September 2024 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse (2011)
Written by László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr
Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky

The world is dying. The world will die. This has been the world’s fate since before humans stood upright and began their intellectual evolution. The Turin Horse is a film about the brutal toil it is to be alive in this world, to experience death at all times, and to be able to do nothing about it. The world is going to die whether we are here for it or not. Eventually, billions of years from now, our sun will expand as it goes into its death throes and consume the inner worlds of our solar system. That is beyond the macro view; that is the omni view. On a smaller scale, we have the perpetuation of our species. Will one of us be able to observe this solar gargantuan devour our old homeworld from a safe distance, our species spread out across the Milky Way? That is something that feels very uncertain at this point in our history.

Comic Book Review – X-Men: Days of Future Present and The X-Tinction Agenda

X-Men: Days of Future Present (1989)
Reprints Fantastic Four Annual #23, The New Mutants Annual #6, X-Factor Annual #5, and Uncanny X-Men Annual #14
Written by Walt Simonson, Louise Simonson, and Chris Claremont
Art by Jackson Guice, Geof Isherwood, Terry Shoemaker, Chris Wozniak, Scott Williams, Allen Milgrom, Art Thibert, Harry Candelario, Jon Bogdanove, Arthur Adams, Dan Green, Steve Moncuse, Art Thibert, and Bob Wiacek

X-Men: The X-Tinction Agenda (1992)
Reprints Uncanny X-Men #270-272, New Mutants #95-97, and X-Factor #60-62
Written by Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson
Art by Jim Lee, Art Thibert, Scott Williams, Rob Liefeld, Joe Rubinstein, Jon Bogdanove, John Caponigro, Al Milgrom, and Guang Yap

Two of Chris Claremont’s stories dominated his run and every subsequent run to follow – “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Days of Future Past.” That latter story inspires “Days of Future Present,” a kind of sequel focusing on the adult Franklin Richards introduced in the old story. Over in the pages of Louise Simonson’s Power Pack, she had included Franklin, the son of Mr. Fantastic, and the Invisible Woman showcases his burgeoning mutant powers. The adult version of Franklin is essentially a god who can reshape reality. He’s searching for his lost love, Rachel Summers.

Movie Review – Werckmeister Harmonies

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
Written by László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr
Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky

Janos, a philosophical young man in a small isolated European town, arranges the patrons of a tavern one night in a simulation of the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth. He uses this to tell a story about a total eclipse of the Sun. When the orbiting bodies achieve this conjunction, he tells a brief fable:

The sky darkens, and then all goes dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful incomprehensible dusk, even the birds, the birds are too confused and go to roost. And then… Complete silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don’t know. For a total eclipse has come upon us…. But… No need to fear it is not over. For across the Sun’s glooming sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away… And the Sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth there slowly comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness.

With that, he walks out of the tavern, and the rest of the film unfolds as a realization of this story.

Movie Review – Sátántangó

Sátántangó (1994)
Written by Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai
Directed by Béla Tarr

Seven hours and thirty minutes. That’s what will stand out for most people when they learn about Sátántangó. That is certainly something that makes it unlike most films. A runtime that long feels overwhelming, and that’s the reason Béla Tarr made this movie. Based on the novel of the same name, the film’s structure is a piece of wonder modeled after the actual tango dance. Broken into twelve parts, the story does not move chronologically and follows the steps of the tango – six steps forward, six steps back. It’s a daunting cinematic challenge, but I found it a very fulfilling experience and felt things I never had before about films.

Comic Book Review – X-Men by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee Omnibus Volume One

X-Men by Chris Claremont & Jim Lee Omnibus Volume One (2021)
Reprints Uncanny X-Men #244-269, X-Men Annual #13, and Classic X-Men #39
Written by Chris Claremont and Ann Nocenti
Art by Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, Rob Liefeld, Rick Leonardi, Kieron Dwyer, Bill Jaaska, Whilce Portacio, Mike Collins, Dan Green, Steve Leialoha, Kent Williams, Scott Williams, Josef Rubenstein, and Art Thibert

Following the conclusion of Inferno, Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men entered a strange period. He would wrap up the Australia-era team only to disband the X-Men. Yet the comic would continue. Instead of team-centered stories, the book became a rotating anthology about mutants who had been or were associated with the X-Men. There wasn’t a team officially bearing that name for nearly a year, but the stories continued. What was happening was a showdown between Claremont and new line editor Bob Harras.

