Seth Harris

PopCult Presents: Screenplay – Corp Borg Episode 2

The second of our next six-part Screenplay series is here!
And you can listen to it by subscribing to our Patreon

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Starforged: Wrath of the Vok Act One

When I return to the world of Ironsworn/Starforged, my first question is, “Why?” The first reason is that it is my favorite solo tabletop system I’ve played thus far. I’ve had fun with almost everything I’ve played, but for the purposes of developing a story with structure and still surprising me along the way, nothing beats this. I’d also like to drop an unsponsored promo for Sean Tompkin’s current Kickstarter for Sundered Isles, the next installment in the Ironsworn series that will provide pirate/sea-faring content as well as Cursed Dice and Crew mechanics.

Movie Review – Emitaï

Emitaï (1971)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

To combat the Nazi occupation back home, the Vichy government (the official French State government during WWII) would conscript men from the lands they occupied in West Africa. These men would be shipped into Europe, where they were made to fight in that war. Ousmane Sembène devoted several of his films to this practice. This one focuses on the way the French government would slowly exploit & drain people already living in abject poverty for the sake of the empire. It’s probably Sembène’s most straightforward film, which shows he wanted to be very precise & clear in what he shows us.

Movie Review – Mandabi

Mandabi (1968)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

Despite the brutal French colonial presence in Senegal, most Senegalese do not understand or speak French. This led Ousmane Sembène to want to make a film entirely in the indigenous tongue of Wolof. Like most of Sembène’s work, it was almost lost to us. Film prints were locked away in vaults in France. Sembène’s son, Alain, and filmmaker Martin Scorsese worked together, slogging through bureaucratic hell to get the films in their hands for restoration.

Movie Review – Black Girl

Black Girl (1966)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

I had never heard of this film until a few years ago. I didn’t learn the name of its writer-director, Ousmane Sembène (pronounced Oos-man Sem-ben), until last year. I have to ask why that is. Why do I know the names and filmographies of a whole host of directors, but if I were to be asked about African cinema, I would draw a blank? At most, I probably could have come with Neill Blomkamp, a white South African. But no indigenous African filmmakers? I should have known who Sembène was long ago; he’s considered the “father of African cinema” and has been named one of the greatest authors of that continent. The reason I didn’t know this person was because the society I grew up in is profoundly racist, and so someone like Sembène is seen as unworthy of attention.

TV Review – The Kingdom II

The Kingdom II (1997)
Written by Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel
Directed by Lars von Trier and Morten Arnfred

Trying to describe where Lars von Trier’s sequel to his 1993 mini-series The Kingdom goes is quite a challenge. The thing your 21st-century sensibilities will be struck with first is going to be the cinematography. A lot of The Kingdom looks like absolute shit. This isn’t a byproduct of a filmmaking amateur but a stylistic decision made by von Trier. His 2000 masterpiece Dancer in the Dark employs early digital and has a similar grainy look to it. While the director was inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, he wasn’t simply going to mimic that style and instead employed his unique visual take on this horrific & comedic story. Through grainy handheld camerawork and especially the editing in post, he can construct a comedic rhythm that makes this show genuinely hilarious.

PopCult Podcast – Perfect Days/Tokyo Story

Two quiet slice of life dramas get the spotlight this week. Wim Wenders finds poignancy in the life of a public toilet cleaner as he makes connections. Ozu delivers his humanist masterpiece with a quiet family epic.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Ironsworn: The City of Eternal Night Part Three

Read Part One and Part Two

Kronholm is a place composed of layers. The first layer, built by the ancient dwarves, was hewn from the great mountain with which the city came to share a name. Their time ended with a blaze of blood & magic, sorcerers acting unrestricted in those days, leading to mass death. In time, like vermin, humans spread across the land and discovered the hollowed-out ruins of a once great city. On top of this, they constructed Sirenhelm Keep, where, to this day, the royal family resides in the palace, though sightings of them are much harder to come by, and rumors spread that the line died out generations ago.

Comic Book Review – Parasocial

Parasocial (Image Comics)
Written by Alex de Campi
Art by Erica Henderson

The other day, I was looking over the upcoming DC Comics solicitations and realized something. I am old now. I just looked at the covers, the blurbs for stories they were announcing, the lead-ups & preludes to the next big event, and I thought, “Boy, am I tired.” I know part of this is that the writers that are up and coming in comics right now are, for the first time, my age or younger than I am. It was an inevitable point I would reach one day, but experiencing it is still strange. Having grown up reading comics written by mostly Baby Boomers, there’s a particular style & tone I’m used to. It’s not better than what is new; it is just different. When I read something like Parasocial, I have mixed feelings – I like a lot of the ideas, but the execution is not what I expected, so I’m left feeling ambivalent.

Movie Review – City Hall

City Hall (2020)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman

At age 94, Frederick Wiseman is still making documentaries. While elements of his style have changed over the decades, and he has very distinctive periods within his filmography, Wiseman has always retained sight of what is important to him in making docs. He believes presenting a moment as true to the heart of what was happening when the camera was rolling is more important than anything else. The process of making movies is inherently biased. There is no way to be objective in the editing bay; each cut is a subjective choice, and we can see that it feels different when someone re-edits a movie. Wiseman does not believe his films are THE final word on anything. They are simply the director and his camera being present in a moment and capturing what happened.