Seth Harris

TV Review – The Venture Brothers Season One

The Venture Brothers Season One (Adult Swim)
Written by Jackson Publick, Doc Hammer, and Ben Edlund
Directed by Jackson Publick

In the early days of Adult Swim, it was always a surprise to see what would pop up beside the standards like Space Ghost, The Brak Show, and Aqua Team Hunger Force. One of these surprises was a one-off pilot for The Venture Brothers in 2002. The show combined elements of Jonny Quest and The Hardy Boys to make a spoof of both these shows and their associated genres. The Venture Brothers would run for seven irregularly scheduled seasons and recently culminated with a streaming film on Max that serves as a series finale. It has been about a decade since I last watched the show, so I decided to go back to the beginning to revisit familiar episodes and see where the series went after I moved on to other things.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Supersworn Part Five

Supersworn Pre-Alpha
Designed & Written by Ben Adams

You can check out this game and many other hacks of Ironsworn here.

Read part four of our Supersworn actual play here.

Once again, I used Mythic GM Emulator 2ed tools to set up this session along with Starforged’s built-in Start of Session move. That latter move generated this for me: “Unforeseen aid is on the way or within reach.” I got this at the start of the last session in the context of a comic book adventure; I interpret this as another hero guest-starring. I had a list of names and randomly picked one: The Forever Kid. So at some point, we will meet The Forever Kid and learn what he is about. Then, I decided the Chaos Factor from the last session had gone up from 7 to 8 and rolled on Mythic’s scene table. I was told to go with an Altered Scene with the prompt “Remove a character.” This was the moment I decided to just reveal the phone call from Aunt Laurie was an illusion removing her from the moment.

Comic Book Review – The Human Target

The Human Target (2023)
Reprints The Human Target #1-12
Written by Tom King
Art by Greg Smallwood

I hate to keep harping on how much I dislike Tom King’s work but here we are again. If I don’t like the guy so much why do I keep coming back, you might be asking. I think it’s because on the surface his concepts aren’t bad. He likes using lesser “played with” toys from the DC Universe and I have always been far more interested in those figures than seeing Batman all the time. In the instance of The Human Target he took this obscure character created to tell spy stories and combined it with the Giffen-DeMatteis-era Justice League. I will admit that’s a creative combination I hadn’t ever thought of. I love those characters and that era for how unique they were, how risky it was to go in that direction. King is currently writing Danger Street, another 12 issue maxi-series bringing in some of the most obscure characters from DC’s 1970s showcase First Issue Special. I will definitely be reading that one when it is done.

Solo Tabletop Actual Play – Little Town Part Three

Little Town
Designed & Written by Gustavo Coelho

You can purchase this game here.

Read part two here.

For this second chapter, I decided to pick a character introduced in the last session and continue the story from their perspective. The one I settled on is Richard Robertson, the father of Liza, the girl who is currently in a coma after being struck by a car after she ran wildly out of the Twin Rivers State Park late one night. I knew he had secrets when I introduced him last session but didn’t flesh them out until this one. Rolling on the book’s table told me he had two, and I tied them both to his profession as a psychiatrist: 1) he’s currently having an affair with Lucy Hayward, one of his patients, and 2) he’s become an addict, and because this takes place in 1996, his drug of choice is OxyContin which had been seen as a miracle narcotic upon its release in 1995. Being an incredibly flawed & complicated character is more interesting to play than some perfect golden boy type.

Patron Pick – The Last of Sheila

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 Last of Sheila (1973)
Written by Anthony Perkins & Stephen Sondheim
Directed by Herbert Ross

Once upon a time, the man who would direct Footloose and Steel Magnolias made a film based on a screenplay by “Norman Bates” and the guy who wrote Sweeney Todd. This film would significantly influence Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc/Knives Out movies. For the first time in a long time, I had an American film suggested to me I had never heard of before. I attribute this to the fact that I’m not a big mystery-Whodunnit fan. I can’t pinpoint why, but those stories don’t appeal to me, so I rarely seek them out, likely due to their formulaic structures. I was pleased about this suggestion because it plays out and delivers an ending with a lot more dramatic heft than I anticipated.

Movie Review – Lady Vengeance

Lady Vengeance (2005)
Written by Chung Seo-kyung & Park Chan-wook
Directed by Park Chan-wook

Park Chan-wook is a master filmmaker. If you read my review of Decision to Leave last year, you know how much I love this director. South Korean cinema is the most vibrant creative filmmaking scene we have right now, with a diverse array of directors making all sorts of movies that play to their strengths. Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is fantastic at making biting social satires, Hong Sang-soo (In Front of Your Face) crafts gently paced slice-of-life dramas, Lee Chang-dong (Burning) dark stories of psychological trauma, and Park Chan-wook has mastered the art of telling tense & violent thrillers. Lady Vengeance was part of Park’s Vengeance trilogy, which started with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (still on my Watchlist), Oldboy, and finally, Lady Vengeance. Throughout every film, he follows the response of a profoundly wronged person and explores the effects their quest for vengeance has on them.

Movie Review – Walker

Walker (1987)
Written by Rudy Wurlitzer
Directed by Alex Cox

When I see or hear gringos complaining about Central & South American immigrants showing up in large numbers in the States, I can’t help but think in response, “This wouldn’t be a problem if the States and other colonizers just stayed the fuck home and minded their own business rather than imposing themselves and intentionally destablizing already established cultures.” Colonization means disrupting indigenous people’s development and almost always ends with them becoming an exploited class by foreign business interests that make up our extraction economy. Alex Cox is clearly furious, and we can see that broiling on screen in his savage, intentionally historically inaccurate depiction of one American madman’s crusade into Nicaragua. Something that happened long ago and was happening as Cox made this film.

PopCult Podcast – Full Time/Yellowjackets

It’s tough for ladies out there. Whether its trying to commute to work in the midst of French transit strikes or handling the trauma of being a cannibal in your formative years, women are being asked to balance a lot.

Solo Tabletop Actual Play – Supersworn Part Four

Supersworn Pre-Alpha
Designed & Written by Ben Adams

You can check out this game and many other hacks of Ironsworn here.

Read part three of our Supersworn actual play here.

Before I started this Supersworn series, I decided to delve into Tana Pigeon’s The Adventure Crafter and see if I could incorporate elements into this. It has worked really well. The Adventure Crafter has the solo player organize a list of Themes in order of priority for their game: Action, Mystery, Tension, Social, and Personal. Then, to create a plot point, you roll to determine the Theme and then roll a d100 to be given a random plot element related to that Theme. Each plot point can consist of five of these elements, and they generate hooks to get a story going. In the spirit of classic Spider-Man comics, I have a list of five plot points, each following a separate story, that I have randomly rolled on to see if we pivot from where we are to something else. I hoped it would create the sense of a vibrant living world populated by a host of characters, and it has certainly felt like that while playing.

PopCult Presents: Double Down – Child’s Play 2

Sorry Jack, Chucky’s Back! In a first for both Ariana & Seth we watched an entire Child’s Play movie. It was better than we expected but the bar was set pretty low. Siskel & Ebert had a moral panic over this one but we both thought it was mid. To listen to this episode and more of our exclusive subscriber-only podcasts join our Patreon.