#inside review

In this post, I’m going to go over all the stuff that I’ve written about on Tumblr to see what episodes, games, TV shows and movies I’ve enjoyed and enjoyed writing about. I’m still learning because I’m not a professional critic or a journalist but a novelist. I started this as a means for a portfolio to build-up work and I couldn’t be bothered messing about with making a website because I’m not exactly tech-savvy. This has been a lot of fun and I look forward to doing so much more. So much in fact, that I will have eventually written about everything ever.

Perfect Blue

I really loved Perfect Blue and I was very happy with what I wrote about it because it’s not exactly an easy film. I barely scratched the surface but I personally feel that it is one of those movies that isn’t really meant to be “got”. It has multiple layers and “reading too much into it” is a concept that the film itself makes comment on. The art allows you as a viewer to make what you think out of it and it’s a double-edged sword because at one end, it does mean that it’s an expertly crafted psychedelic, psychological thriller that achieves this mystery in the plot but on the other - in this modern age of post-grad, new-media analyses - people want to declare that their interpretation is exactly what the art is about. If you look up write-ups and reviews of Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, research is riddled with all sorts of angles on the ideas that the film presented which is great but it’s frustrating that ultimately no-one really knows for certain what was real and what isn’t and that is the point of the movie but no-one can really accept that. Everything has to have conclusions and I tried to avoid that as much as possible in my post but just to talk about themes.

Having said that though, if I was to re-do it again right now, it would probably be completely different. In short, I still love the movie and almost everything about it. I do think it is ever-so slightly overrated and overstated. To date, it’s my favourite animé movie. If you want to read it, it’s here. It’s a biggun, mind.

Re:ZERO / Starting Life in Another World from Zero

i’m ups and downs about Re:ZERO and I still am. It was exhausting to write about every single episode of this fucking show because you don’t expect the world to be so complicated because of the silly way that it begins. Writing about it was not like anything that I had ever done before and I was thrown in at the deep end but in a lot of ways, I thrived from the challenge. It was my first real foré into animé that was outside my jurisdiction, as it were. Compared to what Japanese media that I absorbed before (Danganronpa, Persona, A Silent Voice, Madoka Magica and Steins;Gate), it was pretty out-there. I was still new to animé (I still am) so it was a little overwhelming. I routinely got things wrong, confused one episode’s contents for anothers and spelled character’s names wrong. Not only was I ill-experienced with animé, I wasn’t terribly interested in medieval fantasy either. In fact, I hate medieval fantasy.

All that being said, I still enjoyed my time writing about it and embracing the challenge. I like that there is a lot that I can say about most episodes despite what I actually think about it. Even though I’ve wrote two summary write-ups about the both seasons, I still don’t really think that I’ve settled in my opinions about it. It is one of those things that is admittedly quite good but there is just that certain thing that you cannot put your finger on for the life of you that would just make it that bit better.

For brevity, my favourite episodes [to write about] were The Sound of Chains, The Outside of Madness and The Witches Tea Party. There were more good episodes but they were so good in fact, that it was too hard to write about them. I’m not Vonnegut, you know.

To Your Eternity

I really loved the first few episodes of To Your Eternity. I was blown away by the weirdness of the concept and how they executed it in a really larger-than-life way. Although that I’m having a tumultuous time with it at the moment, I still think the first six or seven episodes were really good at doing everything it is that you can think of and then some. It was great at storytelling, building mystery and suspense, drama and fight scenes. Fumetsu no Anata is an incredibly competent show and the universe outside of the brewery is something that I’d love to explore for myself. I’ve not been too invested in anything for a long time and I’m going to stick with it despite the problems I’ve had with it in recent weeks. I upload a To Your Eternity write-up every Tuesday after the newest episode has come out and Episode #11 came out yesterday on my blog.

My favourite episodes are The Rambunctious Girl, A Small Evolution and Those Who Follow. This has to be the asterisk that these are my favourite episodes so far. The series is far from being done.

INSIDE

I loved Bo Burnham’s INSIDE as did everyone else but I felt like my write-up could’ve been a lot better after sitting down to read what everyone else had to say about it and it was all far more clever, poetic and beautfiul compared to me. It’s probably why I pre-emptively prefaced it with the adverb Gushing to implicate senseless rambling by a blogging idiot who doesn’t know how to properly review a film or what to say about music. I still do enjoy it and I wish that I could sit and write four hours and be incredibly dissectant in how the piece is put together. But my dissertation is on the way and I don’t really have time to be surgical for fun.

My favourite songs were White Woman’s Instagram, Welcome to the Internet, Comedy, Problematic, Sexting and Goodbye.

