Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. This has been a hectic week on my end, with a family wedding consuming my general film-screening time, but I’m fortunately sitting on a massive buffer of reviews to ensure you all receive your regularly scheduled ramblings. And frankly, I really can’t blame the wedding for my negligence – the genuine fact of it is that I’ve been splitting my evenings between thrilling Armored Core battles and binge watches of Dragon Ball Super, which has risen from a rough start to prove itself altogether superior to Z. Super has fully revived the mix of comedy, character drama, and action that made the original Dragon Ball so engaging, and I’ll be sure to have a full report for you all as soon as we munch through its pan-universal martial arts tournament. But in the meantime, lemme just rummage around in my sack of movie reviews for a moment, so we can break down a fresh collection of films!
Category Archives: Week in Review
Summer 2023 – Week 10 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. The warm days of summer are currently ceding to chill winds and autumn leaves, which is normally a time of great existential terror for me, but I’ve frankly been so preoccupied by the day-to-day chaos of life that I can’t really bother to be scared about aging with nothing to show for it. Instead, I’ve been keeping busy with writing projects big and small, from breaking into the deliciously well-written It’s MyGO! to proofreading the last few quests of my DnD campaign. Also, the live action One Piece came out! My expectations were thoroughly muted after the disastrous live action Cowboy Bebop, but positive buzz and my abiding love for the material drew me back, and I’m happy to report that the live action One Piece is nearly as good as a live action One Piece could possibly be. What does that mean? I’m glad you asked!
Summer 2023 – Week 9 in Review
Hello friends, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I am sorry to report that this has been another tough week on the home front, as our core “family” of four onetime tenants has been reduced to two, with our other companions choosing new horizons over continuing the apartment hunt. What this means for our D&D campaign I shudder to imagine, but I’m doing my best to take the changing tides with grace. Life continues, you know? It can’t all be good times, and a shakeup like this is also an opportunity to unshackle myself from routine, and see what else is out there for me. Though I enjoy my comfortable, predictable days, it’d also be nice to travel more and meet new people, and so I’m channeling my Rilakkuma & Kaoru zen as fiercely as possible through these turbulent times. In the meantime, a little constancy is always appreciated, so let’s run through some of our regularly scheduled movie reviews. Onward!
Summer 2023 – Week 8 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It’s been another hectic week on my end, as we approached and marched by the due date for moving all our shit out of the old apartment. I’d been living at the old place for a full-on decade at this point, which meant moving out involved not just grabbing all my furniture and figurines, but also the towering boxes of manga, blurays, and everything else I reviewed during my Anime News Network tenure. Also I lived on a third floor, and the only passage down from that floor was a winding little staircase, and… look, I won’t bore you with any more details, but rest assured it made for a sucky sequence of days. I’ve now basically got a leopard’s coat worth of bruises down both my pale, twig-like arms, and have vowed that it’s just me and my laptop moving in wherever I head to next.
Summer 2023 – Week 6 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I write to you from the midst of a furious thunderstorm, which I’m hoping will at some point calm down enough for me to get on with some apartment hunting. But whether I am swept away by the torrential rains of August or not, I will at least have left you all with another collection of ramshackle film reviews. This week our cinematic journey carried us from a heartbreaking classic to the latest One Piece film, with a couple unexpected detours along the way. We’ve also been churning our way through Dragon Ball Z Kai, and in the process discovering that if you pare down the original Z’s interminable pacing, the show’s actually pretty darn fun. I’ll likely have more coherent words on that next week, but for now, let’s check out some films!
Summer 2023 – Week 5 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week we took part in what has unexpectedly become the cinematic event of the summer, taking in both Oppenheimer and Barbie in a rush of cinematic splendor. There have been few reasons to feel hopeful about the future of cinema lately, and even fewer regarding the fate of theaters specifically, so I was happy to indulge in this bucking of the downward trend. Even though it’s already clear that the lesson our asinine media overseers are taking is “more films based on toys” rather than anything genuinely relevant to Barbie’s excellence, these twin successes nonetheless demonstrate a hunger for genuinely interesting new films, and (god willing) a fatigue regarding endless franchises. Let’s munch through those two and more besides in the latest Week in Review!
Summer 2023 – Week 4 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Things are still pretty hectic on my end, as my housemates and I are still cooped up in temporary lodgings in the wake of the house fire two weeks ago. Not only has this made sneaking in film viewings more difficult, but it has also, unforgivably, delayed our progress in running my D&D campaign. As such, my Bridge Over The River Kwai-themed quest has been delayed until god knows when, but I can at least say I’ve been keeping up to date with my weekly articles, with my buffer now actually containing more big sturdy essays than episodic notes. I’m eager to share all my findings with you, but for now, let’s sift through the films I did manage to watch in the Week in Review!
Summer 2023 – Week 3 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I didn’t really plan on it, but based on what we watched, it turns out this week features a particularly dubious film theme: movie adaptations of video game franchises. Though we’re long beyond the days of Uwe Boll acquiring rights for pennies and exploiting well-intentioned art grants to make garbage, movie adaptations of games still possess a fairly dubious reputation, a predictable byproduct of games generally interactivity over narrative. Aside from the surprisingly endearing Sonic the Hedgehog, cinematic game adaptations generally just tend to emphasize the narrative paucity of their source material – and while this week’s viewings didn’t exactly circumvent that obstacle, they at least left me with plenty to say regarding their attempts. Let’s run down some would-be films in the Week in Review!
Summer 2023 – Week 2 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I write to you from temporary lodgings, owing to the fact that my goddamn apartment caught fire some time early Sunday morning. We all made it out okay, and from what I hear they’ll be able to save the building, but good lord is it a shock to wake up to screeching alarms, open your bedroom door, and stare out into a hallway entirely consumed by black smoke. So yeah, it hasn’t been a great few days, with significantly more focus spent on finding shelter and surviving than exploring the infinite mysteries of cinematic art. Fortunately, my film review buffer is substantial and I still managed a couple viewings late last week, so our weekly film explorations can still proceed as usual. Let’s try to embrace a sliver of normalcy among the chaos, and break down a fresh Week in Review!
Summer 2023 – Week 1 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m doing my best to beat this grotesque summer humidity, while also recovering from the fatigue of running my first D&D session in a month. Scheduling hiccups resulted in an unfortunately extended gap between sessions, which then led directly into me running the party through the action-packed finale of my campaign’s second act. This oversized return to form had me so tired that when I collapsed into bed, I experienced a succession of two dreams that were each also focused on me collapsing into bed, something I didn’t think was actually possible. How can you have a dream about being asleep? Well, regardless of the specifics, my decaying frame was fortunately still able to conjure some reflections on the week’s film adventures. Let’s break down a fresh collection of features in the Week in Review!