August 2024 – Page 2 – PopCult Reviews

Patron Pick – Enter the Void

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Enter the Void (2009)
Written by Gaspar Noé and Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Directed by Gaspar Noé

No one knows what happens when we die. There has undoubtedly been a lot of time devoted to thinking about death. Some people claim they know through various intense near-death experiences, but we don’t really. One of the biggest questions that surrounds death is what happens to the conscious mind. In sleep, we dream. But where does that mind go when there is no body to return to? The easiest answer would be, “Remember what it was like before you were born.” That’s what death is like. Nothing.

Movie Review – The Earrings of Madame De…

The Earrings of Madame De… (1953)
Written by Max Ophüls, Annette Wademant, and Marcel Achard
Directed by Max Ophüls

As with so many artists in Europe during the 1930s, Max Ophüls could see the rise of the Nazis and fled to France following the Reichstag Fire. He would continue his odyssey across the continent, attempting to stay ahead of the Nazis, making films along the way before reaching Portugal and heading to the United States. Ophüls would settle down in Hollywood for a few years, where he continued making movies, and once the war was over, he returned to Europe in 1950. It’s this period he’s become most known for, when he made his most acclaimed feature film, The Earrings of Madame De…

TV Review – Fantasmas

Fantasmas (2024)
Written and directed by Julio Torres

The post-Internet era of media is very much here, and one aspect of that is this DIY/hyperreal style of filmmakers like Julio Torres. The work is very much queer both in its presentation of diverse genders and sexualities but also in the strangeness of its presentation. It’s clearly modeled on our real world but often exaggerated in ways inspired by the cartoons of the 1990s and early 2000s these artists grew up watching. They address the current reality of capitalism’s buckling by finding humor in the mundane but nevertheless infuriating odyssey of trying to get adequate health care or resolving a bank charge. And it’s all done in a manner that feels fresh and exciting.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Against the Wind Part Two

You can purchase Against the Wind here

Read my first session here.

For our second session of Against the Wind, I wanted to try out the settlement building procedures. Like everything in this game, creating parts of the world is guided through dice rolls. The tables here cover everything from the angle of the streets and the number of intersections to how dense each block is. You’ll use tables to detail activity on the street and the purpose a building serves if you choose to enter one. I found it to organically build the community and provide many natural adventure hooks or set up potential NPCs to encounter again. Below is my second session playthrough, which ends with a clear direction for our third and final session.

Movie Review – Godzilla Minus One

Godzilla Minus One (2023)
Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki

There is a scene just before the big third-act finale where Godzilla Minus One lays out its core thesis through the words of Kenji, a former Naval weapons officer trying to end the monster’s reign of terror on Japan. He states: “Come to think of it, this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats, and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That’s why this time I’d take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.” And that’s the theme of this film, to live in the face of what seems like hopeless obliteration.

PopCult Podcast – The People’s Joker/Ghostlight

This week it’s two new releases about performance & identity. In one, we see a transgender woman’s story of self-realization through a parody of Batman and his world. In the second, a construction worker happens upon a theater putting on Romeo & Juliet that helps he and his family process a recent trauma

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Supersworn: The Victory Academy Part One

This campaign started as a world-building exercise. Click here to see how we got to this point.

What has come before:

The Naxramman Alliance had its attempted invasion of Earth thwarted by the largest coalition of superhumans ever assembled. Even some villains bordering on antiheroes joined the fight to save their planet. Thousands of tons of wreckage litter the globe. Governments are attempting to secure it, some for good and others for ill. Supervillains and their minions are also grabbing up as much as they can.

The death of Silver Sentry signaled the end of The Silver Generation and the transition into the darker Bronze Generation. A battle with Bombardier left the android’s body in pieces. He was laid to rest by his family & friends, with his adopted human daughter taking on the mantle of The Silver Rose in her late father’s honor. Months ago, rumors that Sentry was alive again started to circulate. He was spotted in Hong Kong, Cape Town, and Rome. Other androids, robots, and AI all started to vanish. STRIKE believes Sentry is gathering these beings under something called The Machine Collective. Its purpose is unknown.

Aiden Bell used to be Captain Quantum, a child’s fantasy of a superhero. As a thirteen-year-old, he would blow the right notes on the quantum whistle and swap places with the alien super-being Quantum. Along the way, things went sour, but he’s in his fifties now and claims to have been reformed since then, or at least pretending to be. This rebranding has been so persuasive the city leaders have appointed Bell the headmaster of The Victory Academy. He’s interested in making this a pathway for young superheroes working directly for America’s institutions. The instructors at the Academy are highly suspicious of this move.

Movie Review – Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer (2023)
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Western culture is obsessed with singular individuals. Any brief survey of historical events reveals that while there may be people in positions of leadership or authority, they rarely act alone. The Nazis were not simply Hitler. Many of them passed through the war untarnished and even got cushy jobs working for the United States government, like Werner Von Braun. A general depends upon an army. The U.S. government is not just the President. Oppenheimer was placed in a leadership position at Los Alamos, but the construction and deployment of the atomic bomb cannot be placed at his feet alone. That also doesn’t excuse his involvement, either.

TV Review – Shogun Season One

Shogun Season One (2024)
Written by Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks, Shannon Goss, Nigel Williams, Emily Yoshida, Matt Lambert, Maegan Houang, and Caillin Puente
Directed by Jonathan van Tulleken, Charlotte Brändström, Frederick E.O. Toye, Hiromi Kamata, Takeshi Fukunaga, and Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour

I must confess that of all the Japanese media, the stories surrounding this historical period typically leave me cold. I can acknowledge that there is tremendous quality here, but the philosophy of life is so dramatically alien to me that I have difficulty connecting to it. Unlike the protagonist here, I do not feel the intense etiquette systems. It comes across to me as oppressive and suffocating. But then, I wouldn’t be surprised if a Japanese person who finds this perspective normal looked at how I lived my life and felt that I was in a sort of prison, too. All societies are, to an extent, prisons; they have rules relatively rigid to outsiders. And that’s kind of what this show is exploring.

Movie Review – Black Rain

Black Rain (1989)
Written by Shōhei Imamura and Toshirō Ishido
Directed by Shōhei Imamura

In a bizarre coincidence, two movies titled Black Rain were released in 1989. They both take place in Japan. They opened in theaters one week apart. The other Black Rain we won’t be reviewing is a Michael Douglas-led action picture about the Yakuza directed by Ridley Scott. No one involved in the writing of that film was Japanese. But they both derive their title from the same phenomenon: the black rain that fell after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This substance was nuclear fallout falling like rain from the massive pyrocumulus cloud left in the bomb’s wake. The U.S. picture uses the black rain as a plot point and doesn’t really provide context or give adequate respect to the victims. As is typical in escapist Western cinema, it’s exploitation from top to bottom. Not so with the Japanese film.