Hello everyone, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. It was a productive week over at my house, as we marched through a sequence of acclaimed films, and also powered all the way through One Piece’s first post-time skip arc. The Straw Hats have been attempting to reach Fishman Island for over two hundred goddamn episodes now, having first set sail for it at the end of Enies’ Lobby before being interrupted by Thriller Bark, scattered at Sabaody, and eventually implicated in a little light treason. I can’t imagine what that wait felt like at a weekly episodic pace, but given the island’s ultimate complexity, I could believe Oda’s been slowly drafting its story for that entire span. We’re gonna go deep on that arc at the end of this article, but let’s start off with some lighter attractions, as we explore some high quality cinema. Without further ado, it’s the goddamn Week in Review.

We started off this week with one of Paul Newman’s most acclaimed films, Cool Hand Luke. Set in the early 1950s, the film follows the titular Luke as he is assigned to a chain gang, integrates into its community of prisoners, and ultimately rises against the chains that bind him. Featuring a rich ensemble cast who all offer great performances (George Kennedy won an Oscar for his performance as team leader Dragline), it’s a full course meal of a film, rambling from playful prison yard shenanigans to ruminations on the purpose of existence.

There’s plenty to applaud about Cool Hand Luke, but unsurprisingly, it was the film’s character studies and philosophical questions that most appealed to me. Luke’s acquiring of his nickname establishes the underlying conflict of the film, as well as Luke’s philosophy for fighting back against the unfairness of the world. When Luke bluffs out a fellow prisoner with a worthless poker hand, Dragline laughs, and cheers that Luke “beat him with nothing!” In response, Luke offers the smooth “sometimes nothing is a pretty cool hand,” thus earning his sobriquet.

Over the course of the film, Luke seeks to embody that statement, and show that dignity and joy can be found even if life deals you an empty hand. Again and again, he demonstrates not incredible strength or intelligence, but simple resilience: “life may beat me, but I’ll be damned if I don’t stand back up.” It’s that quality that earns him the adoration of his fellow prisoners, and it is that quality that his guards are determined to beat out of him. Cool Hand Luke never flinches from articulating the injustice of living; there is no strength or fortune to be found save for what can be found within us.

The film is a terrific experience on the whole, and rises fully into the stratosphere for its best scenes. In the first, Luke’s final meeting with his deteriorating mother sketches an entire history of hard love and disappointment across a few short minutes, as the two reflect on what they each hoped Luke’s life would be. In the last, Luke issues a final challenge to God, asking what possible cause there could be for our suffering, and what redemption he might have in mind. “Old Man, I gotta tell you, I started out pretty strong and fast,” Luke states, “but it’s beginning to get to me. When does it end? What do you got in mind for me?” God’s answer is the same as ever.

After that, we checked out a recent acclaimed horror feature, His House. The film follows a Sudanese refugee couple as they are assigned a house in England and attempt to integrate, but find themselves haunted by a presence in their new home. Given the film’s universal acclaim, I was expecting good things, but still found myself impressed by the result. His House excels in basically every way it can, and instantly establishes Remi Weekes as a director to look out for.

First of all, the performances are excellent across the board. Wunmi Mosaku and Sope Dirisu reflect myriad shades of hope, tenderness, and vulnerability across their early interactions, only to later infuse those instincts with deep splashes of desperation and guilt, offering a Hereditary-tier portrait of familial dissolution while still demonstrating mutual love at all times. Meanwhile, Matt Smith turns in a quietly excellent performance as their government liaison, holding the axe over their head while still demonstrating clear humanity as one more unhappy cog in a failing machine.

England is not kind to these refugees, but the sense of displacement, of being a person irrevocably out of step with your neighbors, is felt even more acutely than the overt racism. And England does not need to inflict new horrors on these people; their escape from Sudan offered horrors enough, and informs the dread of their new house on narrative, emotional, and thematic levels. Additionally, the film’s successes as an exploration of the refugee experience are accompanied by a consistent parade of satisfying horror beats, all elevated through Weekes’ alternately intimate and alienating direction. His House succeeds as a human drama, as a much-needed perspective on England’s refugees, and as a traditionally satisfying genre feature. Highly recommended.

We followed that with Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s ‘90s flashback to ‘70s youth culture. Dazed and Confused follows a broad ensemble of high schoolers on the last day of the school year, charting their course from the end of class through the end of the night. The film doesn’t have a single central narrative; proceeding like a Robert Altman picture, Dazed and Confused possesses the easy, wandering pace of a delinquent summer, as friend groups roam around in cars, ask each other where the party is, and generally try to find either love or inebriation in copious quantities.

