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.
Continue reading “PopCult Podcast – Bunny Lake Is Missing/A Taste of Honey”
Eldersworn
Written and Designed by Wasteland Sniper
You can access this game freely through the Ironsworn Discord server.
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.
Continue reading “Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Eldersworn: Florida Grotesque Part One”
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.
Continue reading “Comic Book Review – The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume Five”
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
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.
Continue reading “Movie Review – All About Eve”
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.
Continue reading “Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Into the Odd Part Two”
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.
Continue reading “Movie Review – Gaza Fights For Freedom”
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.
Continue reading “PopCult Podcast – All That Jazz/Mikey and Nicky”
Into the Odd Remastered (Mophidius)
Written and designed by Chris McDowell
Graphic design by Johan Nohr
You can purchase this game here.
You can read Part Two here.
Into the Odd is another in the OSR subgenre of tabletop roleplaying games. See my first post about Mork Borg for a more detailed definition of what OSR is, but the short one is it is a throwback to the original way of playing Dungeons & Dragons mixed with more contemporary elements. The result is gaming experiences with the nostalgic familiarity longtime players enjoy, with fresh takes that can help bring in new players. Into the Odd is a game I have heard a lot about since it began development in the mid-2010s. Chris McDowell hasn’t sat on his laurels and continues to refine the system with additions like Electric Bastionland and the recently funded Mythic Bastionland. Into the Odd has also inspired further hacks like Cairn and Knave, which have inspired more games. These come up fairly often as solo-friendly systems, so I decided to start at the source and, over time, try out the others to see which one I mesh best with.
Continue reading “Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Into the Odd Part One”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.
Wonka (2023)
Written by Simon Farnaby and Paul King
Directed by Paul King
Why? Why was this movie? Yes, I know it was made because a series of corporations made legal acquisitions of the film rights to Roald Dahl’s writings, and so they made the movie to recoup the costs spent on purchasing the rights with the idea of also turning a profit. What I am asking is why, from a creative perspective, does this film exist? What does this add to one’s appreciation of Dahl’s original novel or the character of Willy Wonka? Nothing about this film feels like it has anything to do with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory besides Wonka and Oompa-Loompas. I would go so far as to argue that not one of the three live-action appearances of Wonka on film does the book character justice, as much as I love Gene Wilder.
Continue reading “Patron Pick – Wonka”
PopCult Reviews 