Boy oh boy do I have a collection of films for you today. With our house’s reliable contributor of genuinely bad suggestions on vacation (sorry Neil, but it’s true), we experienced a week of all-thriller-no-filler, storming through unimpeachable classics and a variety of great new features alike. We cleared out a couple of 2021’s top outstanding features, leaned back to snag Kaufman’s latest film, and also spent some time with that irrepressible showman, Orson Welles. It all made for a weighty, criticism-ready pile of cinema, and I feel like my thoughts are going to start tumbling out of my head if I don’t get to them immediately, so I’m just gonna quit with this labored introduction and get to the good stuff. Let’s run down the Week in Review!
Tag Archives: Film
Winter 2022 – Week 3 in Review
Whew, it has been a week. I finally got my COVID booster, which had me basically incapacitated for forty-eight hours. That, of course, invoked a rolling cascade of delayed responsibilities, meaning I’ve been rushing to catch up on projects while handling a variety of other outstanding responsibilities. It turns out as an adult, when you have a sick day, that day’s responsibilities don’t just float away into the ether; they get compacted into all your other days, punishing you for the audacity of possessing a feeble, mortal frame. Fortunately, I’ve mostly caught up at this point (or will have once I finish this article, then write up the first half of the next Week in Review, then watch the last four episodes of Sonny Boy, then write it up for my Year in Review), and believe I have managed to keep my external pandemonium from tarnishing the sanctity of my weekly film reflections. With all that bellyaching off my chest, let’s dive into the Week in Review!
Winter 2022 – Week 2 in Review
Oh god, it’s already week two of the new year? But I haven’t done anything yet! As long as we were still adrift in that post-Christmas/New Year haze of temporal ambiguity, I could avoid the anxiety of feeling insufficiently gung-ho about seizing the new year by the horns, and immediately accomplishing all my long-dormant life goals. But now it’s Week Two, and I’m still the same person I was last year, and clearly that means I am incapable of commitment or self-improvement or any of the other things we annually demand of ourselves. Fortunately, our house did indeed run through a fresh collection of films, so at least my cinematic education is still burbling along. I’ll do my best to internalize the fact that personal growth is a gradual process, and in the meantime, please enjoy this fresh collection of film takes!
Winter 2022 – Week 1 in Review
Alright folks, pile in, pile in. It’s technically the new year from where you’re standing, but I’m currently starting this article on 12/28, and doing my best to keep the weekly content flowing while also catching up on 2021’s best anime. Turns out it might not have been wise to leave like three quarters of the year’s most highly acclaimed shows unwatched, but hey, at least I’m eating well right now. I’ve already stormed through Ranking of Kings, will be following up with Heike Monogatari, and should have Sonny Boy finished by some time this weekend. To be honest, you’ll probably be seeing the fruits of this watch grind within a few days of this very article – but for now, we’ve got other fish to fry. Let’s charge through an eclectic collection of films, as we run down the new year’s first Week in Review!
Fall 2021 – Week 13 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Apparently we’ve reached the end of another year, though with all the fires of 2020 still raging, it certainly doesn’t feel like that much time has passed. Biden has settled into the bemused indifference of most modern democrats, COVID is still running wild, and the environment is in chaos; so far, so normal for our apocalyptic era. With the external world maintaining its all-seasons horror show, I’ve mostly been marking my time in art consumed, which frankly isn’t all that different from my usual behavior.
To be honest, the biggest difference is this project right here. With a clear incentive to actually jot down my thoughts on everything I’m watching, I’m engaging in more active thinking about the connections between all these films, and broadening my appreciation of cinema at record pace. Transitioning these articles to my weekly film adventures has been a great boon for both my artistic education and mental health, so I’m thankful to you all for bearing with me as I sail through the history of cinematic storytelling. Let’s break down one more week in film!
Fall 2021 – Week 12 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I have some lamentable news: every single film I watched this week was great. No grand failures, no experimental misfires, not even any random nonsense my housemates dredged from the depths of Netflix. Every single movie was great, and that means I actually have to provide meaningful commentary for all of them, rather than tossing them aside with a terse summary and a jab at the director’s mother. On the other hand, I suppose this is actually good news for all of you, as you get to enjoy my cinematic ramblings for that much longer. So let’s get to it, ya animals, as we run down a worryingly distinguished Week in Review!
Fall 2021 – Week 11 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. I have to admit, my film viewing hours have been diminished as of late, due to one obvious and embarrassing cause: Darkest Dungeon is taking over my life. I am not one of those people who plays a videogame casually, logging in a few minutes here and there throughout the week. Either I bounce off a game almost immediately, or I let it consume me entirely, thinking of little else until my trials are complete. My mind is now perpetually half-occupied with hardy adventurers and the trials thereof, but I fortunately managed to sneak in a sturdy collection of film viewings in the margins of the week. With a healthy mix of artistry, indulgence, and straightforward violence ahead of us, let’s dive into the Week in Review!
Fall 2021 – Week 9 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I have a confession to make: I am currently typing to you from some point in the indeterminate past, having watched so many recent movies that I’ve actually developed a “Week in Review buffer.” Look, it’s not my fault: first we ran out of new One Piece episodes, and then we beat our Playstation 5 games, and now we’re back to relying on the endless bounty of cinematic history to keep us distracted. I’m currently writing this introduction while gazing in horror at the list of films I’ve already got to review for next week’s post, so I suppose you can all be assured that The Content Will Flow for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, please enjoy this fresh set of film reflections, and know I’m hard at work excavating the content mines of the future!
Fall 2021 – Week 8 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It is now officially too cold to comfortably go outside, which signals the beginning of my six-month griping session about the misery of living in New England. I believe I’ve basically had enough of seasons all together at this point, and would move to someplace nice and perpetually temperate like Los Angeles – it’s just, you know, all my stuff is here. But fortunately for you all, the advent of the Suck Months has also left even more time for movie screenings, which I have dutifully translated into an unwieldy tower of random reflections. Let’s warm ourselves with the magic of the cinema, as we ramble through another Week in Review!
Fall 2021 – Week 7 in Review
Buckle up and secure your hands over your peepers, folks. We ended up screening a horror-themed collection of films this week, perfectly on time with… fuck, Halloween was like three weeks ago, wasn’t it? Alright, fine, we just watched a bunch of horror movies because we like horror movies. Watching a bunch of idiots stumble around and get sequentially liquified has become our comfort food in times of trouble, as we high-five their harbingers and make wagers on survivors and applaud the brutality of their kills. The violence is so abstracted it becomes almost freeing; while many of the best horror films draw on the anxieties that populate our own world, they refract those horrors into a universe where courage and a sturdy axe just might see you through. And even if a horror film does genuinely unsettle me – good! I like being scared! When I get back to writing fiction, I expect to begin by cataloging a few of my own nightmares – until then, let’s see what beasties await in the Week in Review!