Seth Harris

Movie Review – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Written by George Lucas, Jeff Nathanson, and David Koepp
Directed by Steven Spielberg

Once upon a time, there was a man named Indiana Jones. He had many adventures in his day. Then one day, he stopped. That would have been a perfect place to end things. Indy rides off into the sunset with his friends as the end credits of The Last Crusade roll across the screen. For nineteen years, it was the end. In the background, treatments, and drafts of scripts were hammered out as the creatives and executives hemmed and hawed over how much more money they could squeeze out of this one. I was okay with no Indiana Jones movies in the 1990s and most of the 2000s. We didn’t need any more stories anymore because we could always revisit the ones we had. But more was required by the money machine. So we got Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a medley of scenes from many scripts that are made worse by the development of computer-generated imagery. Poor Indy was forced to put the hat back on and dance for the audience again.

Book Update – May/June 2023

Runaway: Stories by Alice Munro

May & June have been my two favorite reading months this year. It’s one of those rare times when I didn’t read anything I disliked. As you’ll see in one review, my expectations for a new book didn’t pay off, but I still didn’t think the book wasn’t worth reading. May started with my first read ever of the fantastic Canadian author Alice Munro. Very much in the vein of your classic literary short stories, Munro offers up stories that spotlight crucial moments in everyday people’s lives, women exclusively. Spanning the decades, these stories all deal with choices these women made at some point, often affected by circumstances that shaped them going forward.

Movie Review – Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade

Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989)
Written by Jeffrey Boam, George Lucas, and Menno Meyjes
Directed by Steven Spielberg

The idea had been to make three movies from the start. After Temple of Doom was less successful than Raiders of the Lost Ark critically, there was some hesitancy about continuing. Steven Spielberg hadn’t felt as committed as he would have liked on Temple, the subject matter didn’t interest him, and the material was far darker than he would have liked. However, the director believed they could correct the course and make something better. Eschewing directorial gigs on Big and Rain Man, Spielberg focused on developing the third Indy film into something special.

Movie Review – Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (1984)
Written by George Lucas, Willard Huyck, and Gloria Katz
Directed by Steven Spielberg

I did a lot of imaginative play as a kid, as do most kids. I’m about to sound like an old man, but this was a time when television was the biggest distractor in the house, and without cable, it wasn’t much of one. The movies and shows I would watch would inspire the play I did, often by myself or maybe with a younger sibling, if I could convince them to play along. I became a Ghostbuster using a backpack, yarn, a paper towel tube, and a shoebox. I was a Ninja turtle using the same backpack for a shell, a wrapping paper tube, and a piece of cloth with eye holes cut out. Indiana Jones was as simple as a cowboy hat and a jump rope.

Patron Pick – Oz the Great and Powerful

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.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)
Written by Sam Raimi, Mitchell Kapner, and David Lindsay-Abaire
Directed by Sam Raimi

The Wizard of Oz is the most significant notable American fairy tale. The others we typically think of are imports from Europe and folktales translated from their African roots into a new land in the case of the American South. It began in 1900 as the work of writer and theatrical producer L. Frank Baum. Combining fragments of his life experiences, Baum constructed a story about a little girl from Kansas and her adventures in the strange land of Oz. Two years after the book publication, Baum staged a live theatrical performance, so it is clear his intent was that this would always be a living story, not simply a book to be read but to be performed.

PopCult Podcast – Showing Up/Sleepless in Seattle

From the present, we have a film about a struggling artist trying to determine if she has anything of value to say and where she fits in with the larger art community. From the past, it’s a film about falling in love but with some heavily problematic messages and weird stalker-ish, parasocial behavior.

TV Review – Deadwood Season Three

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Deadwood Season Three (HBO)
Written by David Milch, Ted Mann, Regina Corrado, Alix Lambert, Kem Nunn, Nick Towne, Zack Whedon, W. Earl Brown, and Bernadette McNamara
Directed by Mark Tinker, Dan Attias, Gregg Fienberg, Ed Bianchi, Dan Minahan, Tim Hunter, and Adam Davidson

Ratings are the bane of good art. Because everything that involves money must be quantified into a system that evaluates for profit or potential profit, television executives chose to use viewership numbers to determine whether a piece of art continues. There is some logic behind this, as the production of shows involves a lot of money & resources. The idea is that art exists to be consumed in the instant it is delivered to the public. In the modern world, there is no discovery of something beautiful over time; this society prides itself on fantastic newness. Despite being the fourth highest-rated cable television series of 2006, Deadwood was ultimately canceled upon concluding its third season.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Alone Among the Stars

If you enjoy the reviews, podcasts, and other content we make here at PopCult Reviews please consider sending a tip of appreciation through our Ko-Fi. Thanks!

Alone Among the Stars
Written & Designed by Takuma Okada

You can download the game and pay what you want here.

Even today, with so many diverse tabletop RPGs for people to enjoy, the mainstream response to hearing about ttrpgs is for people to think of Dungeons & Dragons. While DnD certainly created a structure for a very dominant roleplaying style, it is not the be-all and end-all of the hobby. With recent decisions by DnD’s owners, Wizards of the Coast, to try and limit the open gaming licenses, which allow third parties to create content for the game and send Pinkerton agents to harass & threaten a streamer who legally purchased material WOTC accidentally sent out early, it’s time to find a new game. One thing that helps to expand your horizons is to engage with something wildly different than you are used to, and Alone Among the Stars is nothing like DnD.

Patron Exclusive – Double Down: Friday the 13th-The Final Chapter

The third of six episodes for a Patron exclusive podcast is now live on our Patreon. It’s Double Down, a series where Ariana & Seth check out six movies that critics Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert gave thumbs down to, but are not obscure films.

Camp Crystal Lake has seen its share of killings over the last forty plus years. Ariana and Seth take a look at one film in the Friday the 13th franchise series that caused Siskel & Ebert to get pretty moralistic. Were they out of line or right on the money? Take a listen to hear what we think.

Subscribe to our Patreon to check it out as well as our previous tv-focused podcast The Pitch.

Comic Book Review – All-Star Superman

All-Star Superman (2011)
Reprints All-Star Superman #1-12
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Frank Quitely

I’m not sure what I think of Superman these days. For anyone claiming to believe there is a single definitive version of him, it shows they don’t actually know the character’s history. The Superman who appeared in the pages of Action Comics #1 wasn’t even Siegel & Shuster’s first attempt to create a character with that name. Over the nearly 90 years that Superman has existed in the culture, he has undergone numerous reboots and minor tweaks. The Golden Age Superman is a different person from the Silver Age version who, in turn, is not the same as John Byrne’s rebooted Man of Steel. Even that iteration from 1985 was changed significantly by the end of the 20th century. In All-Star Superman, writer Grant Morrison is focused purely on the Superman of their youth. This was the Superman of the 1960s, a fatherly figure whose powers bordered on god-like, new ones manifesting as writers needed them. Morrison has chosen what is ironically the least human of Superman’s faces to tell a story about life & death, a Herculean postmodern myth.