Ken and Robin Consume Media: Bugonia, Freaky Tales, and Junji Ito’s Cat Diary
November 4th, 2025 | Robin
Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.
Recommended
Elegant Beast (Film, Japan, Yuzo Kawashima, 1962) A family of con artists living in a cramped apartment looks for an angle when the ambitious but dim son (Manamitsu Kawabata) is outmatched by his unflappable ex (Ayako Wakao) in an embezzling scheme. In a visual scheme mirroring the maneuverings of the characters, this satirical drama of post-war moral rot shoots its confined space from every angle. Also known under a much worse English title, The Graceful Brute.—RDL
Freaky Tales (Film, US, Anna Biden & Ryan Fleck, 2024) Four interweaving stories featuring anti-Nazi punks, up and coming rappers, a weary leg-breaker (Pedro Pascal), a corrupt cop (Ben Mendelsohn), and a katana-wielding basketball hero (Jay Ellis) celebrate the spunky underdog culture of 80s Oakland. Genre-hopping hometown valentine nods to the less frequently stolen pages of the Tarantino playbook.—RDL
Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu (Comics, Junji Ito, 2015) Horror mangaka Junji Ito depicts the incursion of new cats into his life: “cursed face” Yon and new kitten Mu, both courtesy of his fiancée “A-ko.” The slim manga serves as self-parody both of Ito’s own style and of the emotional over-commitment of even “normal” cat owners, all under absolutely quotidian tales of escape, vet visits, and weird feline emotional availability. A small delight with a hidden bite, much like its subjects.—KH
Queen of the Deuce (Film, Canada, Valerie Kontakos, 2022) Biographical documentary tells the jaw-dropping story of Chelly Wilson, an indomitable figure who fled Salonika’s Jewish enclave one step ahead of the holocaust, arrived in America with five bucks in her pocket, and parlayed a hot dog counter into a lucrative pornography business in wild 70s New York as theater owner and film financier, becoming a doting if eccentric grandmother along the way.—RDL
Good
Black Magic (Film, US, Gregory Ratoff, 1948) Faith healer Cagliostro (Orson Welles) uses his hypnotic powers for revenge against the count who had his parents hanged, embroiling himself in a scheme to embarrass Marie Antoinette (Nancy Guild) with a faked jewel purchase. Wildly ahistorical even by 40s Hollywood standards and stitched together with narration to cover connective scenes missed in principal photography, this gothic swashbuckler is worth a look for Welles’ magnetic journey from anti-hero to monster.—RDL
Death of a Borgia and The Duke and the Veil (Fiction, Caroline Stevermer, 1981) As “C.J. Stevermer,” fantasy author Caroline Stevermer started her career writing detective novels featuring the English alchemist Nicholas Coffin, living in Rome under the Borgias. (The occasional visit to a reclusive Nicolas Flamel aside, the novels have no fantastic component.) Rome and Cesare Borgia are competently sketched, the mysteries play basically fair; this is good journeyman work by someone who switched genres to find her true metier.—KH
The Green, Green Grass of Home (Film, Taiwan, Hsiao-Hsien Hou, 1982) As an idealistic new grade school teacher (Kenny Bee) settles into his new small town post, his three least ruly students get into a series of scrapes. Episodic slice of life drama with an overbearing, sentimental score at odds with its gentle, observational tone, made before the director adopted his characteristic slow cinema style.—RDL
Okay
Bugonia (Film, US, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025) Conspiratorial fanatic (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps lingo-spouting pharma CEO (Emma Stone), believing she’s an alien infiltrator poisoning the planet. Nihilist provocation shows that just because you can make a more emotionally real version of the 2003 Korean grand guignol black comedy Save the Green Planet doesn’t mean you should.—RDL