Berserk

I very much loved writing about all of Berserk from the original and iconic animé to the much maligned 2016 iteration. After rejecting a lot of it initially, the more and more I think about it, it grew on me. I had to go back and rewatch everything once Kentaro Miura died and I discovered that I actually, genuinely loved Berserk and I don’t know what I was thinking. It was nice to write about something so certain and so plainly obvious. Like I said in the original article, I don’t know what else I can add. It was just a lot of fun to express how I felt about it if it was ever so brief.

Persona 4: The Animation

Persona 4: The Animation has been present in my life for what feels like forever and I was bound to write about it once I started doing this i-have-an-opinion-blog thing instead of concentrating on my novelist pursuit. It’s something that has stuck with me ever since I first seen it and to me, it was my first animé that I ever watched and could remember all the way through. But it had been a long time since then so I decided to sit down and watch through it all again to see how it would fair on my now slightly cynical brain.

Now,

it wasn’t as great as I remember BUT, I still had a good time watching it. I found new favourites in the series and new things to like about Persona generally. I also found new things to utterly loathe and despair at the sight of it in the 26 episodes. To be fair, some of those certain things that I now hate about it are things that I would hate in all animé and they are disappointingly common things that you aren’t allowed to express distaste for because “it’s just an animé thing” i.e. Treating women like property, making fun of gay men, trying to find comedy in borderline sexual assault ETC. At the risk of putting myself in front of the cannon of annoying patois and verbiage from the terminally reclusive, I have to say that all those tropes had soured my friendship with Persona 4: The Animation but not enough to break the bond completely. Now, P4 is that friend who crosses paths with a different friend group of yours one day nd you sit there clenching your knuckles until they’re snowball white because you're constantly worried that embarrassment or offense might be caused at any point. You know it’s capable of it but you just hope the charm shines through all the cringe.

My new favourite episode was The Anniversary to Become a Family which you can find my write-up of here.

It feels like it has been a very long time since something has came about that has been so universally acclaimed and it has grown on me more and more since my first viewing. At the time of writing this, I have seen it four times.

It’s funny because my initial praise seemed fairly pedestrian in that I enjoyed it because it struck the comfy place between base-level silliness and excavated deeper meaning. You can still enjoy this work of art if you take it for what it is but the iceberg is there if you want to take a deep dive underwater which is precisely what you want out of any art. But there, I’ve praised INSIDE for essentially being extremely competent at visual storytelling and thematic resonance as opposed to telling what those themes and story are. How themes of living with anxiety and depression, the blurred lines between the creative self and the human underneath the skin and aspects of self-awareness.

It also couldn’t have released at a better time or in a better way. It wasn’t hastily knocked together in prime pandemic hour when every production company was scrambling for some COVID-19 related media. It isn’t really about the pandemic either and I feel like he could’ve made this whenever and it would still touch and relate to people like it has. It’s just even more relatable to a lot more people. Personally, I think it’s a bit of a mistake to put this out in cinemas because it obviously isn’t crafted for a crowd of people. I feel like being in a massive theater full of other people would detract from the claustrophobic experience of watching it.

I can go on and on about how brilliant INSIDE was at achieving all this and more but I want to talk about the infectious creativity behind Burnham’s latest song-and-dance.

The term ‘home-made’ is synonymous with low-effort. Not anymore. Sure, it’s obvious that Bo Burnham’s equipment wasn’t bought in an alleyway and that it is bound to have cost an arm and a leg. But the point is that it could’ve been made with electronic equipment that Burnham found at the back of his shed and it still would’ve went down just as well. The power was in his all in his hands to make something exceptionally good and be in complete control of the output which is an abject rarity in this world. So he made what he wanted and had to answer to nobody - on paper anyway.

As an aside, something that I found frustrating was that everyone and their dog was trying to get ahold of him for an interview about it or a podcast or whatever when, I really don’t want to know behind the scenes or the thought process. It’s not something we should want to know. It would be like asking Salvador Dali what he was thinking when he turned the urinal on it’s side and signed it with a fake name. That may sound a little pretentious but it’s true that once he tells you, some of the magic has gone. You should want the magician to baffle you.

Anyway, it’s clear Bo Burnham is writing about himself whilst simultaneously expressing a self-consciousness about how he is percieved by himself versus the perception of others. This is especially present in the reaction scene where Bo Burnham reacts to himself reacting to himself reacting to himself reacting to his song Unpaid Intern. The end result of him writing about himself is fantastically earnest and thought-provoking despite the groundwork being very small.

It’s something you appreciate as a viewer when you’re watching it because it’s not like you are being let inside someone’s thoughts and feelings, you are being let inside someone’s thoughts and feelings. He has used the concept of being by oneself to think about oneself conceptually. That is perhaps what I admire most about INSIDE because it’s a special, secret slice of Bo Burnham. Personally, I’m self-conscious that I’m scrubbing myself and who I am over everything I do when it isn’t entirely necessary or that I’m tricking myself into thinking people are interested. No-one looks at INSIDE and thinks that Burnham is being narcisstic or self-absorbant.

