Thoughts from two weeks: 6 movies. 2 books. 1 manga.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026)
I Saw the TV Glow is a film that transcended its deeply personal nature to be something that a whole lot of people could make into something differently personal. I knew it was a trans story, but to me it meant more as a piece about nostalgia and the realization that oh my god I’m in my thirties and I haven’t done the things I wanted to do and yes “there is still time” but also I could just as easily let life go by without doing any of those things and yeah Jane Shoenbrun has made another movie and all I’ve done between them is bring back my YouTube show without the YouTube part. Bleak.

But where I could see myself in that story that wasn’t about me, I don’t see myself anywhere in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. This is a whole different kind of “personal,” one that seems actively hostile to those who don’t connect with it on the level it was made to connect on. If you had your queer awakening while watching a girl dissociate in the moments before a masked monster rams a giant spike through her (and the man on top of her), you’re probably gonna feel this movie Extremely Fucking Hard. If none of those words apply to you, you will not.

But that’s fine, because there is stuff there that isn’t the there I was talking about there. This is an utterly bonkers movie, one that takes its slasher inspirations really seriously even as it jokes about them. Hell, that opening montage alone just has so much love in every dang frame. And obviously the main inspiration is Friday the 13th with a fair bit of Sleepaway Camp, but there’s just so much else jammed in there (Jade Daniels of Stephen Graham Jones’ Indian Lake trilogy would have a field day with this for shore) and even when I couldn’t specifically recognize it I could feel the affection for those stories and also for just cinema itself. The literal opening shot is a camera (with Camp Miasma slasher Little Death’s breathing over it) going through the crew ready to set up a big beautiful wide shot wherein Little Death is going to get a big beatiful geyser of hilariously fake blood. (It then cuts so hard into the bloodiest frame of the entire entire film, which is quite jarring!) 

And throughout, the artifice is emphasized: whether it’s the obvious matte paintings in the backgrounds or the shot from the “original Camp Miasma” being projected on film but there’s a shot of a girl holding a digital camera, and when we see Little Death before their transformation it drops that aesthetic entirely leading to even more questions about who is what and when and where. I don’t actually like the big moment in the middle with all the CGI gore, but the moment where the darkness lifts and we can see their eyes for just a moment? Standing ovation or whatever. There are just these moments: even the revelation of why the fuck Little Death has a damn fan on their head actually has a weird amount of emotional weight? Like, it’s this really small thing but damn dude. 

So I look forward to a second watch, one where I know that this is not a thing for me at all but is perfectly content to let me along for the ride. And what a ride it is. 

Comrades, Almost A Love Story (Peter Chan, 1996)
Wow dude.

I caught this at MoMA as part of their current Immigrant Nation series, and it hit me like a damn truck. During my time in Hong Kong last year, I took a walking tour of filming locations in the Tsim Sha Tsui area. One of the movies she showed a clip from was this one – lamenting how all of the shops visible in the background have been replaced with Western luxury brands: Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc etc etc. 

And that memory plus having recently finished Louisa Lim’s Indelible City made this story about two people trying to make it in a new city feel really bleak in a way that Peter Chan et al definitely did not intend and worries me that maybe the entire idea of hope in Hong Kong cinema has been ruined? I hope not… even if I know that it would exist as history since there's no production happening there anymore. 🙁

This is also a case where the name really does shape your expectations. Where the original title – 甜蜜蜜 (Very Sweet) – is a bunch of bland nothing, the English title shapes your experience of the relational arc because a part of you convinces yourself that maybe it isn’t a love story after all despite knowing full well of course it’s a love story.

One of the odd things about time is that even though this movie preceded Wong Kar-wai’s classic-for-a-reason In the Mood for Love, virtually any person today who finds Comrades, Almost a Love Story will be seeing it second… and they (I) will be unable to view it apart from that film: here is another story about Maggie Cheung, objectively one of the most beautiful human beings to have ever lived, mixed up in these odd romantic circumstances full of absolute yearning.

But the comparison isn’t fair to either film. I don’t know what Comrades would have felt like in 1996, but even now it still feels utterly special. I do think I have seen romances sort of like this one… but all from this century. I’ve never seen anything like this from before this. And whatever it was that was like this after this wasn’t nearly as good.

