Seth Harris

Movie Review – Pauline at the Beach

Pauline at the Beach (1983)
Written & Directed by Eric Rohmer,

Eric Rohmer was the right age to join his colleagues from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema in becoming a filmmaker. Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, whom he worked alongside as editor of the magazine, became the two most prominent names associated with the French New Wave. He did make movies, but not at the same breakneck pace as the others, and he didn’t receive the same level of acclaim until much later in his career. The filmmaker was very secretive about his private life, including that Eric Rohmer wasn’t his real name but a combination of actor/director Erich von Stroheim and writer Sax Rohmer. Unlike his colleagues, Rohmer outlasted them in terms of career length, finding his most significant acclaim in the 1970s & 80s. It was in the 1980s that he began a thematic series titled “Comedies and Proverbs,” with each film based on common sayings in French culture. One of these was Pauline at the Beach.

Movie Review – Tender Mercies

Tender Mercies (1983)
Written by Horton Foote
Directed by Bruce Beresford

Tender Mercies will break your heart, but that’s a good thing. It’s a film that is incredibly sensitive & thoughtful. It’s the story of an alcoholic, not during the midst of a bender or at their most self-destructive. Instead, this is a drunk who has lost everything that had any value. His career, his money, his wife, his daughter. He can’t get them back, but he can try and build something new. It’s a film whose presentation is simple, much like the quiet life lived in its desolate setting. It asks us how we can keep living when so much tragedy falls into our laps, some of it our fault and some of it happenstance.

TV Review – The Bear Season One

The Bear Season One (FX)
Written by Christopher Storer, Sofya Levitsky-Weitz, Karen Joseph Adcock, Catherine Schetina & Rene Gube
Directed by Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo

I felt obligated to watch this one, but I knew it would be good. I can’t say The Bear was what I expected. I knew it was about a restaurant and starred Jeremy Allen White, but I was under the impression it was set at an upscale restaurant. Definitely not. And the first half of season one didn’t stand out as anything overly special. Ariana & I talked about how much the show used a premise akin to something like Cheers. If this had been made in the 1980s or 90s, it would have been a three-camera comedy-drama, probably with a “will they, won’t they” plot stringing the audience along for multiple seasons. We even have a Carla in the form of Tina, but even that character conflict is resolved relatively quickly, and the show moves on.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Fiasco + Mythic Part Two

Read Part One where I explain what parts of Mythic I’ll be using as well as the character set-up for this game.

The heat beats down on Ginette LaFever as she sits in the pitiful shade of the dugout, shadows but not much cooler than the sun-blazed field she watches her players on. Her eye is on one particular player at the moment, Yu Kim. The girl has only been in Poppleton for about six months, and Ginette doesn’t like her attitude. If you were to ask Ginette to articulate what she didn’t like about Yu, the softball coach would probably stammer and search for the words, likely dropping the phrase, “I’m not racist, but…” The girl just “has a bad vibe” is Ginette’s go-to when she tries to justify the disdain in her own head.

PopCult Podcast – RMN/Past Lives

Two more new releases take the spotlight this week. In one we journey to Transylvania, but there’s no vampires here. Instead, it’s a tense & moody exploration of various ethnic groups at each other’s throat. In our second film, we span 24 years as a Korean woman retains thoughts of her childhood crush while moving on with her life and changing in so many ways.

My Favorite Films of 1983

The Outsiders
Written by Francis Ford Coppola & S. E. Hinton
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

It was partly made out of Coppola’s dire need to pay off accumulated debts and an homage to the rebel films of the director’s youth. Based on the first young adult novel, The Outsiders follows teenager Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell) as he grows up in a small Oklahoma town where the poor kids are constantly being targeted by the wealthy ones. Pony’s best friend Johnny (Ralph Macchio) accidentally kills one of these preppies out of self-defense, which sends the two boys scrambling into hiding. Through this trial, they are forced to confront the fragility of life and the beauty that each new day brings. Coppola created an emotionally moving and volatile film that captures the chaos of being a young adult. There are some stunningly beautiful images here where the director embraces the intentional artificiality of film in order to strengthen the visuals. The film also introduced us to many white boys who would dominate movies over the next decade, including a pre-dental work, Tom Cruise.

