Seth Harris

Patron Pick – House of Games

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.

House of Games (1987)
Written by Jonathan Katz & David Mamet
Directed by David Mamet

“David Mamet is a controversial figure” is pretty much an understatement. I can’t claim I have ever known the writer and his work intimately. Like many people, I saw Glengarry Glen Ross. I remember a professor showing Oleanna in a college class. That’s about it. The other way I know Mamet is from his post-9/11 remarks. I get the sense he was never a well-balanced person, but in the wake of that terrorist attack, Mamet became much more vocal about his political beliefs. In 2008, he claimed to no longer be liberal and now a conservative. Mamet has also stated that Donald Trump was a “great president” and espouses all the views you might associate with someone like that. This was a long way of saying Mamet is an unhinged reactionary who is also a talented playwright.

Movie Review – Scream 3

Scream 3 (2000)
Written by Ehren Kruger
Directed by Wes Craven

The success of the first two Scream movies made it inevitable that a third would be coming down the pipeline, and sure enough, it dropped with the new millennium. With his original script, writer Kevin Williamson provided treatments for two potential sequels. By the time production on the third film rolled around, Williamson had garnered a full plate of work and was unavailable to pen the script. He was writing & directing the short-lived tv series Wasteland and his feature film debut, Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Miramax decided to move on without Williamson. Then Columbine happened, and suddenly Hollywood executives started wondering if they should make films that were playful with murder & violence. The result was a mandate that Scream 3 lean more into the satirical elements than the murderous parts resulting in a tonally strange entry into the series.

Movie Review – Scream 2

Scream 2 (1997)
Written by Kevin Williamson
Directed by Wes Craven

Since the 1980s, there haven’t been too many long-lasting horror franchises. Paranormal Activity is probably the most recent series to have legs for a while, but it seemed to have burnt out just before the pandemic hit. Scream is the only other one I can think of, and it represents the end of the 1980s slasher obsession. In my brain, I often associated Scream with grunge as they both were subgenres that deconstructed what had come before. Grunge was a response to 1980s metal and its overproduction, while Scream serves to comment on the movies that inspired it. Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter, decided he wanted to make this a franchise from the start and sold a five-page treatment for Scream 2 with the original film’s script. This is also one of the first films altered by the internet as the screenplay leaked online during production revealing four killers. Rewrites were made, and actors weren’t given the final pages until a few days before the scenes were shot. It was a hit then, but is Scream 2 as good as the original?

TV Review – Better Call Saul Season 2

Better Call Saul Season 2 (2016)
Written by Thomas Schnauz, Gennifer Hutchison, Jonathan Glatzer, Gordon Smith, Ann Cherkis, Peter Gould, Heather Marion & Vince Gilligan
Directed by Thomas Schnauz, Terry McDonough, Scott Winant, Adam Bernstein, John Shiban, Michael Slovis, Colin Bucksey, Larysa Kondracki, Peter Gould, and Vince Gilligan

Our personal values can often clash with what we want to become. I taught elementary school for a decade and genuinely loved working with kids. It’s a special thing to watch students grow into themselves, gaining confidence in areas they once thought they were terrible at. But, with COVID-19 and the poor decisions made by my district’s leadership, I knew my personal values were not in line with the myopic view of those in charge of American public education. So I left. I say all this because Jimmy McGill goes through a similar experience, being forced to conform to a system that gatekeeps his ambitions. While me teaching children is not the same as being a slightly crooked lawyer, both instances are about staying true to oneself.

Movie Review – Black Adam

Black Adam (2022)
Written by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Certain pieces of film feel like monumental shifts in the culture, or at the very least, that suddenly reflect horrible truths about the current dominant ideologies. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was hailed as a masterpiece in Germany, but it found traction outside the boundaries of that country. The Nazi filmmaker’s propaganda piece was awarded in Paris and Venice and lured many people outside of Germany to see fascism favorably. Movies did not start as overt propaganda, but it’s hard to argue now that the productions released by major American film studios are not produced with some sort of establishment normalizing ideology embedded within them. Be it Nolan’s Patriot Act apologia in The Dark Knight or the military glorification found in Michael Bay’s work and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Americanism as a worldview is ever present in our “entertainment.”

Comic Book Review – X-Men Epic Collection: The Sentinels Live!

X-Men Epic Collection: The Sentinels Live! (2018)
Reprints X-Men #46-66, Ka-Zar #2-3, and Marvel Tales #30
Written by Roy Thomas, Arnold Drake, Gary Freidrich, Denny O’Neill, Linda Fite, and Jerry Siegel
Art by Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, Werner Roth, Don Heck, George Tuska, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Sal Buscema

The X-Men were in a spiral downward during this period, with writers coming and going every few issues. Roy Thomas’ run was paused for a few issues before returning with a surprisingly new collaborator on pencils. Eventually, the steam would run out of the concept, and for four years, there would be no new stories published in the X-Men title, only reprints. In this book, we see that last period where you could pick up a new monthly story featuring only the original team. After all this time, some of their personalities are still muddy and often contradictory when new writers jump on the book. There are some hidden gems here, though, stories that rooted themselves so much they still have effects on the title today.

PopCult Podcast – Halloween Ends/What We’ve Been Reading (Horror)

David Gordon Green has brought his Halloween trilogy to an end, but is it any good? Also, nothing is better than curling up with a great horror story on a gloomy October Night.

Movie Review – Viy

Viy (1967)
Written by Aleksandr Ptushko, Konstantin Yershov, and Georgi Kropachyov
Directed by Konstantin Yershov & Georgi Kropachyov

There was a recent clip going around from an interview with George Lucas where he talked about the difference between the American film system he came up with in the Soviet analog. Lucas’ remarks expressed his frustration with the film industry as a whole is centered on making profits rather than allowing artists to make art. He explains that he is forced to only make a particular type of movie if he wants to continue having access to the resources needed to make them. Conversations with Soviet directors in the 1980s caused him to realize they had more creative freedom than in the United States. While making films critical of the Soviet government was forbidden, Lucas says he felt more penned in by Commercialism restraining him.

Movie Review – Dracula: Prince of Darkness

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
Written by John Elder and John Sansom
Directed by Terence Fisher

I was born over a decade after Hammer’s golden age, but I was certainly aware of it. There were children’s books about monster movies that I gravitated toward as a kid. My earliest memories of learning the Dewey Decimal System were memorizing where the movie books were (790s) and where the books about comic books were (741.5). I remember pouring through these books and coming across a section in one about Hammer Horror; an image of Christopher Lee as the fanged Count Dracula accompanied the text. Around this time, some local stations would do a pretty good job programming horror movies on the weekend afternoons during October. I vividly remember a promo for The Curse of Frankenstein but not being allowed to watch it, despite being censored for television. This solidified my desire to seek out horror.

Movie Review – The Haunting (1963)

The Haunting (1963)
Written by Nelson Gidding
Directed by Robert Wise

Haunted houses are not something new. Books, movies, comics, and every other form of media have presented haunted houses in one form or another to the point they have become relatively cliche. In today’s world, poorly made “ghost hunter” television shows and web series are a dime a dozen. The film The Haunting is the product of two minds: the author of the original novel Shirley Jackson and the director/producer Robert Wise. Through each artist, this story delivers a haunted house story unlike many that had come before and essentially shaped the subgenre going forward to the present; even those “ghost hunter” shows are profoundly influenced by this story.