vverb's Plex Newsletter, September 2025
Oh jeez. Okay. I didn’t realize how many things I added to the server this month until I opened the draft for this and realized that I had already input a bunch earlier in the month and still had a lot to go. But hey, that’s good right, you’re all getting your money’s worth. Notable themes this month are a trio of examples of the late New Taiwanese Cinema movement, and also the rest of the Godzilla franchise through the end of the Heisei era (1995). And a bunch of other stuff, as usual.
Server Updates
None
New Additions
A City of Sadness (1989) 720p HEVC, stereo AAC audio (Chinese), SRT subtitles (English)
M.D. Geist (1986) 480p HEVC, stereo AAC audio (Japanese), ASS subtitles (English)
Steins;Gate (2011) 1080p HEVC, stereo OPUS audio (Japanese), 5.1 OPUS audio (English) (except for the ONA episodes), ASS subtitles (English)
Steins;Gate 0 (2018) 1080p HEVC, stereo OPUS audio (Japanese), 5.1 OPUS audio (English), ASS subtitles (English)
Dallos (1983) 1080p HEVC, stereo FLAC audio (Japanese), ASS subtitles (English)
Outlander (2014) (Season 5) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AC3 audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)
The Prisoner (1967) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AAC audio (English), PGS subtitles (English)
Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX (2025) 1080p HEVC, Stereo EAC3 audio (Japanese, English), ASS subtitles (English)
Cromartie High School (2003) SD HEVC, Stereo HE-AAC audio (Japanese), 5.1 HE-AAC audio (English), ASS subtitles (English)
My Dress-Up Darling (2022) 1080p HEVC, Stereo FLAC audio (Japanese), 5.1 FLAC audio (English), ASS subtitles (English)
A Brighter Summer Day (1991) 1080p HEVC, Stereo AAC audio (Chinese), SRT subtitles (English)
Rebels of the Neon God (1994) 1080p HEVC, Stereo AAC audio (Chinese), SRT subtitles (English)
Berserk (1997) 1080p HEVC, Stereo AAC audio (Japanese), ASS subtitles (English)
Lust, Caution (2007) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AAC audio (Chinese), SRT subtitles (English)
Halloween (1978) 1080p HEVC, 7.1 AAC and stereo HE-AAC audio (English), VOBSUB subtitles (English)
Magic Knight Rayearth (1994) (season 1) 1080p HEVC, Stereo AAC audio (Japanese), SRT subtitles (English)
Air Crash Investigation (2003) (seasons 1-3) SD HEVC, Stereo VORBIS audio (English)
The Wicker Man (1973) 1080p HEVC, Stereo AAC audio (English), VOBSUB subtitles (English)
Ping Pong the Animation (2014) 1080p HEVC, Stereo OPUS audio (Japanese), ASS subtitles (English)
The Sixth Sense (1999) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 EAC3 audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)
And also every Godzilla film from 1971 to 1995, 720p HEVC, stereo AC3 audio (Japanese), SRT subtitles (English), which is to say:
Changes
After some consideration and reading about database structuring, moved Gundam AGE: Memory of Eden back to the movies library, but with a new naming scheme so that the two parts show up as one movie.
Moved the first Dirty Pair OVA from being season 2 of the TV show to being at the end of season 1, as it’s listed on TVDB.
Deletion Proposals
None
What’ve I Watched?
