Seth Harris

Movie Review – Exorcist II: The Heretic

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Written by William Goodhart
Directed by John Boorman

Warner Brothers knew they wanted another Exorcist film after the success of the first picture. However, screenwriter William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin had no desire to revisit this world. They told a complete story in the first picture, and the sequel would just be a silly idea. At first, the plan was to cut/paste the plot, but things quickly spiraled into unhinged territory when playwright William Goodhart was hired. He would retroactively add a backstory to Father Merrin from the first film by including the theories of a Jesuit priest who had some views about why demon possessions occurred and why some people seem to be targeted by them. Linda Blair would return as Reagan MacNeil, and even Max Von Sydow reluctantly returned to cameo as a younger Merrin. Kitty Wynn, as Sharon, the friend of the MacNeils, came back, but Ellen Burstyn flatly refused to come back as the girl’s mother. Not a great start.

PopCult Podcast – The 100th Episode

We get creative in this one.

TV Review – The Bear Season Two

The Bear Season Two (FX)
Written by Christopher Storer, Joanna Calo, Karen Joseph Adcock, Catherine Schetina, Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Alex Russell, Rene Gube, and Kelly Galuska
Directed by Christopher Storer, Joanna Calo, and Ramy Youssef

Ultimately, people don’t want to be in a state of conflict & antagonism. They want to learn, grow, and find ways to work together with others. So much of our world is informed by a media landscape that projects contrived, unnatural division. Reality television, so poorly named, delivers manufactured arguments & clashes intended for us to believe they are the truth. Even scripted narrative content is always about wars or personal contentions that go on and on and on. When do we get to see people heal genuinely or move past petty grievances in an authentic manner that isn’t cloying & artificial? The Bear is not a light show; its themes are weighty & dark. Yet, its characters are brilliantly full of life. They are capable of not living in the same rut their whole lives. Watching them struggle and grow is an absolute delight.

Comic Book Review – The Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume Five

The Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume Five (2011)
Reprints Swamp Thing #51-56
Written by Alan Moore
Art by Rick Veitch, John Totleben, and Alfredo Alcala

Coming off an incredible piece of horror writing, Moore keeps things chugging along at full steam in the pages of Swamp Thing. Our hero has faced the ultimate evil and has been the only one to stop it. However, there was lots of trouble bubbling over in the land of the living that directly affected the Swamp Thing. While the Crisis on Infinite Earths seems to have little consequence in these pages, we begin to see our main character connect with traditional superheroes outside of Houma, Louisiana, with this particular volume including a clash in Gotham City with Batman.

Movie Review – Touch of Evil

Touch of Evil (1958)
Written & Directed by Orson Welles

None of his peers could come close to touching the natural filmmaking genius of Orson Welles. Sometimes, you hear film people overhype a filmmaker or actor, but in this case, believe the hype. Welles delivers a film that looks like nothing else that was out at the time, pushing the boundaries of American cinema once again. Charlton Heston was cast after the release of The Ten Commandments and was curious who would direct. Welles was already in the cast, and Heston suggested the film legend helm the picture. Universal said they would get back to him. He got the picture, rewrote it, and staged one of the most visually exciting film noirs ever made.

Movie Review – Kiss Me Deadly

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Written by A.I. Bezzerides & Robert Aldrich
Directed by Robert Aldrich

At one point, around the halfway mark, I turned to Ariana and said, “This main character… he’s a real scumbag, right?” She agreed. The screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides said, “I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it… I tell you, Spillane didn’t like what I did with his book. I ran into him at a restaurant, and, boy, he didn’t like me.” I haven’t read Spillane’s novel or any of his Mike Hammer work, but I liked how nasty the investigator was. It felt in tune with the world of film noir, where everyone seems to be simmering with misanthropy and taking their anger out on the world. Hammer is no exception to this. Kiss Me Deadly is also a film that has influenced many other pictures as varied as Alex Cox’s Repo Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Pulp Fiction. This is by far the most cynical of all the noir pictures we’ve watched.

Movie Review – The Big Heat

The Big Heat (1953)
Written by Sydney Boehm
Directed by Fritz Lang

What is the Law? Who does it exist to protect? It’s becoming more evident to me, maybe to you too, that the Law as an institution in the States (as that is where I grew up) does not exist to protect me. If I benefit from it, that is an unintended benefit. The Law is in place to protect & serve the wealthy ownership class. The main prerogative of the police as an institution is to protect the rich & their property. If that means cracking the skulls of the plebs, they don’t shed a tear over that. The noir genre is full of characters who find themselves on the receiving end of these systems, and over the years, one subgenre has emerged: the rogue cop. It probably didn’t start here, but The Big Heat was likely one of the significant sparks to see this subgenre grow in popularity. It’s a very reactionary response to social injustice, continuing the fixation on hyper-individualist solutions.

PopCult Podcast – The Blue Caftan/Rotting in the Sun

A beautiful & intensely intimate Moroccan drama & an intensely funny satirical Chilean comedy make up our two picks for this week.

Patron Pick – Gran Turismo

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.

Gran Turismo (2023)
Written by Jason Hall, Alex Tse, and Zach Baylin
Directed by Neill Blomkamp

2023 feels like an apocalyptic year for Hollywood. The labor strikes, which the studio execs refuse to approach in good faith, stretch into the future. Rumblings of AI-generated films & television abound. The content coming out often feels like it was already written by AI anyway. The mainstream has never been such a void of humanity, and that’s saying a lot. The brand movie and video game adaptations have been hot commodities as trends shift in a disturbing direction. These two horrible new late-stage capitalism genres come together in the mire that is Gran Turismo. “Based on a true story” but clearly embellished and overly dramatized, which doesn’t help the picture to become more compelling. Not since Black Adam have I felt such a sinking sense of doom watching a movie that this medium I love so much is being strangled in the States, everything that made it worth engaging with melting away (thank god for world cinema!).

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Lisergia

Lisergia
Designed & Written by Cezar Capacle

You can purchase this game here

When someone hears about a tabletop rpg, they typically think of character/class-based systems where adventures are had, treasure of some sort is discovered, and a story is told. You would be right in almost every circumstance except this one. Lisergia goes in a direction I’ve never seen a ttrpg go before. In some ways, you could argue it’s not a ttrpg but a freewriting tool. I would push back that this limits what a ttrpg can be, and I think it’s much broader than people contemplate. One of my favorite things with ttrpgs, whether I play solo or with a group, is the spontaneous emergence of ideas. I’ve always loved David Lynch’s take on this: thoughts emerging from a massive pool, and we are just receivers. Lisergia is a game that plays to that idea.