Of course, it isn’t a new thing that an artist has put a piece of themself into something that they’ve made but it’s rare that someone has done it this way.

Conceptually, Burnham has created something unique that does defy the laws of what movies should be. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but if you’ve ever tried to recommend this to someone else, you struggle to describe what it even is because, unlike the fucking boring Death Stranding, it actually has invented a new genre. If there is one thing I hate in craft, it’s rules. Bo has given me something to aim for in that respect.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQf1Lhhles5/?utm_medium=copy_link

"Inside" - Bo Burnham's Netflix Special: Review "We have a masterpiece on our hands."

“Inside” – Bo Burnham’s Netflix Special: Review Starring, written, directed, and produced by Bo Burnham. “Inside”, Bo Burnham’s newest special is available to stream on Netflix now. TW: This review mentions suicide towards the end (I’ve marked the section with an * after the subheading) – please do not put yourself in harm’s way to read this if it will negatively affect you. We know you support…

I’ve always been a bit funny about young Bo throughout his career. His material has been hit-and-miss for me between some punchlines being far too obvious to be funny to then produce a song that is surprisingly fantastic and completely takes me back with how clever and catchy it is. I’ve never been one for comedy and music mixed in a cauldron because it always comes off un-natural to my ears. I thought that his movie Eighth Grade was far better than i expected but it wasn’t great enough for me to turn a corner on him. I should point out that he’s obviously got a talent for this sort of thing but what. and Make Happy weren’t really for me despite the handful of laughs they do have.

I was skeptical about this because I thought that, because it was a Netflix special, I pre-judged it massively to be by-the-numbers comedy but with awkward and obnoxious gags about the COVID-19 pandemic in front of no crowd - it's just not something we all need right now. I didn’t really like the idea that it was a creation not born out of creativity but necessity. I couldn’t be more wrong though.

Bo Burnham really flexes all the skills that he’s learned over his many years of production, song-writing, direction and editing and all that by itself is enough for you to enjoy watching it. Empathy for the pursuit is made easy. The work he has put in really translates well on screen so it’s a likeable product anyway irrespective of what’s in it. The homemade charm just bleeds through the screen. This entire project feels like a massive evolution in itself because of how much Burnham seems to have improved in all departments from comedy to music. I tell you all this because I’m not raving about INSIDE simply because I’m happy to see him after all this time. To get it out of the way now, I think this crushes everything else that he’s ever done and it isn’t even close.

I’m no Anthony Fantano so I can’t make clever and informed commentary on the musical gusto of Bo Burnham in this special. All I can really say is that I loved nearly all of them and the greatness of all the songs in it are lifted even further by the incredible DIY visuals that Burnham makes using some admittedly expensive equipment however, they are just projectors, good lighting lamps, synths and keyboards. It’s all very gorgeous on the retinas and a pleasing accompaniment that you wouldn’t get out of listening to the album (which came out today so check it out if you don’t have the evil Netflix; it’s the next best thing).

I really enjoyed a lot of the clever commentary throughout the movie and it really reminded me a lot of Limmy’s Show! or his homemade iteration because, on surface level, the jokes are very silly, quick and punchy but there is a lot of subtext that you can really sink your teeth into. An analysis of the entire project warrants it's own article. A couple of my favourite sketches were the parody of a Twitch streamer which hits home a lot for me as I dipped my toes into streaming when none of us were allowed to leave our houses - and the reaction video sketch. When both of those sketches begin, they seem very simple and transparent but they evolve to unexpected places and they say a lot that you perhaps wouldn’t expect. The themes of the internet are very fitting in that Bo Burnham analyses and pokes fun at the over-reliance on the web, especially at a time like this where many people, me included, have tried to pick up streaming to fill the void.

What a lot of people have mentioned is how dark some of the undertones are but I didn’t think the comedy was incredibly black. I thought the stream of consciousness stuff was great at letting you in to the creative process and it didn’t come off as fake at all. A big part of comedy is sympathy and empathy and I personally thought that it was a great way of executing it and it wasn’t terribly present either so you aren't distracted by it.

The narrative of the piece is unexpected but engrosses you in the fever dream of Bo's post-modern making-of documentary where you are right in the lens. Lines between reality and fiction are blurred and fuzzy as Bo Burnham thinks aloud about his life, his career and what comedy means to him. The latter is nothing unusual for him but in this context, you find yourself asking questions about your attitude to entertainment when no-one is laughing in the background.

