I guess I'm overdue for a blog post.
What was the pathetic minimum? At least one sentence about everything I've watched?
Okay, here goes...
Three more episodes of One Piece. OP continues to be amazing, but uneven. One episode will have me wanting to re-watch it and break down the structure, then the next episode will be a bore, stretching my patience. So it goes. Another 1,000 or so to go.
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Seeing Labyrinth on the big screen at the Ithaca Regal was one of the highlights of the year so far (yes, I know, we're only 17 days into 2026, but this is already the film experience to beat).
I was struck again by how perfect the casting of David Bowie is. The film is about, if it's about anything, the seductive distracting allure, the Glamour, of following personal pleasure instead of submitting to the responsibilities of relations to Others, to Real Persons outside oneself.
Bowie had been the household symbol of androgynous make-your-own-meaning for a decade. Even in '85/'86, he still has an undeniable charisma and appeal; nearing 40, he was still the man to embody selfish self-direction. In the film, he's a peacock, drawing all attention to himself. He directs the attention of others to him. To Sarah, Jareth presents himself as the embodiment of all of her hopes and desires. If she'll only submit to him, she'll be free. Just let me rule you, and you can have everything you want. It's the lie on which all self-imposed slaveries are built.
The climax of the film is Sarah remembering the only line that matters: My kingdom as great... my kingdom as great... You have no power over me!...You have no power over me.
The amount of power we have. The extent to which we allow others to have power over us. Those are things that I have been thinking a lot about lately. Labyrinth is as relevant as it ever was.
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I began hosting monthly group watches of the 1966 Batman TV series at the end of last year. At its best, it's a lot of fun. At its worst, it's Penguin episodes. Only four episodes into this project and I'm already regretting it.
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More anime? A couple of episodes of Bananya (3 minutes per episode), which is cute but stupid, and a re-watch of an episode of Polar Bear Cafe, which might be my favorite anime series. It's about a lazy panda who makes unlikely friends at a cafe run by a polar bear. It's full of stupid puns and it's great.
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For most of the past week, I've been reading Stephen King's It, which I hated. I'll move on to the film adaptations soon, but right now I'm focusing on film adaptations of Wuthering Heights, which I read recently for my non-SK book club. The 1939 version directed by William Wyler and starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon? Well, it's a fine movie, enjoyable, but it's a bad adaptation. Besides its mischaracterizations, its elimination of the last third of the novel means that completely misunderstands and misrepresents the novel. The 1992 version directed by Peter Kosminsky (who?) and starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche? I don't know. The performances are good. Fiennes is given a more complicated Heathcliff than Olivier and he holds his own, but it still doesn't quite hit the right notes. Compressing the story into a sub 2 hour runtime and using the same actors to portray the characters at different ages just doesn't work. Even though the '92 version gets more of the story, it also feels like it might be incomprehensible or illogical to someone who doesn't know the source material. In neither film does Cathy seem as abominably selfish and self-serving as she is in the novel. Based on some interviews I've seen, I'm hoping that Margot Robbie does understand Cathy as manipulative and cruel, but I'm also not holding out too much hope that the 2026 adaptation will capture the fullness of the rich source text, a text that I've come to really respect even if I don't love it.
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But wait, what? Isn't it still Japanuary? Yes, yes, it is.
Today was a lazy family movie day.
After Breakfast, The Mysterians. This 1956 feature was allegedly Ishirō Honda's favorite of his own films. The plot is great. Aliens come to Japan, destroy a village with unimaginable power, then demand space for an outpost and, you know, breeding rights with some Japanese women. Tennish years after the Hiroshima bombings, it's not hard to read this as a response to American incursions on Japan, despite the film's own calls to an international response to the aliens, including American support. What matters is that this film is full of gorgeous cinematography, flawless composite shots, immaculate costume and set design, and a story that never sinks under its own weight. The increasing focus on the meetings of the international community feels right in the context of the story and is balanced by the ongoing rad practical special effects and the ongoing human interest element of a dude trying to rescue his women from the threat of Mysterian Marriage.
After lunch, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which will always be one of my favorite films. It's the greatest achievement of Miyazaki and Takahata, even though both would go on to so, so many great achivements. I know it's personal preference, but I love this mid-80s moment in Japanese animation with hand inks and hand paints. Everything looks like it was lovingly created by handiwork that was time and labor intensive. It looks that way because that's exactly how it was made. Time and effort and love. It's visible. It's made manifest in Nausicaa.
Oh, and that Joe Hisaishi score. It's easily in my top ten film scores, which is a list that I really need to finish making. Hisaishi is rightly known for his Miyazaki collaborations, but he also did repeated great work with Obayashi. Nausicaa is my favorite of all his scores that I've heard. Nausicaa is such a visually perfect film that it could work just fine without any dialogue and without any music, but the Hisaishi score that does exist is so good that Miyazaki leans on it and often pushes it to the foreground to emotionally support a scene. It really is one of the great scores in a century of film history. I don't think it's just personal preference.
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I've been looking up Japanese adaptations of Wuthering Heights and started watching one for a few minutes before deciding that I wanted to write this post to keep the blog up-to-date. I'm going to go cook some supper right now. I don't know if I have another feature film watch in me today without falling asleep to it, but if I'm lucky, I'll watch an episode or two of Polar Bear Cafe before bed.
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One more thing that I just remembered from looking at my notebook. Last week, I watched the 2025 Reith Lectures given by Rutger Bregman. I could quibble about the content. I get nervous when a vegan suggests the temperance/prohibition movement as a model for future political action. Chesterton, once a member of the Fabian Society that Bregman praises, is my model in rejecting the Fabian Society.
I recently read, "A friend told me once--and I haven't forgotten his words--that the deepest friendships are formed not by sharing the same answers, but by mutual devotion to shared questions." In that spirit, I appreciate Bregman's attention to important questions.
I bring it up here because of the medium of the lecture. The filmed version that I watched on Youtube is an example of the worst trends of online videos. At seemingly random intervals, the camera cuts from a direct view of Bregman to a shot of his right profile (never his left, seriously never his left), then back to the direct, then back to the right, and so on, with occasional cuts away to filler visual material that is illustrating something that he has mentioned in his talk.
This is neither a good lecture format nor good cinema. It's a bad version of both.
I'll contrast it with another thing I've watched in the last week, the 2025 Bryant lecture given by Percival Everett. With a couple of exceptions, the lecture is filmed and presented in one continuous shot, which I would argue is essential to the presentation of a lecture format. The British Library fails this a couple of times, but overall the presentation is overwhelmingly consistent, which I appreciate. The lecture itself is worth watching and thinking about, but I was disappointed again by the audience questions. Everett very clearly misidentifies Huston as the director of Red River, which cleverly aligns with all of his previous presentations, but I'm still not sure if it's a deliberate provocation or the result of an old man recalling film history without checking his facts. I wish that anyone would have pointed this out in the Q&A. Did no one in the audience know this information? Did Everett walk away amused at getting away with something? Or did he walk away uncorrected in an error? Either way, that's a fun footnote to a talk on authenticity, on who has a right to tell stories, and why we should listen to them. Should we care at all to listen to someone who doesn't know the obvious difference between Huston and Hawks? Was that a mistake? Or was that the exact point of Everett's lecture?