Read my full review here.

Comic Book Review – Justice Society of America: Black Adam and Isis

Black Adam: The Dark Age (2008)
Black Adam: The Dark Age #1-6
Written by Peter J. Tomasi
Art by Doug Mahnke

Justice Society of America: Black Adam and Isis (2009)
Reprints Justice Society of America #23-28
Written by Geoff Johns, Jerry Ordway, and Matthew Sturges
Art by Jerry Ordway, Dale Eagelsham, and Fernando Pasarin

Before Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson desperately tried to carve out a niche in the superhero franchise landscape, Black Adam was just one of the villains in Captain Marvel, aka Shazam’s rogues gallery. Like many villains, he served as the shadow to the hero, a dark version of that main character. When the Shazam franchise was revived in 1995 via Jerry Ordway’s one-shot graphic novel The Power of Shazam (followed by an ongoing series), Black Adam was brought back with more nuance than you would expect with modern comics. He would eventually become a member and then enemy of the Justice Society during Geoff Johns’ first round with the book, a character arc that has permanently redefined how readers view Black Adam. In Johns’s final (at the time) arc on JSA, he brings some closure to Adam and the corner of the world he occupies in the DC Universe.

Movie Review – Eyes of Fire

Eyes of Fire (1983)
Written and directed by Avery Crounse

The American folk horror genre is surprisingly sparse compared to its British counterpart. Starting in the 1970s and continuing through today, British filmmakers continually find new angles to approach the horrors of rural life. With the States being such a vast landmass with plenty of myth & danger sprinkled through its most sparsely populated corners, you would expect more. Robert Eggers’ The Witch is the most prominent American folk horror film, and it becomes hard to name another. Avery Crounse wrote & directed his first feature film by focusing on the expansionist period of American history, following pioneers poorly prepared for what they would find and facing ancient evils tied to the land.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Mork Borg: Solitary Confinement Part 4

Mork Borg: Solitary Defilement (10d+5)
Written & Designed by…? (no specific names on the document)

Read Part One, where I explain the rules/tone of Mork Borg and this solo supplement.

You can get this set of solo rules here.

This playthrough also uses the Mork Borg Core Rules as well as the Feretory supplement.

Instead of using the core book & its included classes, I used a third-party class I’d found on itch.io. Let me introduce you to the Murderous Marionette.

I rolled through some of the Mork Borg core book tables to flesh out my character and his adventure. His name is Träpojke, a puppet made by a disturbed hermit in the mountains of a distant land. The hermit had initially intended to use Träpojke to lure children into his lair, where he would feast on them. However, the spirits of the children who had already been killed by this monster prayed, and these prayers were heard by the Fae who lived in the misty mountains. They woke the wood sprite that slept within the wood Träpojke was made of, and he went on a murderous rampage, bludgeoning his creator to death with the very mallet used in his creation.

Patron Pick – The Social Dilemma

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.

The Social Dilemma (2020)
Written by Davis Coombe, Vickie Curtis, and Jeff Orlowski
Directed by Jeff Orlowski

In every person’s mind lives three Vincent Kartheisers, at least according to this “documentary.” This might be the worst documentary I have ever seen. I was baffled from the first ten minutes and kept sitting there, unable to get over how amateurish and poorly edited the whole thing was. It’s also one of the most redundant films I have ever seen. The picture’s central thesis is explained in the first five or so minutes, and the rest of the runtime is just people saying the thesis in different ways over and over again. Oh yes, and using poorly thought-out metaphors. Two people used magicians as metaphors to explain social media, which was kept in the final cut rather than the director noting that this was unnecessarily repetitive. It’s also a film about a problem in which the people who caused it try to convince you that only they can solve it.