Tatami Galaxy 4

I am officially bored. I said the show was going to have to figure out a way to vary the formula and keep things interesting, but it has absolutely failed to do this. There are moments of insane, beautiful genius peppered liberally throughout it:

...but I just don't give a shit.
I basically think exactly the same thing as I did with Trapeze -- taking insanely talented directors like Yuasa and Kenji Nakamura and forcing them to fritter away their talent on third-rate books not worth filming by authors not worthy of licking the boots of these creative giants is doing both the bootlickers and the visionary directors and the Noitamina audience a huge disservice. Let these people make their own shows! Stop wasting them on adaptions of books that don't bring in an audience anyway!

Tatami Galaxy 2

As expected, it looks like each episode is going to start over at the beginning of college, with the motormouthed narrator choosing a different club before sinking into the exact same failures.

The weakness of this structure is that it mandates a series of echoed touchstones, moments that happen in each version of the story; but to get mileage out of those, you have to keep them more or less the same for the second episode, which is a bit...dull. I couldn't help but feel like they could have done a little more with them than have the narrator experience deja vu. The fortune teller in particular seemed like the same fucking footage. This repetition will pay off later, I'm sure, but for such a stylish show, he didn't really find a way to repeat most of those moments stylishly.
Good thing the rest of the episode is a blast. The shift from the faceless lovers to a full fledged character helped personalize his vindictive struggle.
The ending song is weirdly great, too.

Tatami Galaxy 01

How does each new Yuasa top his previous work?

Can't believe they let shit this good get made. Hardly seems fair to the rest of them.