Alright folks, it’s Wednesday again, and you should hopefully all know the drill by now. This week I burned through a couple of classic ‘60s films, along with the usual scattering of horror selections, and I’m eager to share my findings with all of you. The spoils were frankly excellent this week; Ghostwatch felt similar to Noroi in terms of its understated yet incendiary assault on the found footage genre, and the ‘60s films were an unrelenting buffet of great performances both straight-laced and satirical. Let’s run it all down in the Week in Review!
Tag Archives: Film
Winter 2020 – Week 10 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Week in Review. I’ve got a varied assortment of new properties to explore with you today, including a genuine anime classic, along with films ranging from the ludicrously terrible to the actually pretty good. It turns out self-quarantining also gives you a whole lot of time for videogames, so I’ve also got some initial thoughts on Nioh 2, the latest Soulsborne-style release from Team Ninja. I’ve got plenty to say and this article is late enough as it is, so let’s not waste any more time on throat clearing, and dive right into the Week in Review!
Winter 2020 – Week 8 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to the Week in Review! I worked through a solid pile of fresh films this week, including a mix of anime tie-ins, strong genre features, and one of 2019’s fan favorites, and I’ve got plenty of thoughts to share with you all. Incidentally, I’d like to thank you all for accepting this season’s shift in Week in Review structure, as from my perspective, it’s been very rewarding to simply write about whatever recent art has actually inspired me, rather than limiting myself to the scope of the current anime season. Anime’s great, but there’s an infinite horizon of art out there, and I plan to explore as much of it as I can. Let’s get to it!
Winter 2020 – Week 7 in Review
Hello all, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! I’ve got a fresh pile of films I watched this week, including Masaaki Yuasa’s latest feature, along with another boatload of variably watchable horror films. Along with me personally being a big horror fan, horror is also one of the few genres I can always convince my housemates to take a chance on, so we end up screening a fair number of blood-curdling features around my apartment. The pickings were pretty solid this week, so let’s not waste any more time, and dive into the latest Week in Review!
Winter 2020 – Week 5 in Review
Well damn, it looks like Wednesday has come again. I’ve got a pile of Eizouken and Chihayafuru articles coming down the pipeline, but today we’ll once again be discussing this week’s non-anime attractions, which all seemed to follow a certain theme. In general, the films I tend to watch end up falling in two broad categories: critically acclaimed films and classics I get to in Me Time, and somewhat more crowd-pleasing fare I convince my housemates to watch. This week didn’t really feature anything from column A, but column B was full of fun attractions, as we explored the wild spectrum of martial arts films!
Winter 2020 – Week 4 in Review
Alright folks, settle in for the Week in Review! Once again, the fact that I’m already writing about all the anime I’m watching elsewhere means we’ll be diving into non-animated attractions this week, as I run through David Lynch films, wuxia dramas, and a novel new war epic. I’ve got a whole film canon to catch up on, and though my journey may be rambling, I’m committed to marching through it all. Without further ado, let’s explore some new movies in the Week in Review!
Chihayafuru Part Three: The Movie
It’s generally a good policy to design your stories with a planned beginning, middle, and endpoint. Certainly leave yourself room for creative twists and new discoveries along the way, but beginning with a coherent, planned structure is crucial if you want your story to feel like a satisfying, cohesive saga. Of course, not all stories can afford to open with knowledge of their ending – particularly stories in mediums like weekly manga, where concerns like “what new variables can I introduce to keep readers hooked” will often trump more luxurious questions like “how do these new variables further articulate my story’s fundamental point.” Continuing weekly narratives demand novelty, and novelty often ends up evolving into baggage.
Chihayafuru Part Two: The Movie
I’ll get the bad news out of the way right from the start: the second Chihayafuru film is not that great of an actual film. If I were giving it a formal review, I’d probably spend a fair amount of time talking about how its first act hangs on insubstantial drama, as well as its inability to maintain the manga’s tactical sports intrigue, which generally acts as a needed counterbalance to the story’s melodrama. I’d praise Mayu Matsuoka for absolutely killing it as Shinobu, but reflect that ultimately, in spite of doing its best to reconstitute the manga into a coherent three-film structure, it loses too much of the original’s appeal in the process. I’d conclude by summarizing it as not a great film in its own right, but a very fun lark for fans of the franchise, and a fascinating exercise in the difficulty of translating ongoing manga to discrete films.
Chihayafuru Part One: The Movie
The opening scene of the Chihayafuru film embodies something utterly fundamental to karuta as a sport: the constant, thrilling sense of tense anticipation. Karuta is not a game of continuous action. Its energy and appeal build up over strained moments of anticipation, waiting for the next card to be called. Karuta embodies the thrill of the silence just before a decisive play in any sport; the ball aloft, players’ eyes trained, all voices hushed as victory and defeat hang in the balance. Karuta bottles that thrill, and unleashes it again and again, as its contenders rush for glory on the tatami mat.
Moonlight, A Quiet Film
Moonlight is a quiet film.
I actually had to turn up my speakers just to hear the dialogue, and had to turn them up even more when, after ten minutes, our protagonist resentfully speaks his first words. He doesn’t follow those words up with too many more. Whoever else he is, Little, or Chiron, or Black, is not one for big speeches. His feelings maintain an internal smolder, clear in his downturned eyes and inward-sloping shoulders and perpetual inability to stand in the middle of the frame. Our hero is a man of big feelings afforded minimal release. There is so much there, so much contained in all his unhappy, furtive glances, so much preserved across the astonishingly congruent performances of three brilliant actors.