December 2020 – Page 3 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Lovers Rock

Lovers Rock (2020)
Written Steve McQueen & Courttia Newland
Directed by Steve McQueen

I fell in love with director Steve McQueen’s work when I saw his first feature film, Hunger, a decade ago. The way he told the story of Bobby Sands, an IRA member who took part in a prisoner hunger strike and died standing up for his beliefs, was told beautifully. As someone who knew nothing about Bobby Sands beforehand, I was in tears during the beautiful final scene. McQueen hasn’t disappointed me since, and I consider every film he’s directed to be one of the best of that year’s releases. So, in 2020, a year that has been unconventional in every possible aspect, McQueen has done something unconventional with his filmmaking as well, releasing the Small Axe Anthology.

Movie Review – Lawrence of Arabia

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Written by Robert Bolt & Michael Wilson
Directed by David Lean

In the 19th century, Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle gave a series of lectures positing the great man theory. This belief is that history is simply the impact of a series of great men who were highly influential and better than the ordinary person. This was attributed to some innate superiority or divine providence. This has become a well-deserved point of contention in modern history discourse as it’s become clear that white men did a very efficient job of suppressing the accounts and perspective of women, black people, and other non-white, LGBTQ+ people that lived alongside them. T.E. Lawrence was definitely seen as a great man, but David Lean’s controversial film about the historical figure explores that the myths and stories did not match the reality.

TV Review – The Mandalorian Season Two

The Mandalorian Season Two (Disney+)
Written by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Rick Famuwiya
Directed by Jon Favreau, Peyton Reed, Bryce Dallas Howard, Carl Weathers, Dave Filoni, Robert Rodriguez, and Rick Famuwiya

I was not a massive fan of the first season of The Mandalorian. Once I realized it was more a procedural Western than a serialized story from the Star Wars universe, I became a lot less interested. I was curious to uncover the mystery of “Baby Yoda,” and the series didn’t seem in any hurry to explore that in detail. So, if I’m honest, my expectations for season two were pretty low. This is to say I was delightfully surprised at how great these eight episodes were. It felt like a real Star Wars story, epic in scope & exciting. I don’t know if the production budget was higher, but it definitely looked and felt like it was.

TV Review – How the Grinch Stole Christmas

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)
Written by Dr. Seuss
Directed by Chuck Jones & Ben Washam

This is my favorite of the classic Christmas animated specials. When I was in the middle of my childhood, in 1988, I think that TNT bought the rights to the Grinch and aired it exclusively on their network. As stated before, I grew up without cable television, and so I’m not sure how I saw this special and remember it so well. I’d like to attribute that to how well animated and written the story is, and so it ingrained itself firmly in my memories. The special came back to broadcast in 2000 on The WB and has floated around networks like ABC and its current home NBC.

TV Review – Frosty the Snowman

Frosty the Snowman (1969)
Written by Romeo Muller
Directed by Arthur Rankin Jr. & Jules Bass

By the end of the 1960s, Rankin-Bass had solidified themselves as one of the major animation companies in North America. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer began their ascent, and in 1969 they had eleven films & animated specials under their belt. This was going to continue into the 1970s but would steadily decline in the early 1980s. When Frosty hit the air, we saw Rankin-Bass at their prime. I would also say this is by far my least favorite of the popular re-aired Christmas specials, but I’ll get more into that later.

Movie Review – The Bridge on the River Kwai

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Written by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson
Directed by David Lean

Of all David Lean’s films, this remains my absolute favorite and rewatching it many years since the last viewing, I saw so much more than I ever have before. I think The Bridge on the River Kwai actually serves as a perfect allegory for the incoming Biden presidency and the unity message of Liberals towards Leftists and Progressives in America. While the film is set during World War II, we aren’t in the middle of the action. Instead, the narrative has two prominent locations: a Japanese POW camp and the Club Med-like hospital and Allied base of operations in Ceylon. We never see massive battleships or armed soldiers moving en masse across hills and fields. These are people broken by war, yet some are still unable to see the madness in their actions and cling to the procedures.

Comic Book Review – X-Men by Jonathan Hickman Volume 2

X-Men by Jonathan Hickman Volume 2 (2020)
Reprints X-Men #7-11
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Francis Lenil Yu

Jonathan Hickman’s new status quo on the X-Men books has been such a refreshing surprising over the last year from Marvel. It seems more and more often, comic books get stuck in nostalgic cycles of retelling the same basic stories over and over. Hickman has totally reinvented the X-Men, ending the entire conflict between the team and their villains to tell a much more compelling story about a new race of people trying to carve out their own place on this planet. There really isn’t an X-Men team anymore with this title and many of the others featuring regularly rotating casts.

TV Review – Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
Written by Romeo Muller
Directed by Larry Roemer

Rankin-Bass dominated holiday television for decades, yet almost none of their productions are remembered aside from this one and maybe a sprinkling of others. Rudolph was the beginning of what would become a bizarre shared universe with Santa Claus, Jack Frost, the Easter Bunny, and more. All of this would serve to inspire later work, especially A Nightmare Before Christmas, which exists as a sort of lost Rankin-Bass crossover between Halloween and Christmas. Rudolph keeps airing every year, but I wondered if it still held up as time has passed and stop-motion animation has evolved since.

TV Review – A Charlie Brown Christmas

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
Written by Charles M. Schulz
Directed by Bill Melendez

This is my favorite of all the classic Christmas specials. It’s very in line with my own complicated feelings about the holiday, imbued with a sense of melancholy while still not lacking that charm you expect from these cartoons. What’s funny is upon its initial viewing for executives, they hated the cartoon. It was seen as too slow-paced, the music was off-putting (genuinely shocking to me), and they hated the animation. This shocked the creators as they were sure this would be a holiday classic from the start, and fears set in that it would never air again. Instead, the public fell in love with the story, drawn to the fact that this wasn’t a shallow feel-good Christmas story but deeper and talking about something more profound.

Comic Book Review – Young Justice Book Five

Young Justice Book Five (2020)
Reprints Young Justice #33 – 43, Young Justice Our Worlds At War #1, Impulse #77, Superboy #91
Written by Peter David (with Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Todd DeZago & Joe Kelly)
Art by Todd Nauck (with Pascual Ferry & Carlo Barberi)

With the publication of this volume, it was billed as the end of Young Justice…except it doesn’t reprint issues 44 through 55. I’m hoping that is an oversight because, as little as I have enjoyed reading through this series, I would like to finish it up in an official collection. If there aren’t signs of a sixth volume, I may just review those last few as an unofficial set. As I said, I haven’t enjoyed this read through as much as I anticipated because of the emphasis on comedy over drama. It’s good to have both, but Peter David certainly leans into the former over the latter.