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!
Category Archives: 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!
Spring 2023 – Week 13 in Review
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!
Spring 2023 – Week 11 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I come to you from the midst of a week that offers no reasons to suffer its completion, with the One Piece manga, One Piece show, and even my goddamn D&D campaign all taking the week off. It is difficult to see purpose in existence when I am denied my weekly trickle of media dopamine, but fortunately, the entire collected history of cinema was here to comfort me through it. This week featured a varied assembly of car thieves, satanic monsters, hungry sharks, and even some nazis in hiding, making it easy to forget that our lives are spent mostly in anticipation of moments that will pass even before they are fully savored. Let’s rage against the dying of the light with some delightful feature films!
Spring 2023 – Week 10 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we enter into that strange period of the annual anime cycle where we’re pushing mid-June, yet still working through the final weeks of the spring’s shows. This mismatch has long been a source of comfort to me, ensuring me that although we might already be a significant way through summer, it hasn’t technically started yet, at least according to the arbitrary strictures of Japan’s broadcasting schedules. But alongside deluding myself regarding the dwindling days of summer, I also made sure to watch a scattering of new features, furnishing our usual horror selections with a recent animated feature and a very mopy Brad Pitt. Let’s break ‘em down!
Spring 2023 – Week 9 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. While most of our weekly screenings aren’t really driven by any sort of guiding theme, one of my housemate’s larger meta-projects lately has been to test one of my other housemate’s variable tolerance for action movies. We’ve basically pinned down that an emphasis on practical stunts, focus on at least vaguely human characters, and minimum of grating machismo are generally the key factors allowing our action-averse companion to enjoy some apocalyptic mayhem. And this week in particular, we discovered a franchise that somehow nestles within the overlapping circles of all our interests: The Fast and The Furious. As such, today I bring to you the fruits of a week and a half of fast and furious features, as we raced from the original film all the way through F9: The Fast Saga. Plentiful spoilers ahead, but you really can’t describe this franchise without referencing the audacity of its twists and setpieces. Buckle your seatbelts, folks. It’s time to get furious.
Spring 2023 – Week 8 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week has seen me and my housemates positively gorging on Tears of the Kingdom, losing ourselves in the realms of Hyrule at every possible opportunity. The game still seems plainly unrealistic; game worlds can’t be realized with such simultaneous breadth of experience and effortless nuance of character interactivity, all of these systems can’t possibly feed into each other to encourage such a robust and satisfying play loop, and jury-rigging machines together couldn’t ever feel so seamless, natural, and joyful. And yet it is, they do, and making weird contraptions has proven itself the natural evolution of Breath of the Wild’s call to creative action. They’ve even addressed what issues did exist in Breath of the Wild, from weapon durability (now you can always craft your own high-quality weapons) to rain (say hello to sticky tonics). It’s been hard to pull myself away, but don’t worry – we still found time for our scheduled film viewings. Let’s get into it!
Spring 2023 – Week 7 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I come to you after hours of scribbling about movies, having been forced by article scheduling to skip last week’s standard movie-scribbling time. It’s so far been a week of catchup in general – with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arriving on Friday, I essentially did the temporal version of pushing all your stuff into a closet and hoping the door locks, and have been paying for my adventures in Hyrule ever since. Fortunately, I’m now all caught up on my responsibilities, meaning I can now push a whole new set of responsibilities forward to make more time for Zelda. The game is just straight-up bottled joy – I was wondering how they’d make a new adventure in the same world feel fresh, and every minute I play is filled with delightful, intriguing answers to that question. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about Zelda once I’m decently into it, but for now, let’s run down the films I snuck into the margins of the week!
Spring 2023 – Week 6 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. We’re halfway through the spring season at this point, which means most new shows have lost their opening act glamor, and I can start figuring out what’s actually worth following this season. I’ll obviously be catching up on The Witch From Mercury at some point, but as for new arrivals, it seems like Tengoku Daimakyou is the one worth checking out? I’m also still committed to getting my house into Birdie Wing, which I think our recent return to Hot Shots Golf will help facilitate. And shit, there’s also Vinland Saga! Alright, this idle reflection has swiftly unearthed more responsibilities than I expected, so I’ll probably be chipping away at some new shows this weekend. But in the meantime, let’s burn down a fresh collection of films in the Week in Review!
Spring 2023 – Week 4 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. It’s a beautiful day out today, so I’ll try and keep this brief so we can all enjoy the sun. I’ve certainly done enough sun-shunning already these past few days; my housemate’s idle interest in checking out Bloodborne has predictably turned into an all-Souls rampage conducted by three of us, with Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls falling in quick succession, and the original Dark Souls soon to follow. The games are certainly still challenging, but I’ve played all of them enough that this journey also feels nostalgic and even cozy; there is a certainty of input and response in FromSoft games that makes mastery feel much like a dance, while seeing a new player deal with their “sense of humor” is almost as good as playing through it yourself. And of course, we also made time for a fresh collection of films, including some timely holiday selections. Let’s get to work!