Tag Archives: Film

Winter 2024 – Week 9 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I am riding high on the conclusion of various personal projects, which most notably include my entire goddamn DnD campaign. That’s right, we finally toppled the scions of hell this monday, and my players all seemed to have a pretty good time of it! With no future adventures left to balance, the inspirations and “sure, I’ll allow it”s flew freely, allowing for some truly preposterous setpieces and combo attacks. With a final battle set atop an actively crumbling helltower against essentially the devil himself, the session certainly didn’t lack for spectacle – and I also made sure everyone had a suitably satisfying epilogue, tying romance, family reunions, and future ambitions into our requisite post-credits sequence.

Anyway, my pride in my courageous party members aside, this has also been a plenty productive week in terms of media viewing. I’ve now charged about two-thirds of the way through ZZ Gundam, and accompanied that with both a healthy selection of films and the recently released Hazbin Hotel miniseries. Let’s run down some new features in the latest Week in Review!

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Winter 2024 – Week 8 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week in film screenings was defined by an unexpected themed project, owing to the recent dumping of basically the entire Snyderverse onto Netflix. That’s right, we watched some goddamn superheroes, munching through, if not the majority, at least a generous selection of the various Justice League-adjacent film productions. The picture that emerged was of a franchise in disarray, tonally at war with itself owing to the obvious contrast between Snyder’s preferences and Marvel’s template, forever juggling its need to appeal to a superhero-fatigued general audience with its dedication to a more angular, ‘90s-reminiscent era of comic drama. You know I like an interesting failure, so let’s dive right into Zack Snyder’s doomed empire!

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Winter 2024 – Week 7 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week has been one of tremendous progress in terms of my own community projects, as my former housemates gathered to complete our first D&D campaign, and also carry our second me-written one within at most two sessions of completion. It’s been a delight to actually resolve these stories we’ve been crafting for the last several years, even if my efforts to avoid D&D’s generally “roll a dice to decide the outcome”-centered conflicts have been less effective than I’d hoped. We’ve basically got half a table that genuinely enjoys mastering the game’s mechanical systems, and half a table that sees those systems as an awkward translation of the emergent creativity the game is designed to facilitate (myself included), which can at times lead to some strained interactions. Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to sending my players to hell for their final adventure, and in the meantime, I’ve got plenty of film reflections for you all. Let’s break down some fresh features in the Week in Review!

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Seeking This Moment in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

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You could describe our passage through life as an accumulation of regrets, of opportunities missed and promising roads not traveled. We rise through youth bearing dreams of becoming astronauts or rock stars, or at the very least not disappointing our parents; we ultimately settle for smaller victories, savoring financial independence or whatever slice of happiness we can find. We compromise and forgive and compromise again, as the once-open canvas of life is weighed down by responsibilities and disappointments, a thousand thousand doors closed forever behind us. And slowly, what once seemed like active choices become the terms of your imprisonment, the endless cycles that define your journey from unhappy adulthood to the grave.

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Winter 2024 – Week 6 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the winter season nearing its halfway point, it seems like it’s about time to check in on the seasonal anime contenders, which at this point have generally either derailed in a cloud of smoke or proven themselves of an enduring, superior caliber. And for this season in particular, that unsurprisingly means I really ought to check out Delicious in Dungeon, which seems to be the undisputed winter all-star. I’ll surely be getting to that soon enough, while also continuing my Gundam education with all haste – we’ve now concluded Zeta, rewatched 08th MS Team, and most recently checked out War in the Pocket, on which I offer a handful of thoughts below. The grand climaxes of the Universal Century’s conclusion await, but for now, let’s burn down the Week in Review!

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Winter 2024 – Week 5 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I am feeling perhaps inordinately proud of myself, as I march ever closer to currency on my ambitious reader-funded projects. That once-imposing “Outstanding Projects” header has been whittled down to a mere handful of features, with only the imposing specter of Evangelion’s second half remaining to keep me up at night. In the meantime, my house’s adoption of a weekly film genre cycle has continued to reap interesting dividends, ranging from a unique exercise in ‘80s animation trends (courtesy of “Muscle Monday”) to a viewing of Miyazaki’s penultimate film (via the questionably titled “Sanimation Saturday”). Let’s see what treasures await in the latest Week in Review!

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Winter 2024 – Week 4 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’ve got a distinct pep in my step, as my D&D party convened for our first adventure since goddamn November, and exciting adventures were had in my fantastical riff on an SCP containment center. Though things have more or less settled since the apartment fire, having our party split across three apartments instead of one has certainly complicated D&D logistics, so this return to relative normalcy was greatly appreciated. As it turns out, life comes at you fast, and though my plan for a “final month” of sessions has now ballooned into the majority of a year, it seems like we might just conclude my Dalelands campaign after all. That in turn has got me thinking about returning to fiction of my own, and perhaps dusting off those short story-writing muscles and trying to get something published. I’ll attempt to institute some dedicated weekly writing time and get back to you all on that, but for now, let’s run down the week in film!

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Fragments of Romance: In the Mood for Love

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“I keep what I can of you; split-second glimpses and snapshots and sounds.”
– The National

In the Mood for Love begins with a title card, a tidy explanation of the drama to come. “It is a restless moment,” the film informs us. “She has kept her head lowered to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away.”

It is an odd description of a film narrative, odder still in its inclusion before the film it describes. The words seem to describe a slight, likely inconsequential interaction, a momentary meeting of two bodies in transit. And indeed, attempting to describe the overt drama of In the Mood for Love almost necessarily results in such a dismissive summary, for the film is largely about things that almost happen, futures that might have been. In the Mood for Love is a film of lingering feelings hanging in narrow hallways, of dreams unspoken until their hope of fulfillment has long passed, of words that flash in the eyes but never pass the lips. It is precisely measured in its form, achingly romantic in its substance, and ultimately ephemeral in its passage. It is the essence of love unfulfilled.

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Winter 2024 – Week 3 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am ensconced securely in my bedroom-office, savoring one of the few aspects of winter I actually enjoy: sitting inside while snow falls beyond my window, luxuriating in the fact that I’m in here and all that chilly white stuff is stuck out there. Yes, I will eventually have to go outside and unbury my car and get some goddamn provisions, but for now the snow is just a lovely change of scenery, a shroud concealing the dirt and dead leaves of New England in January. I’m not sure what it says about me that my appreciation for inclement weather depends entirely on the light schadenfreude of reveling in it not being my problem, but I have decided to forgive myself this unkindness, in light of everything else about winter sucking so terribly. And with the outdoors being so hostile, I’ve certainly had plenty of time to watch new movies, at least. Let’s run down a fresh collection of features in a brand-spanking-new Week in Review!

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Winter 2024 – Week 1 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time, as well as to motherfucking 2024. I’m hoping this year will be an improvement on the last, which, considering that my house burned down, probably shouldn’t be that much of a struggle. Unfortunately it’s also an election year, meaning there’s a fair chance 2024 will conclude in chaos and total anarchy, but I suppose we must take the bad with the good. All we can really hope to do is improve our lives and those of our loved ones on a personal level, and with that in mind, I’m happy to have initiated a new weekly film-viewing regimen that will hopefully expand both the number and variety of my cinematic screenings. Let’s start the year off strong with a robust selection of features, as we ramble through 2024’s first Week in Review!

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