Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Though we’re already near the end of June, this is technically the final week of the spring anime season, making it the perfect time to learn what shows I should actually come up on. Actively watching airing anime is obviously a recipe for tragedy, given how many productions either collapse partway through or never realize their potential. As such, I’ve lately been waiting for seasons to end before checking them out, thus mitigating the likeliness of suddenly running aground on a stretch of war crime apologism or whatnot. This normally cuts down the field significantly, but it seems this season’s Witch From Mercury, Skip and Loafer, Vinland Saga, and Birdie Wing all held strong from start to finish, leaving me with a whole goddamn pile of work to do. Fortunately, with Dennou Coil complete, it’s the perfect time for me to dig into a bunch of recent anime – but in the meantime, let’s run down some films in the Week in Review!

First up this week was A Hard Day’s Night, a song-stuffed adventure starring The Beatles as themselves, racing across London and attempting to prepare for a live TV performance. Well, not attempting all that hard – the film is mostly consumed with them going on rambling adventures, playing catchy tunes, and generally being agreeably insouciant young men.

Though a fair amount of this film’s humor is so impenetrably era-specific and British that it just parses as funny noises to my dumb ass, the film remains an eminently charming and altogether energetic production, owing largely to Richard Lester’s innovative direction. His method of rapid cutting, musically timed transitions, and on-the-run hand camera interviews give the film a persistent bubbling energy, and would go on to inform both documentary and music-oriented cinema moving forward. And of course, there’s the Beatles themselves, who prove almost as endearing off-camera as they do in their songs (alright, Lennon’s a bit of a dick). Their easy camaraderie is infectious, and as someone who’s gone through several Beatles phases of his own, it was a delight to see Ringo and George’s personalities celebrated alongside their more culturally inescapable bandmates.

Also, the music! A Hard Day’s Night was released alongside their correspondingly titled third album, meaning it’s brimming with the early, Beatlemania-inciting tracks that tend to get overlooked in critical evaluations of their work. It’s true that little here can match the musical or lyrical complexity of either their “refined pop” era (Rubber Soul, Revolver) or the wild, striving masterpieces that would follow, but marinating here in this earlier era gave me a fresh appreciation for how catchy and inventive even their earliest compositions could be.

“She Loves You” in particular is a track that never previously stood out to me amongst their altogether romance-obsessed early material, but here in film form, I could truly appreciate the thunder of those delayed snares, the winking rush of its verses, and the frantic collapse of its cascading choruses. It would take only the slightest of adjustments to shift “She Loves You” into a barreling punk rock anthem, and it’s been stuck in my head so persistently the past week that I’m beginning to think that’s the only way to exorcize it. Great song, great film, great time.

Having heard that the sixth Friday the 13th feature is actually worth a watch, our house buckled down and powered through Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, the fifth entry in the franchise, and one widely condemned by just about everybody. Well, it turns out just about everybody was right: A New Beginning is about as repetitive, uninspired, and lacking in energy as anything in the already-dubious Friday the 13th canon, offering little more than a high kill count as not-Jason tramps murderously through some nondescript woods. This film was intended to jumpstart a new trilogy with a new killer, but responses were so negative that the franchise owners immediately hit the “revive Jason” emergency switch, meaning the film’s ending is retconned as soon as number six begins. Unless you’ve got some sick fascination with screening things in the order they were released, A New Beginning should probably be skipped in favor of its superior surrounding entries.

We then charged onward into Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, which did indeed return the franchise to its dubious former glory. Friday the 13th has always been the runt of the slasher franchise litter; even its first entry was a warmed-over retread of Halloween, and the franchise lacks either the alienating, paranoid chill of that franchise or the inventiveness of Nightmare on Elm Street. What Friday the 13th offers is a dude with a machete, and Jason Lives sees that dude rising into superhuman status as he returns from the grave, now powerful enough to yank arms straight off, or fold a person back over themselves like a piece of goragami. Our protagonist Tommy’s efforts to fight Jason give this film a welcome sense of focus and momentum, returning to Camp Crystal Lake provides an evocative and nostalgic atmosphere, and the kills are actually pretty exciting. Definitely one of the better entries in one of the worse slasher franchises.

We then checked out Extraction, a Netflix feature starring Chris Hemsworth as Tyler Rake, a mercenary who is hired to extract the son of an Indian drug lord from his rival’s clutches. Of course, things swiftly go sideways, and it turns out Tyler’s group has been betrayed, leaving him with little reason to save this boy. Fortunately for the boy, Tyler is principally motivated by dead wife-style montages of his dead son, and so he resolves to complete the extraction come hell or high water.

Chris Hemsworth extracts the fuck out of this movie, shooting, exploding, or personally grappling roughly a hundred cops, soldiers, and mercenaries to death. Every plot beat present is tired and obvious, but this is not a film about plot – this is a film about Hemsworth dismantling an entire city’s worth of adversaries, and he pursues that goal with absolute determination and convincing vulnerability.

Like Keanu in John Wick, Hemsworth being a better actor than this role necessarily required is exploited to excellent effect; the beats of Tyler’s story might be familiar, but the pain in Hemsworth’s eyes feels real. And given the film is directed by stuntman-turned-coordinator-turned-director Sam Hargrave, you can be assured the action scenes are composed with a master’s eye for visual clarity and spectacle. Like Hemsworth himself, Hargrave is a veteran of the Marvelverse who was always destined for better things. Having graduated from beneath the Russos’ wings, he is already proving to be one of the main reasons people ever thought those two could direct.

There is little reason to watch Extraction beyond its endless parade of chases, shootouts, and explosions, so your reaction to this film will hinge entirely on whether that prospect sounds exciting or exhausting. Either way, I’m looking forward to Hemsworth and Hargrave’s future work!