Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. According to the anime season-based schedule that I’m still pointlessly employing, this is technically the first week of the summer, which greeted us with a scorching heat wave followed by an inexplicable cold front. This was also the week that saw me getting sick as a dog for the first time since quarantine began, and thus unable to power through quite as many films as I’d have liked. I still ended up with a pretty diverse selection of features though, from films to live-action series to the inexorable procession of One Piece. I hope you’re all enjoying these meteorological harbingers of doom as best as you can, and if not, perhaps my rambling can at least distract you for a moment or two. Let’s storm on through another Week in Review!

First up this week was Carlito’s Way, a ‘90s De Palma feature starring Al Pacino as Carlito Brigante. Sentenced to serve thirty years for his crimes, Carlito is released after five years due to the tireless work of his lawyer David Kleinfeld (played by an electrified Sean Penn, both in terms of his hair and his nervous energy). Rather than return to career criminality, Carlito is determined to go straight, and finally earn the money to escape to paradise. Unfortunately, his past, debts, and sense of honor all threaten to derail his dream, and drag him right back into the darkness.

Carlito’s Way is a solid crime drama on the whole, benefitting from the intense energy of its two leads, as well as De Palma’s alternately energetic and elegiac direction. As a team-up between De Palma and Pacino ten years on from Scarface, the film makes for an interesting contrast with their prior collaboration. Carlito has none of Tony Montana’s bravado or mad ambition; he is done with this life, fully aware of its destructive consequences, and determined to salvage what joy he can from a world that’s already pinned him as a loser. The film’s violence is staccato and senseless, jolts of lightning that only bring ruin, every gunshot a mistake Carlito is desperate to avoid. De Palma apparently approached this film more as a noir than a gangster drama, and that makes perfect sense – like the best noir stories, Carlito’s Way is about a man displaced from his era, an old soldier who just wants to come home.

You can really feel the mistakes in this film – the accumulation of concessions Carlito must make, and the moments where his iron grip begins to slip. His instinct towards criminality is a tragic, desperate concession, and his eyes are on the horizon even as his body sinks beneath the surface. As a result, I unsurprisingly quite enjoyed the feature, in spite of finding Scarface an ugly and largely unpleasant experience. Incidentally, this is the film from which Grand Theft Auto: Vice City stole all the narrative elements that it didn’t steal from Scarface, including Sean Penn’s entire character, as well as basically every action setpiece. Between this and learning that Red Dead Redemption II is basically just The Wild Bunch, I feel like I’ve watched through nearly all of Rockstar’s narrative inspirations!

After that, propelled by all the commentary about his new special, I checked out Bo Burnham’s previous special Make Happy. Make Happy made for an interesting and oddly lopsided performance, largely because while I didn’t really find Burnham funny, I did find his experimentation with the base nature of a comedy special compelling and frequently quite effective.

On the comedy front, Burnham’s jokes largely just felt too obvious to me, variations on gags I’ve seen recycled many times, often relying on shock over structure or insight, and done little credit by his musical comedy conceit. When you put a joke to a melody, you can stretch that joke out to three or four minutes – but if that joke doesn’t warrant three or four minutes, you’re left with a mediocre song and an aggressively overtold punchline. I frequently feel that musical comedy is used to mask the weakness of both the music and the comedy by pairing them with each other, and Burnham’s songs largely did not change that impression.

As a concept though, boy howdy! I love the idea of a comedy special as a narrative, dramatic experience, and also loved how completely Burnham embraced the carefully composed artifice of his soundtrack-driven performance. Rather than the personal, spontaneous rapport comedians tend to develop on stage, Burnham was dedicated to a strict script and audio-visual experience from start to finish, taking more of a directorial role in the production. This seemed to suit his talents best, and also made perfect thematic sense; after all, much of the performance was a commentary on the bizarre insincerity of performance itself, complete with nervous self-criticism and jokes autopsied into their component parts.

