Winter 2026 – Week 6 in Review - Ai Animes 🤖

Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I am officially a year older, a fact I am attempting to accept with whatever grace an old fogie like me can muster. It’s an odd thing to have moved so fully beyond mass culture’s sphere of interest, but it turns out life does continue after the halcyon days generally featured in anime, and thus we all gotta make the most of it. A nice meal, hanging out with friends, watching a fucked-up movie; in my experience, the greatest joys in life are not far out of reach, just so long as we keep recommitting to seeking them. And personally, sharing my errant thoughts on art is absolutely one of the things that keeps me putting one foot in front of the other, certain that tomorrow will be a new day with its own unexpected joys. So thank you all for reading my ramblings, and I promise to keep digging at the wonders of anime, cinema, and whatever else crosses my path. Now let’s check out some films!

First up this week was Doukyusei, the 2016 film adaptation of Asumiko Nakamura’s acclaimed BL drama. The story centers on Sajo and Kusakabe, two very different young men attending the same all-male high school. Brought together through their shared practice for an upcoming choir performance, the two swiftly fall in love, struggling through miscommunication, personal insecurities, and the judgment of society as they work out what they mean to each other.

Doukyusei is an effervescent love story with an astonishingly fluid character art style, an extremely summer-feeling movie that packages thoroughly considered characters and anxieties in an always-agreeable aesthetic shell. Character designer/animation director Akemi Hayashi accomplished something truly marvelous here; Sajo and Kusakabe stretch and melt with the shape of their emotions, draped carelessly over each other in the manner of the most languorous manga posing, and occasionally dissolving under the weight of their own emotions.

Both our leads feel believable as people, but it is Kasukabe who tells this story, and Hiroshi Kamiya turns in a characteristically brilliant performance bringing him to life. His playfulness, his lazy confidence, his muttered anxieties, and even where his words trail off – Kamiya is one of the great voice actors of the modern era, and his presence here echoes the confidence of Hayashi’s character acting and Shoko Nakamura’s direction, achieving that enviable feat of mastery that looks effortless. A very rewarding little film.

We then continued our journey through the direct-to-video mines with Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings, which counts as one of the least essential origin stories I have ever come across. Our requisite gaggle of half-witted college students are this time out galavanting on their snowmobiles, when they suddenly realize that many hours have passed, night has fallen, and they have no idea where they are. As you often do in such unfortunate yet emphatically believable circumstances, the gang elect to hold up in a nearby abandoned asylum, where they have the poor fortune of encountering three murderous hillbillies.

How do you even take a wrong turn on a fucking snowmobile? Did they just pick a direction at random and step on the gas until the sun fell out of the sky? Does it even count as a wrong turn if you’re not on a road in the first place? Anyway, these and other questions are not answered by this feature, which is instead mostly occupied with gross-out costume design and squelchy dismemberments, which most memorably include one poor guy who’s turned into hillbilly stew while still alive. I give the producers some credit for making use of their asylum setting’s dubious correctional devices, but without a conceptual device to match its predecessors (reality show! prison break!), Wrong Turn 4 sees the franchise looking pretty long in the malformed, lonely tooth.

Our next viewing was First Men in the Moon, a ‘64 adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel. Edward Judd stars as Arnold Bedford, who resides in a cozy Dymchurch cottage in 1899, attempting to write a play that will resolve his financial worries. Against the advice of his no-nonsense fiance Kate (Martha Hyer), he ends up investing five thousand dollars he doesn’t have in his neighbor Joseph Cavor (Lionel Jeffries)’s anti-gravity material, intent on joining him on a journey to the allegedly gold-rich moon. Ultimately, all three of our unlikely adventurers end up floating off to the moon, where they discover geographical marvels and ominous moon-dwellers in plentiful supply.

First Men on the Moon is an absolutely delightful romp, buoyed up by both Wells’ whimsical inventions and the effortless humor of the script. Martha Hyer delights as Kate; she’s the sort of person who, upon hearing her fiancé is headed for the moon, heads off to pack three chickens and an elephant gun, certain such supplies will be needed for sustenance and fighting moon-monsters. And Lionel Jeffries is a superb absent-minded professor, offering both a convincing portrait of scientific idealism and a charming personality, whether he is conversing with alien scions or his squad of faithful geese.

Thematically, you could call the film a war of ideals, contrasting Cavor’s pacifistic faith in dialogue against Bedford’s man-of-action cynicism and brutality. But in truth, the film is propelled far more by endearing rapid-fire character moments than themes, which are so charming that it has taken me three paragraphs to mention Ray Harryhausen’s monsters are in this one. I know! I love those guys! But I love this cast and script even more, and found myself charmed in every which way by First Men in the Moon.

Last up for the week was The Long Kiss Goodnight, a ‘96 thriller starring Geena Davis as an amnesiac former CIA assassin, who has spent the last eight years living as a mild-mannered schoolteacher. However, her old personality begins to reemerge following a blow to the head, and as former associates begin to track her down, she will be forced to go on the run with a private detective (Samuel L. Jackson), hoping to piece together enough of her old life to protect her new one.

The Long Kiss Goodnight has strong leads, a witty script, and some inventively conceived action setpieces, and for the most part proves that’s basically all you need to make a fun action-thriller. The narrative’s connective tissue is a little weak, resulting in a number of stretches where the story doesn’t really possess any momentum, but Davis and Jackson prove such winning company that it feels petty to complain. Davis in particular impresses through her convincing portrait of a woman juggling two personalities, conveying an ominous transition towards sociopathy across the first half, and then effectively collapsing both identities into one across the second. And Jackson clearly has a fine time playing against type here, serving as the bumbling, long-suffering assistant to Davis’ action hero badassery. Nothing spectacular, and the action is more just American-style guns and explosions than anything with significant choreography or artistry, but I certainly had a fine enough time.

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