Hey folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It seems like spring has finally arrived in my neighborhood, so I hope you’re all enjoying the blissfully temperate weather as much as I am. I’ve also been feeling pretty upbeat about my article progress; I finished an essay I’d been poking at for weeks, knocked out a couple ambitious notes projects, and have got a sizable Why It Works column arriving next Monday. My bounty board is looking more manageable than it has in some time, and in the meantime, I’m still sneaking in as many films as I can to power-level my cinema stats. I started off this whole review business with full points in literature and not much else, so I’ve been doing my best to rush the cinema study endgame, and feeling just a tad more attuned to the breadth and history of film with each new article. Seeing connections and influences emerge in real time is an immensely satisfying process, and I’m doing my best to feed all that study back into my critical work. But for now, let’s just poke at some interesting films, as we run down one more Week in Review!
Tag Archives: Film
Hakujaden
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be exploring the oldest work of anime I’ve ever covered on the blog, and in fact, the first full-length film Toei Douga ever produced. Known as Hakujaden, “The White Serpent,” or “Panda and the Magic Serpent,” it’s an adaptation of a classic work of Chinese folklore, and is essentially the anime equivalent to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
In this film, we will be witnessing the process of a new art form coming into being, as the scattered shorts of prior years gave way to a new era of anime production, led in large part by the luminaries of Toei Douga. Eventually the studio’s film productions would jumpstart the careers of modern legends like Takahata and Miyazaki, but for Hakujaden, the key animation would be composed by just two animators: Akira Daikubara handling the humans, and Yasuji Mori taking care of the animals. Hakujaden is a staggeringly significant work by any metric, and I’m frankly well outside my depth in attempting to “critique” it in anything but the most wildly ahistorical of styles, but I hope at the very least we can simply sit and appreciate it together. Let’s explore the birth of Toei Douga’s film catalog!
Spring 2022 – Week 5 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’ve currently got a post-Covid spring in my step, as well as a quiet sense of embarrassment about how much work I got done while I was trapped in quarantine. It turns out when you’re not allowed to socialize or even really leave your room, it’s not hard to keep working from the moment you wake up to the moment you lie back down. As a result, my article buffer has never looked healthier, I’ve finished my latest ambitious weekend project, and I even made some progress on cleaning my room. Well, a little progress. Look, if you’d seen it before, you’d appreciate it looks better now.
Dubious lifestyle habits aside, I’ve also got a fine stack of film reviews for you all, freshly plucked from my massive bag of takes. Let’s see what we’ve got in the latest Week in Review!
Spring 2022 – Week 4 in Review
Well folks, it happened. I’ve taken every possible precaution, I still only leave the house rarely and fully masked, but I still caught goddamn Covid. As a result, I’ve spent the last four days feeling utterly wretched, guzzling ginger ale and Dayquil, and living pretty much exclusively out of my bedroom/home office. It’s painful, it’s isolating, and it comes with the fun bonus feature of desperately hoping I didn’t infect any of my friends or family before symptoms emerged. The plague has come home at last, and has only intensified my internal fury at all those who believe we have no social responsibility towards our fellow human beings.
Fortunately, while I’ve been feeling far too under the weather to actually engage with any new movies, I’ve still got a healthy film review buffer to deplete before doing anything so drastic as skipping a weekly post. So let’s reach into my bag of film delicacies, and see what I was watching before I was struck down by the hand of god.
Spring 2022 – Week 3 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. Are you all enjoying the spring weather? It’s finally gotten warm enough to allow for regular weekly jogs, which is certainly helping to improve my day-to-day mood. It’s pretty fucked up that proper diet and exercise actually do work, and not only are you healthier, but you also genuinely feel better pretty much the moment you commit to them. Along with enjoying this miracle of human chemistry, I’ve also been munching through a variety of interesting films, and even considering checking out a weekly anime or something. I know, I shouldn’t get too crazy here, but what I’m hearing about Spy x Family seems like it might actually be my sort of thing. But before I do anything so hasty as that, we’ve got a pile of feature films to sort through. Let’s break down the latest bounty of the Week in Review!
Spring 2022 – Week 2 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! I’ll admit right from the start, today’s film selections are some kind of Frankensteinian abomination, the cobbled remnants of several weeks’ viewings. My inconsistent approach to building a review buffer has resulted in some odd temporal anomalies – for example, this week features the Texas Chainsaw revival film that inspired our “further research” from a few weeks ago. Fortunately, this also grants me the luxury of actual curation, allowing me to construct a sort of meta-reflection on the evolution of horror in film. Also, Texas Chainsaw aside, the rest of this week’s films are really good, so I’m eager to share them with you. Let’s get to it!
Spring 2022 – Week 1 in Review
Hey everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It’s been a very Dungeons & Dragons-themed week at my house, as I continued to munch through episodes of Vox Machina, while my own campaign group convened for our first spring session. The confluence of these events had me in a focused game-design mode during our live session, as I sifted through the various motivations of our individual party members. D&D can be many things to many people, and it certainly is a variety of things for our group: one of our party members most delights in crunching their character’s numbers, while another mostly wants to express their character’s outrageous personality, while a third is largely concerned with our adventure’s fantasy worldbuilding. It’s not just “difficult” to balance these desires – it is, to some extent, impossible to satiate all of them without stepping on some toes. And that precise impossibility of “perfect form” is what makes the whole affair so interesting to me, as more a continuing thought exercise than a solvable equation.
Oh, and we also watched some movies this week! I’ve actually got quite the diverse selection for you all, so let’s not waste another moment, and charge on into the Week in Review!
Winter 2022 – Week 13 in Review
Hey folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I have at this point established perhaps a month worth of buffer in terms of film reflection pieces, and hot damn is today’s crop a good one. I don’t know what exactly inspired this week in past-Nick film screenings, but he was clearly on a roll, charging through psychosexual drama and epic Hollywood spectacle alike. In more recent news, I’ve been gobbling through my commissioned episodes of The Legend of Vox Machina, utterly seduced by the fun of tramping along with a well-balanced D&D crew. It’s been a satisfying week in film and television alike, and I look forward to sharing my future fiction-versus-game design ramblings with you all. But for now, let’s power through some films!
Winter 2022 – Week 12 in Review
Hey folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. My housemates and I are pushing towards the endgame of Elden Ring at this point, which has opened up our schedule for a wide variety of film screenings. As a result, this week’s post will be something of a lightning round, as we roar through a wide variety of features at the greatest possible speed. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel at this point; I’ve beaten all but one of the game’s secret bosses, cleared out all the side quests I can, and conquered every dungeon except the road to the ending. The big question for next week will be how I readjust back to post-Elden Ring life, but for now, let’s power through some goddamn movies!
Winter 2022 – Week 11 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. How are you all doing this week? Personally, I just got back from my first jog of the season, so I’m feeling genuinely physically healthy for the first time in about four or five months. My ability to will myself into exercising is tenuous at the best of times, and in the cold of winter, there’s basically no way you’ll convince me to go outside for anything. As a result, my body tends to mirror that of a hibernating bear, as I grow rotund and lethargic over the winter months. This admittedly imperfect cycle will likely continue until I finally stop saying I’m leaving New England and actually do it, but in the meantime, all those days indoors have left me with plenty of time for film screenings. Let’s run down a fresh grab bag of cinema selections!