Some of the special’s best moments strayed fully into Kaufman-style anticomedy, like when an interminable segment about drunkenly making a sandwich was interrupted by the performer’s irate partner returning in the middle of the act. And when Burnham dropped the clever self-reflection and got truly earnest, his songs and confessions landed with a genuine emotional bite, reflecting poignantly on the suffocating burden of our always-online, rarely sincere, and desperately isolated cultural moment.

So yeah, it was an interesting watch! In spite of being billed as a comedy special, I didn’t really find Burnham all that funny, but I did find him to be a thoughtful and clever performer, with a compelling approach to theater and a keen perspective on our generation. I think I’d actually prefer to see him compose a truly earnest production unburdened by cheap jokes – and given he followed this by writing and directing the acclaimed Eighth Grade, I think Burnham might too.

After that, my house watched The Tale of Princess Kaguya, a film I was viewing for the second time. Having already gotten out most of my critic-minded instincts the first time through, I was free to enjoy it as a purely emotional experience. And boy, did it ever cut me to pieces.

As I grow into my thirties, I’m becoming a bit more capable of actually assessing my feelings from my twenties, with all the pain and passion and aspiration and regret that period implies. Watching Kaguya interact with her parents felt like a fractured mirror of my own parental relationship, as they shifted from fully encouraging my passion for writing and creativity in my education, to urging me to hang up those passions and seek something more financially stable as an adult. They didn’t win, but those scars have not yet healed; my body still freezes up at the thought of visiting my childhood home, and I think I’ll always be haunted by a sense of personal failure at not being some high-stakes lawyer, rather than a niche culture critic.

I’m not here to dump a whole therapy session on y’all, but just to say that Kaguya really, really resonated with me this time, beyond its absurd beauty as a visual experience. That exchange near the end, where Kaguya’s father states that he “only wanted her happiness,” and Kaguya responds that his idea of happiness is a heavy burden to bear, felt like my family experience summed up in a single line. But even as this viewing brought me to tears again and again, it also brought joy. After all, Takahata’s clear message is that it is not wrong to have small dreams, to just want to embrace some happiness that is close to home, and to not feel flattered and overjoyed at the fancy robes and vestments which define the theoretical “desired life.” Watching Kaguya again made me feel like I’d come one step closer to forgiving myself for being myself, for wanting the things I want, and not aspiring for the dreams that were laid upon me. If art can provide us with anything, let it be this sense that we are accepted as we are, and understood in such a fundamental sense. Thank you Takahata, for giving me this small peace of mind.

And yes, there was One Piece, though a smaller slice than usual. This week saw us charging through the Zou arc, which was more of a board-arranging sequence than a full narrative. Of course, this is One Piece we’re talking about, meaning the board in question is so preposterously complicated that it took a good thirty or so episodes just to get the pieces rearranged.

Dressrosa clearly marked the end of One Piece’s second act, essentially resolving the Seven Warlords segment of the narrative, and tying off most major threads not relevant to One Piece’s eventual endgame. As a result, Oda immediately set to work filling in all the necessary players for the third act, as we simultaneously established the stakes of both Whole Cake and Wano, solidified the Straw Hats’ overarching world alliance, clarified the threat of the Four Emperors, and integrated Nico’s poneglyph search into the narrative’s central trajectory.

These dramatic demands necessarily made for a somewhat talk-heavy excursion, but Oda made sure to balance this meat-and-potatoes plotting with his signature flourishes, like the inherently captivating setpiece of an elephant-island, or fun side characters like the perfectly named Duke Dogstorm. And frankly, as someone who spends a whole lot of time thinking about narrative structure, I was happy just to marvel at the scaffolding Oda was constructing, an edifice grand and complex enough to carry One Piece all the way to its climax. Oda might have partially stumbled into writing a story of such grand scope, but at this point, he’s worldbuilding with the confidence and skill of the high fantasy masters. I cannot wait to see this last leg of the journey unfold.