The Odyssey Round 3 (Christopher Nolan, 2026)
I half-considered doing a second The Odyssey, IMAX, and Me hot take, because I found this third IMAX experience to be meaningfully different from the two that preceded it… because I was closer to the screen. Not even by that much, mind you, but far enough that I could no longer see the top of the screen without actively looking up. And because of that mid-screen framing I complained about previously, I rarely had to do so, which meant that the Nothingness above really made the whole thing feel just so much more immersive. I expect sitting even further up would actually make it feel like the frame was truly infinite. And that's probably amazing.

I'm not gonna find out, though. Having seen it three times in two weeks, I remain as grateful as ever for the opportunity that people are getting on literal planes in other to have… but I also think I'm kinda The Odysseyd out. For a three hour movie, it moves… but with each successive watch the parts I like less have begun to grate. I understand what role Penelope's suitors serve, but god they're just so annoying. 

And considering I really like this movie a whole lot, I don't want to put myself in a scenario where I start actively disliking it! 

Will definitely try to get tickets for its inevitably return during awards season, tho. Assuming it comes back for an awards run, though, I will absolutely check it out again then. (Or try to, anyway. Man those tickets go fast.)

Speaking of movies starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jon Bernthal!

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026)
Good movie! Albeit one I seem cooler on than many of my friends? I dunno: honestly I think the movie is kinda visually bland and, worse: synthetic. First person swinging was a step back from the over-the-shoulder stuff we saw last time around (and this was actually what made me realize we had switched directors). And even shots of Spider-Man sitting in a chair you can tell the actor has been replaced by his digital suit. And that's annoying!

So the spectacle of it was diminished for me… but the drama was easily the best we've seen from a non-Superman superhero movie in who knows how long. 

Peter Parker’s choice to not reintroduce himself to Ned (best friend) and MJ (girlfriend) at the end of No Way Home was a fairly frustrating one: they knew the dangers when they wanted him to come find them, and he decided he knew better than them. 

That sucks.

But fortunately Brand New Day doesn't shy away from how much that sucks. This choice is at the center of Peter's inner conflict, but it also meshes well with the whole superhero conflict… and I think we can just straightforwardly say that this is the most natural meshing of the MCU with the former Disney properties to date. 

It's also the only superhero movie I can think of that gets better as it goes along. Where most of these films falter in their final acts, this one succeeds in the Talk No Jutsu finisher that Thunderbolts tried but could not fully land. 

Now that this film has broken just so many box office records, I'm genuinely curious if this will change any plans for the MCU. I mean, they just cancelled the series currently being helmed by Destin Daniel Cretton which is a pretty weird choice. I dunno: maybe they should have given him Doomsday, a movie I already got tickets for but frankly am not all that interested in.

Guess we'll see!

The Director (Daniel Kehlmann via Ross Benjamin, 2025)
Imagine you’re a director working on the best film of your career – true capital-a Art after years of disappointments. The centerpiece of this film is a simple violin concert being held in an enormous hall filled with hundreds and hundreds of people expanded by mirrors to seem like thousands. You have this space for mere days before a more, uh, commercial director comes in and replaces your set with his.

And all of a sudden, these hundreds of extras are called to the front, because you are making a film for Nazi Germany. 

But the schedule remains, and you believe that you’re making Art that will long outlast the reich that you (perhaps) don’t even believe in. You can justify every action that has brought you to this moment, but it is the moment where you realize you can have hundreds of different people called in, ones who will not complain about long hours or rough conditions. 

What would you do?

That question, which comes fairly late in Daniel Kehlmann’s fictionalized biography of actual director G.W. Pabst, is at its heart. And there's really only one answer… so how that answer gets presented is of critical importance.

I like how Kehlmann presents it.

Crank (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2006)
The only movie I've ever watched twice in one day! Neveldine and Taylor's Crank was a key example in my college paper about the way video games have influenced film, and I was so excited about how perfectly it fit with my thesis that I made my roommates watch it with me. It's a wild movie that feels like the adrenaline shot that Chev Chelios needs to keep from dying after he's injected with a poison that will stop his heart if he doesn't keep pumping it up (he is the bus from Speed). It is lean (totally would have been shot on an iPhone if it hadn't come out a year before the iPhone), mean (decidedly not Woke), and an absolute thrill start to finish. This is a movie that starts (in first person) with Jason Statham being told about this poison, and then he kicks his TV a bunch of times (and then one more than that), and just runs. 

But not as fast as you'd think. In fact, it feels downright slow at times, which I think is partially a budgetary thing but also just a 2006 thing. This was a world before algorithmic social feeds, where social media itself was in its infancy and again the iPhone wasn't even a thing. If you can make it through the first 30 seconds of Conner O’Malley's Irish Zionism (do it: the whole thing is only 7 minutes and it's so good), then Crank may even feel relaxing.

