the vaudeville ghost house

media roundup, feb 2025 edition

Short one, but I've been sitting on some of these for too long. So, without further ado, please enjoy some movies and one video game.

5 Centimeters per Second (2007)

This is a lovely series of animated vignettes by director Makoto Shinkai (Your Name, inter alia); it's about an hour long, it was my designated New Movie for the month of January, and the fact that it's three vignettes makes it a little hard to get a proper writeup in. But that's what media roundups are for!

The story, such as it is, reflects on the crushing weight of nostalgia: our protagonist ultimately finds himself mired in depression, unable to engage with the relationships in his adult life, as he spends most of his waking moments pining over a girl he was in love with in middle school. Only by being willing to leave the idealized past behind him is our narrator finally able to appreciate the world he lives in.

The climax of this was, for me, somewhat undermined by featuring a tonally inappropriate Japanese pop song; my suspicion is this probably lands better if you were familiar with the song or spoke the language, but the subtitles didn't do it justice and it really did feel jarring. The moment felt like it called for quiet reflection and the song was . . . very energetic.

I had seen Your Name previously a long time ago and enjoyed it (and will probably revisit it sometime this year); this made me curious to check out the director's other films.

The Wicker Man (1974)

The Wicker Man is a classic for a reason. It follows Sergeant Howie, a Scottish cop who is investigating a missing child on a weird neopagan island that absolutely does not want him there. It is fascinating, and delightful, to see how doomed Howie is from the outset of this film. He ignores every sign that he is unwelcome; armed only with the conviction that Christianity is the only good and proper way to be, he disrespects and openly insults their culture; he very nearly has a total mental breakdown when a naked lady is dancing and singing at him in the next room. The islanders' culture is certainly weird--made all the more jarring by the fact that the village looks very much like a contemporary British village--but if ever there was a story of a colonizer bringing about his own destruction, it's this one.

There's a lot to love about this--the music is so well crafted, Christopher Lee as the Lord Summerisle is wonderful, this village feels so vibrant and alive--and it's a damn shame that we even have to mention the appallingly bad 2007 reimagining. That one is not worth anyone's time (it's not even bad in a funny way); the original, however, is decidedly worth a watch.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

I liked Jim Jarmusch's movies before I knew what a Jim Jarmusch was, having been introduced to his Broken Flowers in a film class back when I was still fucking around at college; this one is a vampire story about the way technology can both trap us and connect us, and about the fragility of everything. Our main characters have been around for centuries, if not millennia; they are lovers of art and culture; they are, perpetually, one bad day away from disaster.

The thing about Jarmusch is the movies are largely about the vibes. It's Detroit at night, with a bit of Tangiers thrown in; it's music and conversation. We're here to see these characters do their thing; the vibes in this are immaculate, the perfect combination of that vampiric melodrama and the comedy of how absurd these people have become over the centuries.

When I first bought this movie, I lost the Blu-ray, so I bought it again; there aren't a lot of things I'd be willing to buy twice, and it never stops being funny to me that I now just have two copies hanging out on my shelf.

The Witcher 3 (2015)

When this first came out, I was kind of bothered by it supplanting Dragon Age: Inquisition in the public mindset, because, for all of its flaws, DAI is still a fascinating game in a series that, at the time, really showcased just what fantasy worldbuilding is even capable of doing. After coming to grudgingly appreciate the crossover quest in Monster Hunter World, I eventually picked The Witcher 3 up for the Switch, many years later, and played, as I often do in open world games, until I encountered something that my brain registered as a chore but that I nevertheless still wanted to get the reward for.1 (It was some armor set or other that I thought looked cool.)

Anyway, I played through it again, and this time disciplined myself to just ignore the shit that sounded tedious and just do the fun bits, and the thing is, to no one's surprise, this is just a better game than Dragon Age: Inquisition. I am less enamored with the worldbuilding on a sociopolitical level, but in many respects, from gameplay to narrative (to ludonarrative bits), it's just exceptionally well-crafted. It does suffer from the open world problem of "if you do any side content, you are grotesquely overleveled for the main story" with a side of "the side content is often where the good bits lie", but that's mostly forgivable; I was still able to do enough side content to feel like I wasn't ignoring all the fun bits while still having enough challenge in the main story so as not to be bored to tears by these epic world-altering battles. This game is far from perfect but it's easy to see why it eclipsed DAI in the zeitgeist upon release.

Somewhere rattling around in this old brain I've got an essay with a working title of "Hawke Dragonage, Gerald Witchman, and the Fantasy of Power" which looks at this game more closely, but I have been, for reasons which I think most people will find quite explicable, extremely depressed this past few weeks and having a hard time getting pen to paper.

  1. This is what makes me bounce off open world games, just about every time; I consider it an immense flaw of the genre and it's a huge part of Breath of the Wild's appeal that it does not have this problem at all (and, in my estimation, a failing of Tears of the Kingdom that it absolutely does).

#essay