With a talented ensemble cast, a hit-stacked musical score, and a few key threads of persistent conflict, Dazed and Confused offers a steady stream of attractions. Ben Affleck’s turn as a senior with far too much rage adds some wild energy to the first act, while Matthew McConaughey basically steals every scene he appears in as a lethargic, predatory postgrad (“the thing about high school chicks… I keep getting older, they stay the saaaame aaaage”). It’s all pretty superficial stuff, but that’s kind of the point, right? Dazed and Confused captures the aimlessness of youth through its very structure, building up characters you like in spite of themselves, and celebrating the arcane rituals of growing through teenage epochs. Not a personal favorite, but a compelling film that I’m quite happy I watched.

And yes, there was more One Piece. At this point we’ve blown well past the Summit War, which basically compressed five hundred episodes of worldbuilding into one absurd action sandwich, and are now nearing the end of Fishman Island. That’s fortunate for me; I feel like I’m still too close to even reflect on Summit War, but Fishman Island provides a terrific snapshot of where the work is at so far.

As far as storytelling goes, Oda’s skills have never been finer, and I get the feeling I’ll continue to be impressed from here on out. Early on, I assumed most claims regarding Oda’s “incredible ability” to seed conflicts far in advance just reflected a fundamental misunderstanding about how storytelling works. Referencing and integrating characters that appeared long ago doesn’t necessarily mean those were “seeded conflicts” – it means the author was smart enough to include some dangling ends early on, and is now looking back to see how they can flesh out the world at large. That’s not otherworldly prescience; that’s just smart, sustainable long-term plotting, and making use of dramatic resources that already exist.

At this point though, it’s become clear that Oda has indeed mastered true narrative scale and foresight, as basically every single thing we’ve learned about fishmen has informed the precise structure of this conflict, and history of their people as a whole. Oda’s at the point where he doesn’t even really need fights anymore – this arc features a seven episode flashback that contains some of One Piece’s most satisfying drama so far, centered on fault lines that allow for genuine moral ambiguity, and featuring characters we’ve seen before, now recontextualized in a way that makes them more human than ever. More than just entertaining and creative, Fishman Island feels perfectly constructed in a thematic sense: the specter of prejudice is threaded through every facet of the drama, the villain embodies the ultimate fear of inherited hatred, and the final connection between Luffy and Jinbei is so thematically and historically appropriate that in retrospect, it feels like the only way this arc could have ended.

At this point, Oda’s ability to weave clear, consistent themes of fear, cyclical violence, and misunderstanding into these tales is making his own perspective oddly transparent. Frankly, most shonens don’t possess narratives with sufficient complexity to convey much message beyond “friendship” or “trying your best” – but with the fishmen’s tale spanning multiple generations and variant forms of government, Oda is beginning to express a clear, consistent personal philosophy.

I didn’t initially think much of the choice to cast One Piece as the “pirate world.” It just seemed like a good hook for a shonen universe, punchy and easy to understand in the same way Naruto’s “ninja world” or Academia’s “hero world” are. But at this point, it’s clear that Oda genuinely and specifically venerates what he sees as the values of pirates – fierce individualism, absolute freedom, and undying loyalty to those you consider family. Rallying against the assumed conformity of collectivism, Oda consistently cries out that I Am Here, and that a true pirate does what his heart desires, no matter the cost.

Watching those values play out on an international scale within One Piece’s world has been a fascinating experience. To Oda, there is no greater evil than forced conformity, meaning the world government is naturally antagonistic, the world nobles are puffed-up sociopaths, and slavery is the ultimate articulation of man’s injustice to man. All of these things are, to be honest, not particularly controversial to me; I largely agree with his opinions on how power works, and his genuine personal fury at the thought of being contained clearly informs Luffy’s intensity.

At the same time though, his general suspicion regarding solidarity and collective action seems to limit his ability to imagine an end to the Fishmen’s oppression. He distrusts structures inherently, and thus cannot imagine a structural solution to their plight; all attempts at civil political action are undercut by bad actors, and genuine revolutionaries are driven more by rage than moral conviction. He repeatedly returns to the idea of changing hearts and minds on an individual level, but in the end, victory can only come when one heroic individual claims justice for himself. I don’t necessarily see this end result as “wrong” or anything – it’s just extremely Oda, reflecting his humanism and individualism in equal measure. It’s delightful seeing Oda’s gift for humanizing characters face off against his clear political philosophy, and while I personally see his perspective as somewhat limited, it’s abundantly clear how that perspective elevates One Piece’s unique world.

As a final note, can Sanji just fuck off and die already. Multiple commenters responded to my Ivan praise with “just wait,” and now I see why – as soon as Sanji returns, we run through a rampage of horrible gay panic “jokes,” followed by an endless proliferation of sexy mermaid “jokes.” Sanji embodies all of Oda’s worst characteristics, and has turned out to be a general blight on the show as a whole. So much of this property is So Good, and then there’s this guy.