, so expect plenty of rambling about Slay the Spire at the end of this piece. But in the meantime, I also snuck in a couple more films, along with polishing off Katsuhiro Otomo’s phenomenal Memories collection. I’ve got harsh words for Hitchcock and effusive praise for killer robots, so hopefully the temperature of my takes can mitigate the relative lightness of this week’s schedule. Let’s get to it! Engine, go! It’s time for the Week in Review!

First off, I returned to Hitchcock’s collection with the prestigious Vertigo. Vertigo is considered one of Hitchcock’s greatest masterpieces, and in a formal, aesthetic sense, I can certainly understand that. The film essentially invented the “dolly zoom” effect, wherein a camera adjusts its depth of field in time with zooming in or out, thereby creating an effect where a central object remains in perpetual focus while the field around it becomes wildly distorted. It sounds complicated, but the ultimate effect is one we’re all familiar with – that heart-drop zoom effect, generally associated with moments of sheer emotional distress, here used to convey James Stewart’s incapacitating vertigo.

Along with its genuine formal invention, Vertigo is replete with plentiful other gorgeous shots, thrilling chases, and snappy exchanges. But for all that, I just couldn’t find myself emotionally investing in the proceedings, largely because it so clearly exemplifies Hitchcock’s slanted view of romance. At the time of shooting, heroine Kim Novak was twenty-four years old, less than half the age of James Stewart. The absurd disconnect between their ages and experiences made believing in their whirlwind romance completely impossible – the film would tell me that they’re madly in love, but they were just such a mismatched pair, and their scenes of genuine affection were so unconvincing, that I could never believe it.

Ultimately, Vertigo actually turns into a sort of interrogation of this very process of idolizing and dehumanizing young women – but while I appreciate the cleverness of that trick in a formal sense, it did nothing to retroactively invest me in such an indulgent romantic conceit. Enjoying classic Hollywood cinema frequently requires indulging a great number of old white men’s personal fantasies, but though I loved many of Vertigo’s aesthetic qualities, its core romantic contrivance was just too much to ask.

Moving on to a classic we can all agree on, I also checked out Chopping Mall, which features three mall security robots who are turned evil (?) by a lightning strike, and go on to murder the shit out of a bunch of teenagers.

Chopping Mall offers basically everything you’d want from a classic slasher, from exploding heads to heroically misguided sacrifices to a weirdly endearing set of monsters. The film’s robots are just entirely unthreatening at all times, and could likely be defeated by (1) a staircase, (2) some high shelves, or (3) perhaps just sitting quietly until they go away. And Chopping Mall understands this, and thus sets up a variety of amusingly contrived setpieces, where its deadly daleks do their dastardly deeds with digital delight.

Slashers are resolute B movies, meaning you sometimes have to accept some clumsiness or ugliness in the bargain – but Chopping Mall is cheerful, bloody popcorn fun from start to finish, never taking itself too seriously, but also never offering any grating winks at the camera. Just a plain great time.

After that, we checked out The Cannonball Run, or… well, we attempted to. We got about twenty minutes in or so, and at that point it had mostly been a mix of clumsy slapstick and just-plain-racism, while our conversations bounced around the fundamentals of a goody Wacky Races narrative. Over the course of those discussions, it became obvious that my viewing partner hadn’t seen Redline – and thus I immediately paused the underwhelming Cannonball Run and switched to the magnificent Redline, one of the most beautiful, silly, and absurdly energetic anime of all time. So I guess my review of Cannonball Run is that Redline sure is a good film.

Speaking of good anime films, I also finished up Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories with Cannon Fodder, the one directed by Otomo himself. Cannon Fodder felt like a natural continuation of Stink Bomb’s anxieties, shifting from Japan’s immediate martial concerns to an imagined world where war is a certainty, and the citizens of its city all dedicate their efforts to the firing of giant cannons. In a narrative sense, Cannon Fodder combines echoes of 1984 with more explicitly antiwar sentiments, presenting both the terror and the tedium of life in a fascist, fully militarized society. There’s no glory in its narrative – its characters are sunken-eyed, defeated already, unable even to stop their children from being inspired by their world’s violent iconography.

In visual terms, Cannon Fodder is an astonishingly ambitious formal experiment, as Katsuhiro Otomo largely avoids traditional cuts altogether. Instead, the “camera” follows the film’s cast without pause, riding an elevator with them down through the bowels of the city, spinning to capture the totality of the great cannon chambers, or floating forward through glass in order to shift from one subject to another. The technique greatly enhances our sense of entrapment within Cannon Ball’s world, as well as our understanding that this whole city is one terrible organism, all individual cells aligned in one monstrous purpose. It’s a stunning display of anime’s uniquely untethered camera, one realized only through absurd feats of perspective and animation. In both narrative and visual terms, Cannon Fodder serves as a terrific capstone for what I now know to be one of anime’s Great Films. Check out Memories, you won’t regret it!

You might have noticed my viewing schedule was lighter than usual this week, and there’s one clear reason why: Slay the Spire, a game designed to drain my life energy entirely. The last couple years have taught me that roguelikes are one of my favorite genres, with games like Dead Cells and Hades offering a thrilling combination of strategic variation and physical mastery. Though genuinely tough games are mostly just represented by From Software on the blockbuster stage, indie roguelikes offer all sorts of punishing challenges, and ways to express and differentiate your style.

Meanwhile, I’ve been playing Magic: The Gathering since the goddamn second grade, meaning I have decades of experience with its systems, and a particular fondness for the “drafting” format. In drafting, rather than competing with a deck you built at home, you actually open new packs of cards at the event, and select individual cards to build up your eventual deck. Successful drafting requires a mental image of the whole you are attempting to construct, an understanding of what abilities in what density you require, an ability to adjust your ongoing plan in order to incorporate changes provoked by the cards you run into, and a million other component skills – and nearly all of those skills are rewarding in Slay the Spire, which replaces the traditional roguelike combat with a card game, and the appearance of boons or other powers with selections of cards to draft.

So yes, this game is clearly designed to ruin me specifically, and yes, it has succeeded masterfully in that goal. Even as I’m working through a multi-hour run of Slay the Spire, I’m already planning my next run, looking forward to trying out some new synergies or maximizing the effectiveness of some rare accessory. The game offers four characters to choose from, each with their own unique approach to combat, and each with a variety of different themes to draft – even just within the Silent class, you can draft poison, shivs, discard, and probably some other archetypes I haven’t even discovered yet. And of course, the nature of a draft means your approach must always be flexible, and that you’re likely to balance some number of different subthemes, while also managing your health and coin economy, and plotting a route that balances powerful rewards with sustainability.

The game is absurdly fun, and if you’re a fan of roguelikes and card games, I’d highly recommend it. My only caveat is that it’s also quite hard, and specifically tests a bunch of draft-relevant skills that are kinda tough to pick up by trial and error. Combat-oriented games tend to have a more coherent feedback loop of failure and punishment, but with drafting, your mistake might actually have been “I didn’t maintain a safe ratio of offensive and defensive abilities, and thus eventually ran into enough lopsided hands in a row that my health economy couldn’t recover.” That said, Slay the Spire actually seems like one of the best possible ways to learn drafting, and drafting is one of the most rewarding styles of gameplay I’ve ever seen (you build a terrifying engine and then kill people with it!), so I’d still urge the curious to give this one a try.