Seth Harris

PopCult Podcast – About Dry Grasses/Housekeeping for Beginners

Two European features make up this week’s episode. One follows a misanthropic rural schoolteacher in Turkey as he burns every bridge around him. The other is about a queer found family in North Macedonia.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Sundered Isles Part One

You can purchase Sundered Isles here.

You can purchase Starforged here.

You can purchase Sea of Sands here.

To say I was happy to see Sean Tomkin’s announcement for the Sundered Isles Kickstarter this year would be an understatement. While I am not a big fan of pirate-y-themed things, any expansion of the Ironsworn ruleset is always good. Rather than just make a second science fiction-themed book, Tomkin developed a third-themed way of play while leaving the mechanics open to be easily reskinned for whatever genre you wish to play in. This is an expansion, though, not a standalone game, so a copy of Starforged is required. It is very well worth it if you don’t have a copy yet.

Comic Book Review – Prophet Volumes One & Two

Prophet Volume One (Image Comics)
Reprints Prophet #21-26
Written by Brandon Graham (with Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, and Giannis Milonogiannis
Art by Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, Brandon Graham, Giannis Milonogiannis, and Marian Churchland

Prophet Volume Two (Image Comics)
Reprints Prophet #27-31, 33
Written by Brandon Graham (with Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, and Giannis Milonogiannis
Art by Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, Brandon Graham, Giannis Milonogiannis, Fil Barlow, Helen Maler, and Boo Cook

You might be a bit confused about the issues reprinted here. How is this volume one if it starts with issue 21? That’s a valid question. Prophet was the revival of a previously canceled series under Rob Liefield’s Image Comics imprint Extreme Comics. The initial Prophet series concluded in 1994 and was revived in 1995, with a second ongoing series canceled shortly after that. For over a decade, Liefield flailed around with his original IPs, as he is wont to do. In 2011, a radical revival was planned of several Liefeld properties, and Prophet ended up being the longest-running and best-executed, in my opinion. That was mainly due to the seemingly endless creativity of its writer, Brandon Graham.

June 2024 Posting Schedule

Film Series
[Flashback to 1989 – June 3rd thru 27th]
Heathers, sex lies and videotape, The Abyss, Drugstore Cowboy, Mystery Train, Steel Magnolias, The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, Tie Me Up Tie Me Down, The Killer, A City of Sadness, Santa Sangre, The Vampire’s Kiss

Patron Pick – Ernest Goes to Jail

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.

Ernest Goes to Jail (1990)
Written by Charlie Cohen
Directed by John Cherry

Mocking the Ernest films would be easy because they never aspire to be anything more than silly, stupid fun. So, I’m not going to do that. I grew up watching the Ernest movies. I lived in Middle Tennessee, where many of these movies were filmed. The Ernest character had been a commercial mascot for our local Purity Dairy, one of many advertising gigs the classically trained actor picked up early in his career. That’s something I always loved about Jim Varney; he was a working-class actor in the truest sense, not the bullshit contemporary right-wing sense. Varney lived just a few miles from my childhood home, and we saw him once at our local Kroger supermarket. By the time Ernest Goes to Jail came along, Varney was quite established.

Patron Pick – Men in Black II

Men in Black II (2002)
Written by Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

Around this time, I began to viscerally feel that the popular fare I would see in theaters mainly was trash. I was in college when Men in Black II came out, and I remember going to the theater to see it. I spent August at a friend’s house, and one of their local friends had connections at the local theater. This meant we would get to enter without having to buy tickets. Men in Black II was one of those films. I couldn’t have been happier not to pay to see this thing. When this was requested as a Patron pick, I wondered if I would change my view. Maybe there was something good about it I missed back then. There wasn’t.

Movie Review – Sherlock Jr.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
Directed by Buster Keaton

There are motion picture cameras. You can film yourself moving rather than just still photography. What do you do with this? That was the situation a handful of people found themselves in following the invention and popularization of movies. It might make sense at first to film people performing plays, operas, or similar things. But that’s a rather flat thing to do. The camera can move and control the audience’s perspective. How can you move that camera to make impossible things seem real? Joseph “Buster” Keaton was one of those people in the early days trying to figure out what this new medium could be capable of.

Movie Review – M

M (1931)
Written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou
Directed by Fritz Lang

David Fincher must really love this movie. Zodiac has oddly become a comfort watch for me, mainly because of the procedural nature of the story. Something is compellingThere’s about watching the various investigators – detectives, journalists, puzzle makers – stumbling through crime scenes & strange clues, trying to make sense of things while the city of San Francisco is experiencing an increase in paranoia & tension as a killer walks among them. Having finally watched Fritz Lang’s M, it’s evident that much of what I loved about Zodiac was Fincher’s riff on this German classic.

TV Review – X-Men ’97

X-Men ‘97 Season One (2024)
Written by Beau DeMayo, Charley Feldman, JB Ballard, and Anthony Sellitti
Directed by Jake Castorena, Chase Conley, and Emi-Emmett Yonemura

I was a big fan of the X-Men animated series on Fox in the 1990s. It just so happened that it aired at the same time as my sister’s beloved Saved By the Bell. Thank goodness for VCRs. I ended up with quite a few episodes on tape to rewatch them, which I did many times over. I can’t say I kept up with the show well after the first three seasons. I definitely never would have guessed we’d see a revival of the series and one that doesn’t just try and recreate the original. Instead, this is a slight maturation of the format and the quality of storytelling. It still reads like Saturday morning cartoons, albeit with a more modern serialized structure.

PopCult Podcast – Stress Positions/The Last Stop in Yuma County

Well, not every week is a fun one. Our first film is Brooklyn hipster snark against the backdrop of COVID. The second is a dull formulaic exercise in genre that wastes so much talent.