Towards the end, it felt less like a “Netflix Comedy Special™ and more like I was watching a movie with how everything is cohesively tied together. It’s far more nuanced and carries a lot more weight than anything else Bo Burnham has ever done, in my opinion.

I hope Bo Burnham continues along this path and maybe gets a series centered around sketches and music in this sort of vein though this special might become even more special if it was just a one-off event where the stars aligned in perfect circumstances. Really, what I mean to say is that I hope Bo Burnham gets to do whatever makes him happy. Like the aforementioned Limmy, he’s quietly a very talented individual without a space that suits him the best where he can do whatever he wants to do.

Maybe I was expecting too much because it seemed interesting. This movie is kinda underwhelming. The only draw is Willem Dafoe.

Playing the final act of Inside, I gasped in awe, recoiled in horror, cackled with laughter, and danced with excitement at the sheer audacity of the thing. Without spoilers or hyperbole: it’s probably the finest final act of a video game I have ever played.

Not that the rest of the game is some kind of disappointment. Playdead’s followup to Limbo is packed with haunting visual and aural design, clever puzzles, and elegant storytelling. At four or so hours, it’s an incredibly concentrated burst of imagination that outdoes its predecessor in just about every way - then almost mandates you jump in and play it again. It’s also a challenge to review: all I want to say is “do not read spoilers; do not pass Go; just play this goddamn game as soon as you can.”

Inside’s basic design echoes the simple, monochromatic puzzle-platforming of Limbo, but adds a number of literal and metaphorical dimensions. The graphics and environment are rendered in beautiful 2.5D, with Playdead putting all those Limbo dollars to good use. Vegetation sways, water ripples, and dust billows in a desaturated world that leaps off the screen like a series of digital paintings. The unnamed, exceptionally well-animated young protagonist starts out in spooky woods, but soon finds himself up against an industrialised machine-state. Piles of slaughtered pigs are just the beginning of the horror he'll find: as he descends into a nightmarish city, the vistas and goings-on get far stranger than anyone could reasonably expect.

I really can’t stress enough how weird and disturbing Inside gets, and I’m straining against powerful urges to avoid spoiling its surprises. Suffice it to say that the horror of Inside is not limited to scary environments or beastly creatures. It's far deeper than that.

In part, the story is told with visual and audio clues both overt and subtle, creating a growing sense of unease as its mysteries deepen and unfold. Not a single word is uttered in the entire runtime, and the only visible text are numbers guiding you (or are they?) towards your ultimate destination. Through your actions, but also through scripted animations taking place off in the distance, Inside paints a series of uncomfortable tableaus: armies of people marching into cages, strange shockwaves booming across the landscape, twisted forests growing inside great steel structures. And the sound design is just as lonely and unsettling.

But the real devious brilliance of Inside lies in its combination of gameplay and storytelling.

If you’ve played Limbo, the basics of Inside will come as second nature - pull this block along the ground, jump over this gap, hold down this button to move a bit of scenery, and so on. But Inside adds a number of mechanics - deftly taught through guided discovery - that generate fiendish puzzles and pique narrative curiosity in equal measure. Paced in peaks and troughs to avoid repetition and constantly confront the player with new ideas, the puzzles challenge the player’s understanding of how the world works, both physically and psychologically. Many puzzles are the sort of head-scratchers that make you laugh out loud when you work them out. One mechanic - which turns a mid-game episode into a primal exercise in terror - gets brought to a horrifying peak before being neatly inverted in the game’s latter episodes. It’s goddamned smart design.

Inside is a rare game that demands active thought well after the credits roll. It doesn't reward multiple playthroughs mechanically, apart from a handful of hidden secrets and a fourth-wall-breaking alternate ending, but I’d challenge anyone with an ounce of innate curiosity to finish it without immediately wanting to play it again. There’s so much going on in the margins - seriously, so much unthinkably bizarre shit - that fan theories will no doubt proliferate as to the meaning of the game’s story and worldbuilding.

Speculation as to the literal events and phenomena of Inside would miss the point. Its abstract, at times Ghibliesque design defies logic, using dystopian sci-fi and horror ideas to reflect themes and ideas rather than spin a finite tale. Exploring notions of industrial slavery, scientific hubris, institutional control, and the nature of body and self, it invites multiple interpretations and complex emotional responses. Mindless masses, hulking machinery, seemingly endless stygian abysses - it’s all potent imagery of oppression and despair. There’s resistance to authority in the game’s spirit, starting from the protagonist’s opening run from taser-equipped figures and continuing into its desperate, triumphant final moments. But there’s also a sense that nearly everything in your little revolt is pre-ordained. Maybe it’s about the dangers of non-conformity! Whichever way you see it, it’ll make you want to watch other people play, just so you can discuss and argue over its meaning.