But for you ADHD-addled psychos who think it should have gone harder? There is, in fact, an absolutely deranged sequel.

Speaking of movies inspired by video games!

Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014)
Technically, Edge of Tomorrow – sometimes referred to by its tagline, Live. Die. Repeat. – is an adaptation of the Japanese light novel All You Need Is Kill (all of these names are terrible), but AYNIK is obviously indebted to gaming for its structure, and Edge of Tomorrow absolutely leans into its inspirations.

A problem with video game movies is that at some point you wish you could just pick up the controller and play the damn thing yourself,* but the sort of game that Edge of Tomorrow represents is not one I want to play. I may enjoy mech killing monsters, but this is a game where the baddies are bullet sponges and our human can’t survive a single hit. I would much rather watch someone else suffer through that. 

And why not have it be Tom Cruise? And why not have him suffer through it with a believing-but-non-looping Emily Blunt? They're two deeply charismatic performers being charismatic together amidst crazy alien action and deeply human drama. 

I mean it genuinely: what's not to like? Sometimes it's deep… and sometimes it's not that deep. And this one is not that deep. It took the #1 slot in the Screen Drafts “Best Time Loop Movies” cause it's really hecking good and I semi-regularly rewatch it for the same reason.

*Is this still true? The number of people who experience video games as streams of other people's gameplay these days makes me think this conventional critique is outdated. 

Super Nintendo (Keza MacDonald, 2026)
Nintendo is the only corporation of which I could ever realistically say I was/am a fan… and this history of the company by way of its biggest franchises exemplifies why. While the game industry is faced with seemingly endless existential threats and constant layoffs decimating livelihoods, Nintendo is just over there doing its own thing. I love tech and good graphics and I generally want the most powerful thing I can afford (I'm glad I got a PS5 Pro while they were still comparatively affordable 😵‍💫), but the most sumptuous tech rarely impresses without a well-considered art style… and I think basically anyone would agree that any Mario game ever made is nicer to look at than every Call of Duty. 

And it’s fun to have this condensed peek behind the curtain; Keza McDonald collects quotes from her own interviews with game makers and executives over the years as well as those from other journalists or even the works of Nintendo personalities themselves, and she really hits on what makes Nintendo special (or “Super”) in the eyes of people like me. It is a much more emotionally charged book than, say, Jason Scheier’s Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard for both its author and this particular reader, and man it made me so nostalgic. 

That said… I found Super Nintendo a little slow going. It definitely wasn't a slog, but it feels a little sloppy. Like, the Nintendo 64DD gets mentioned four times throughout the book, but the amount of detail for each is baffling. The first mention is totally off-handed with no explanation; the second is the full background of the product; the third is just a little reminder; the fourth is a more detailed reminder. It’s just weird and makes the book feel more like a draft than a fully published book. Like, there should have been another round of edits to tighten things up and make sure stories are being told in the most coherent-to-the-reader order and whatnot.

Even so, well worth the read. 

Monochrome Days (Yosuke Matsumoto, 2024-2026)
It’s always a shame when a series gets axed… but this one made me especially sad considering it’s about that very thing: the creation of manga. About how hard it is to make manga and be successful with manga. 

It’s not like that’s never been done before, but the only real classic of the genre, Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata’s Bakuman ended 12 years before Monochrome Days’s first chapter. It seems high time there was another entry… especially because man does Bakuman have some weird gender politics (I reread it recently and while I largely enjoyed it, goodness gracious is there some real “what the actual fuck” in there).

Monochrome Days was perhaps even more inside baseball, really digging into the little complexities: did you ever notice that every manga/anime student protagonist sits at the edge of the classroom? That’s so close-up shots need only have a couple of extra characters – if any. Makes sense! But I never thought about it before. And this series helped open my eyes to some of the more technical aspects of this art form that I have loved since childhood. And mixed in with that were all kinds of wacky characters and ideas, and also hey it’s pretty great that the main characters were adults with office jobs instead of whiny high schoolers! 

The series was explicit that it would end after the Serialization Arc, but even that turned out to be wishcasting. The final chapter of this manga, as is so often the case with axed series, is nigh-on incomprehensible as it tries to wrap up all these storylines and give some kind of closure to all these characters. And so it sucks to see it end on that note…

But it really was great while it lasted.