Thoughts on the things I experienced over the past week: 1 Movie, 1 Manga, 1 Video Essay, & 1 Video Game

The Invite (Olivia Wilde, 2026)
The Invite is literally the fifth remake of the 2020 Spanish film Sentimental (renamed to The People Upstairs for international audiences. It was subsequently translated into Italian in 2022, German in 2023, French in 2024, and Korean in 2025. Who will get it in 2027? Hard to know, but at this rate this thing’s gonna be truly global. And why shouldn’t it. A single-setting chamber play with four meaty tragicomic parts is cheap to produce and will appeal to basically all of the parties involved. Interestingly, the European versions all ran around 80 minutes, while the Korean and American takes are nearly thirty minutes longer. Someone should watch all six versions and compare/contrast. I would not watch all the movies, but I would watch that video.

This latest version is notably by far the Letterboxd community’s most beloved. And while I can’t speak to the others, I can say that love is well deserved here. I had an absolute blast watching this movie in a packed theater. It’s got an excellent mix of laugh-very-loud moments and genuine emotion, and it kept turning in new and exciting ways. I was fortunate to go in blind, but even if you’ve seen the marketing you don’t really have a sense of what’s to come because it is so focused on one particular turn. There’s a lot more there there, to the point where that turn (which I imagine is what has inspired six separate versions) ends up not actually feeling that important in the overall scheme of things.

The Invite is the kind of thing I hoped that we would be seeing from Olivia Wilde following her excellent debut feature, Booksmart before that bright future was derailed by the failure of Don’t Worry Darling. Folks seem to be appreciating the heck out of this one, so looks like we’re back on track. 

Woo!

Reality Is a Camera Trick (Jacob Geller, 2026)
I don’t know if it’s precisely correct to call Jacob Geller my favorite video essayist… but he is the only video essayist from whom I have purchased two books collecting those essays in text form (someday I’ll read the first one… someday I’ll receive the second) as well as the rare essayist who inspires me to read his references. 

Reality Is a Camera Trick begins with the 2023 reveal trailer of Unrecord, an FPS stylized as though it's that looks like it's being captured from a body camera: as Geller says, it's going for the “photo” part of photorealism, faking the flaws of an actual sensor to replicate a specific form of reality – the “filtered reality” of found footage. The sprawl that follows largely focuses on that filter and our modern experience of the world where everything is filtered, and it makes all the profound statements about the human condition and art that you’d expect from a Jacob Geller video while also being much easier to stomach than Lindsay Ellis’s video on body cameras, which tbh I couldn't finish. 

And it’s put more other work onto my reading list. I’ve already downloaded two of the papers he cites, Adam C Hart’s The Searching Camera: First-Person Shooters, Found-Footage Horror Films, and the Documentary Tradition and Alexander Galloway’s Origins of the First Person Shooter, and placed my unopened copy of Filtered Reality, a book of criticism centered on found footage essays, prominently on my book shelf. I look forward to reading all of them soon. (Which I guess you could hold me to, since the book at least would in fact show up here in some future installment.) 

Double Fine Psychodyssey (2 Player Productions, 2023)
Inspired by the news that Double Fine is now in talks to spin off from Microsoft as the company looks to ??? the Xbox brand, I rewatched this incredible series about the production of Psychonauts 2. (The company’s acquisition by Microsoft plays a pretty key role in the final third, and that makes the current state of things hit real different.) I’m now digging deeper into the Double Fine YouTube channel, watching Double Fine Adventure, documenting the creation of their adventure title Broken Age, as well as the 2012 and 2014 Amnesia Fortnight series. I plan on writing something more about all of this. 

Game production is crazy. Speaking of:

007 First Light (IO Interactive, 2026)
As an N64-having millennial, James Bond video games played a key role in my childhood… though I spent more time with The World is Not Enough than I did Goldeneye. I didn’t play most of the games that came later, and I’ve only seen most of the films… but I continue to consider myself a fan of the franchise. And in the absence of a new film as Amazon has fucked around with the rights, IO Interactive has been hard at work on 007 First Light, a new origin story with a younger Bond first entering the service and while that absolutely had the opportunity to suck real hard it thankfully does not suck. In fact, I liked it quite a bit!

The game is a mix of the kind of stealth you’d expect from the creators of the Hitman franchise and the sort of bombast you’d expect from a Big Budget AAA Action Adventure Video Game, and while it doesn’t do either of those things at the highest level, it does them both competently enough that I didn’t care so much. The multiple ways of tackling stealth sequences was cool, though I inevitably messed up and ended up having to punch a lot of people very hard and ya know what the punching is pretty good! And then sometimes had to switch to guns, and the gunplay was surprisingly strong: having very little ammo and needing to run around and pick up guns and then do bam bam bam headshot felt really satisfying. 

But while there’s definitely some jank, watching Psychoddysey did help me forgive some of the flaws, like how James Bond has the same door-opening animation whether he’s stealthing about or chasing a baddie through a burning building: setting up custom animations for different areas would have absolutely been A Whole Thing and I understand why they didn’t. There are pieces of the story that kinda fall apart, weird moments that break the flow, and the difficulty is all over the place… but in the end I just had a good time and I hope that there is more. The ending sets up the kind of cliffhanger that James Bond movies historically don’t, but hopefully we will in fact see IO Interactive return for a Second Light… I dunno, Amazon has never successfully handled a single video game-related thing and now that they own the publishing rights it’s hard to be too confident.

But a guy can hope.

Speaking of dropping the ball:

Hima-Ten (Genki Ono, 2024-2026)
I won’t pretend that my following of a handful of romantic-comedy manga written for teenage boys isn’t at least mildly embarrassing… but I am who I am and it’s fine. Several of the years-long series seem to be reaching their conclusion right now, and I guess it’s good Hima-Ten was the first to go because the same day Hima-Ten disappointed virtually every one of its readers, Blue Box was really good and just kinda washed the bad taste from everyone’s mouth. 

If Hima-Ten is remembered for anything, it will be the fact that its central relationship – between Himari and Tenichi i.e. the people in the name of the dang manga – ultimately turns out now to be the True Romance… with Tenichi choosing to shack up with the girl he liked right at the start who got just so much less character development. It’s a choice that is interesting in the abstract and because I never really cared that much who he would end up with, I thought that I’d find it like a cool, subversive move… but no, in practice it’s just annoying. The whole series sets up these two people and then in the final few chapters says “Nah” and undoes it all. 

It’s weird… and I can already feel it being wiped from my memory banks. C’est la vie. 

Speaking of la vie:

New York’s Primary Election Results
It’s cool as hell that Zohran Mamdani is working to actually help push New York politics in a better direction. The moderate democrats who have failed this city for, frankly, generations gotta go. Of course, the response from the machine has been pathetic; BlueSky folks have noted that Democrats are seemingly angrier when genuinely progressive candidates win than they are when active racists do. And to that point, I didn’t even realize I was on Hakeem Jeffries’ email list until after election night, and when they gave me a little box to explain why I was unsubscribing, I said something to the effect of “DSA coming for you next woooo.” 

I am of the belief that Americans are, by and large, not actually that progressive… but the idea that sending a prison abolitionist to congress will move a single needle in any race anywhere else in the country is absurd. Letitia James saying “Boo we don’t want a left-leaning MAGA” is the kind of obnoxious milquetoast bullshit you’d expect. For its infinite faults, MAGA won elections. I would be happy to see the Democratic party fall to a Make America Great For The First Time movement.