A City of Sadness (1989)
A City of Sadness is the breakout hit of director Hou Hsiao-Hsien (that’s Xiaoxian if you prefer a less stupid romanization system), one of the central figures of the 1980s new wave cinema scene in Taiwan. Central to this movement was a cultural working through of modern Taiwanese history with the relative opening up of the post-martial law era. It was initially described to me as a history of Taiwan’s White Terror, but that’s not exactly right, because the focus of the film is actually slightly earlier, roughly the period of 1945-49, during the chaotic interim between Taiwan’s return to Chinese government until the relocation of the Nationalist government from Chengdu to Taipei at the end of the Civil War. This is done through the experiences of the Lin family, centered around the eldest son Lin Wen-hsiung who owns a bar in Taipei, as a family already marked by tragedy and the stresses of foreign occupation deal with a new period of social transition, the exodus of Japanese nationals from the island and the influx of Chinese criminals, radicals, and the outmatched and increasingly ideologically repressive government of the KMT. It is both a beautiful and, unsurprisingly, very sad movie; Hou works a lot of very artfully composed static shots, watching a workplace discussion framed through the open door of the local clinic, fights weaving in and out of rooms as the camera watches from down the hall, or striking natural vistas that dwarf the frequent acts of random and desperate violence taking place somewhere in the middle distance. This literal distance creates an emotional distance from the characters who are so central to the story, the viewer necessarily alienated from the action by decades of intervening history. I wouldn’t say that it’s a great film to watch if you’re hoping to understand the historical facts of this period in Taiwanese history, but it certainly conveys an emotional sense of some of the terror of the times, the seemingly random ways in which social relationships are upended by chance encounters, opportunists, or the rapidly changing laws of the increasingly desperate KMT, culminating in the 228 Incident that led to the beginning of the White Terror.
The Sixth Sense (1999)
I actually rewatched the Sixth Sense after watching Unbreakable, but it makes more sense to discuss them in this order because so much of my thinking about the latter has been recontextualized by the former. I think that all the memes and the extremely mixed reputation of Shyamalan’s later films make it easy to forget what a truly excellent movie The Sixth Sense is. Partly this is because the twist is undeniably quite good, in that it is both surprising if you don’t know where it’s going, and then in retrospect completely obvious, so thoroughly woven through the fabric of the film. But that in itself isn’t enough, if the fabric into which that twist were woven weren’t so strong. Perhaps where it most shines is in the performances, which a main cast that is delivering really compelling work that is at times heartrendingly dramatic and at others impressively subtle. Bruce Willis, Olivia Williams, and Toni Collette are all excellent but perhaps most impressive is eleven-year-old Haley Joel Osment. What becomes clear revisiting the film, and adds very much to the tragedy of it, is the way Osment’s Cole Sear is clearly carefully managing every conversation he has, intimately aware——in the way that children often are of the emotional states of those around them——of what things are safe to share with the adults around him both corporeal and spectral, and constantly calibrating his words both to protect him and to put those around him at ease.
Unbreakable (2000)
14 months later, Shyamalan followed up The Sixth Sense with a film that is in some ways quite similar. Returning protagonist Bruce Willis is a stadium security guard in the midst of a failing marriage who miraculously survives a violent train accident and is then faced with the possibility that he is actually a superhero. Released just a few months after Bryan Singer’s X-Men, it sits in a very awkward era for superhero movies in between 1997’s disastrously received Batman & Robin and Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man film, in which the possibility of a serious and well-crafted comic book movie seemed an embarrassing near-impossibility. Unbreakable, unlike X-Men, eschews familiar comic book characters to make a film deeply concerned with the form of comic books both as media and as a sort of pulp-history. It’s an intriguing film and also, compared to Shyamalan’s work of the previous year, kind of a huge mess. The parallels in character archetypes underscore how much less dynamic Willis’ performance is here, and Robin Wright and Spencer Treat Clark’s characters seem like drafts compared to their counterparts in The Sixth Sense. The most arresting performance is probably Samuel Jackson as Elijah Price, but this shines through in moments of brilliance and otherwise seems not really up to the caliber of performance Jackson is capable of. I suspect this to be a fault of the writing more any of the particular actors here. It’s all basically competent, but Wright’s performance as Audrey Dunn, the protagonist’s wife, is stymied by the fact that she functions more like a plot device or character foil in the story than a person. Compared to the intricacy of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable feels rough, oddly paced, an attempt to work through the figure of the superhero as mythopoetic archetype and their place in modern society that is thoughtful but ultimately seems to lack a clear argument. What still comes through is the particularity of Shyamalan’s camerawork, which stands out even more distinctively here. The very first scene of the movie places the camera in the perspective of a young child and uses seatbacks as boundaries to intermittently frame and interrupt the action on screen. It remains similarly striking throughout, despite its unevenness, and in the hands of another director this might be what I’d call a bad movie, but impressively Shyamalan has produced such a singular work here that even in its warts its compelling.
Miscellany
Uhhhhh nothing this month I don’t think. Forgot to take notes on this part.