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

Read the previous chapter here

[Begin a Session: External factors create new danger, urgency, or importance for a quest]
Thread: Alien Tech Aftermath
Oracle: Find Target

Everything fell apart for Ryker Vane the day the Space Agents filled the sky above his home world, Essifum. Vane’s tribe consisted of pacifist farmers. It was the Space Agents’ war against Bale and his Deathvoid Inquisitors that ended this idyll. Crops were burnt and houses razed as both cosmic forces battled, taking little heed of the innocents caught in the middle. Ryker would learn that to many, the Space Agents were considered heroes. He found the truth to be far different.

Movie Review – Damnation

Damnation (1988)
Written by Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai
Directed by Béla Tarr

You must remove any of your expectations when you sit down to watch a Béla Tarr film. He’s a filmmaker I’d heard of for years and even seen films influenced indirectly & directly by him. The Chinese film An Elephant Sitting Still by his late protege Hu Bo was one of them. But I’d never seen anything by Tarr himself. I decided to watch his four highest-rated movies, made during the second period of his career, where he changed his style and produced work that is considered some of the finest films ever made. These are definitive slow cinema stories in no hurry and use their plodding nature to emphasize some cruel truths about being human.

PopCult Podcast – Rebel Ridge/Evil Does Not Exist

Two recent releases are in the spotlight. Jeremy Saulnier presents an entertaining & tense action film about a Black man against the local law preventing him from helping his cousin. Ryusuke Hamaguchi delivers a complicated a story of a rural Japanese village facing an outsider developer.

Comic Book Review – X-Men: Inferno Omnibus

X-Men: Inferno Omnibus (2018)
Reprints X-Factor #33-40, X-Factor Annual #4, X-Terminators #1-4, Uncanny X-Men #239-243 and New Mutants #71-73
Written by Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson, and Mark Gruenwald
Art by Marc Silvestri, Walter Simonson, Jon Bogdanove, Terry Shoemaker, Bret Blevins, Jim Fern, Rob Liefeld, Dan Green, Bob Wiacek, Al Williamson, Al Migrom, Joe Rubenstein, Mike Manley, and Hilary Barta

For five years, Madelyne Pryor had existed as a mystery in the X-Men corner of the Marvel Universe. A few years after losing Jean Grey, Cyclops met her doppelganger, an Alaskan pilot. Their love blossomed, they married, and they even had a baby. But then Jean miraculously returned, and Cyclops abandoned his wife and child so that he could head back to New York City as part of X-Factor. Maddie was attacked by the Marauders, and her baby was stolen. She’d end up with the X-Men in Dallas, where they were killed in front of television cameras only to be resurrected by the goddess Roma and sent off into a new chapter of life in the Australian Outback. Finally, Claremont would reveal the true nature of Maddie in what would serve as the first true X-Men crossover, an event that touched on all the ongoing books and had tie-ins throughout the Marvel Universe.

Patron Pick – Quigley

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.

Quigley (2003)
Written and directed by William Byron Hillman

When you see a film like Quigley, many questions flow through your mind. “Are we meant to believe 50-year-old Curtis Armstrong is actually 35?” “Was this just a money laundering scheme by the mob?” “Are we laughing with Gary Busey or at him?” If Quigley were to come out today, it would, like the work of Neil Breen, be caught up in the meme machine. Yet, this picture was released in the early 2000s, shot on video, and released straight to the VHS format. At every turn, I was confused by this picture, wondering how aware the people on set were that this was utter garbage. A paycheck is a paycheck, I suppose.