Seth Harris

Movie Review – Day For Night

Day For Night (1973)
Written by François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, and Suzanne Schiffman
Directed by François Truffaut

Like Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt), Francois Truffaut seemed like someone born in a movie theater. One of the French New Wave movement’s founders, Truffaut, felt cinema in a way few people do. They were certainly not the same and had a very contentious relationship as colleagues. Godard’s approach was to tear down norms, push back against expectations, and embrace a sometimes mechanistic view of the form. Truffaut was far more into the pathos of his work, wanting it to be relatable, often adopting a very sensual approach to his films. Day For Night was Truffaut’s self-reflexive movie, something for his longtime fans but also an exploration of why people make these pictures in the first place.

Movie Review – Contempt

Contempt (1963)
Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

In doing a film series spotlighting Movies About Movies, there’s no way we could exclude Contempt from this list. Filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard were lovers & critics of the medium first before they exploded the form and sent cinema hurtling down a magnificent track for about 20-30 years or so. Godard was a profoundly complicated person, and I think he was likely neurodivergent, or at least his work was inspired by a neurodivergent perspective. There’s an intense focus on what most people might see as unimportant or the constant repetitive movements or behaviors of people.

PopCult Podcast – Bunny Lake Is Missing/A Taste of Honey

It’s another week of pulling from the Letterboxd Watchlist, this time with the theme being the 1960s and England. One film is a thrilling mystery about a lost girl and the other is about a girl lost about what to do with her future.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Eldersworn: Florida Grotesque Part One

Eldersworn
Written and Designed by Wasteland Sniper

You can access this game freely through the Ironsworn Discord server.

Read Part Two here.

It was inevitable. At some point, all tabletop RPG systems get a Lovecraftian/cosmic horror hack. It may be one of Newton’s Laws. I was curious how the Ironsworn system would handle mysteries. I could imagine some ideas based on its progress-tracking system, but I couldn’t nail down the concrete mechanics of how that might work. Leave it to Wasteland Sniper, the author of the in-development Eldersworn game, to come up with a pretty ingenious collection of investigative moves that, like the official Ironsworn content, remains genre-neutral so you can layer it over any mystery style.

Comic Book Review – The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume Five

The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume Five (2023)
Reprints Uncanny X-Men #194-209, X-Men Annual #9-10, New Mutants Special Edition, New Mutants Annual #2, Nightcrawler #1-4, Longshot #1-6, and Marvel Fanfare #33
Written by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, and Ann Nocenti
Art by John Romita Jr, Barry Windsor-Smith, Rick Leonardi, June Brigman, Dave Cockrum, Art Adams, and Alan Davis

Chris Claremont is wondering where he can go with the X-Men in 1985. He’s been writing the book for an entire decade, and you can feel him struggling to find storylines to latch onto. Plot elements get introduced but seemingly forgotten in the next issue. Sometimes, they will resurface months or even a year later. Outside of Storm, the rest of the cast is just sort of there. If you stand back and look at the comics landscape at this time, the type of stories being told and the tone of comics were dramatically changing. The old Silver Age villain-of-the-month tropes had grown tired, and more mature writing was what people wanted. Well, mature in the case of someone like Alan Moore, but not so much with everyone else. At a minimum, stories were becoming grittier or making meta-commentary on the genre.

February 2024 Posting Schedule

Film Series
[Movies About Movies] – Feb 1st thru 28th
All About Eve, Contempt, Day for Night, Intervista, The Player, In the Soup, Irma Vep, Millennium Actress, Goodbye Dragon Inn, Overnight, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, One Cut of the Dead

TV Reviews
Feb 4 – Rain Dogs
Feb 11 – Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom Season One
Feb 18 – The Venture Brothers Season Seven
Feb 25 – Neon Genesis Evangelion Episodes One thru Six
Feb 29 – The Venture Brothers: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart

Comic Book Reviews
Feb 3 – Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume Five ***
Feb 10 – Uncanny X-Men: Mutant Massacre
Feb 17 – Uncanny X-Men: The Fall of the Mutants
Feb 24 – The Flintstones: The Deluxe Edition

Solo Tabletop RPG Reviews & Actual Plays
Feb 4, 11 – Eldersworn: Florida Grotesque Part One, Part Two
Feb 18, 25 – Wanderhome Part One, Part Two
Feb 10, 17, 24 – Little Town: Bright Falls Episodes Four, Five, Six

Podcast Episodes
Feb 4 – Bunny Lake Is Missy/Taste of Honey
Feb 11 – Babe: Pig in the City/Happy Feet
Feb 18 – TBD
Feb 25 – TBD

Movie Review – All About Eve

All About Eve (1950)
Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

My supporters at Patreon voted, and February’s month-long film series is “Movies About Movies.” This means we will be watching and reviewing films all about various aspects of the industry, mostly narrative, but one documentary thrown in that was the seed of this series. We begin with one of the great American films, a piece of cinema that has rippled through popular culture since its debut. All About Eve emerged from a real-life incident where a stage actress allowed a young fan to become a part of her household staff. Things eventually went south, and the young fan became a toxic element, actively trying to undermine the woman she admired. This was related to the author Mary Orr, who turned it into a short story, which became the basis for this screenplay.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Into the Odd Part Two

Into the Odd Remastered (Mophidius)
Written and designed by Chris McDowell
Graphic design by Johan Nohr

You can purchase this game here.
Read Part One here.

The treasure hunters feel along The Coral’s spongey-smooth exterior, careful not to slice a hand open on the jagged bits and edges of the cracked shell. Edmund holds out his hand and helps Poddin step onto the outcropping of sand between the Coral and a gray morning tide sloshing in and out. She points out a large opening they could use to enter the structure and step closer. It’s a sandy slope that likely fills up at high tide. It’s dark down there. Poddin goes first, sliding down on her bottom, reaching the Pit, and turning her lantern on. Edmund comes down shortly after that.

Movie Review – Gaza Fights For Freedom

Gaza Fights For Freedom (2019)
Written by Abby Martin and Mike Prysner
Directed by Abby Martin

You can watch this documentary in its entirety here. It is age-restricted so I cannot embed it, sadly.

One of the talking points of the pro-occupation crowd is to talk incessantly about 7 October 2023. If you respond by bringing up other relevant dates and incidents that establish a slow-rolling genocide, the counterargument is that they are talking about “right now,” not the “ancient past.” When asked for their justifications of why the occupying force should have any claim in Palestine, they will respond with “evidence” from a dubious religious text by practitioners of the religion this occupying force has appropriated that this is their homeland circa two millennia earlier.

PopCult Podcast – All That Jazz/Mikey and Nicky

The new movies we want to see just aren’t available to us yet. So we dipped into the ol’ Letterboxd watchlist and pulled out two classics from the 1970s we’ve needed to watch.