Seth Harris

Movie Review – But I’m A Cheerleader

But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)
Written by Jamie Babbit and Brian Wayne Peterson
Directed by Jamie Babbit

America is a land rife with pseudoscience. The COVID-19 pandemic showed how deep those roots are, with all sorts of unfounded remedies being churned out via reactionary social media. My mother apparently visits an herbalist regularly who runs magnets over her body to suss out any sneaky infections. And what do you know? The herbalist happens to sell the very remedy my mother needs for these infections. The same nonsensical thinking drove Christians to create conversion therapy camps where adolescent queer people or suspected queer people are sent to be “cured.” Over time, various cruel methods have been used to torture people for being attracted to those deemed “wrong.” These methods include but are not limited to brain surgery, surgical castration, electroshock, nausea-inducing drugs, and other dehumanizing reconditioning techniques that would make a Nazi proud. While the camp in this film may not be those extremes, it still displays the emotional cruelty intended to teach children that love from trusted adults comes with a cost, meaning a suppression of your Self to please them.

PopCult Podcast – Fast X/Succession & Barry

Whether your family are a quasi-cult of car ninjas, a media empire owning cluster of ghouls, or living in a doublewide on the plains homeschooling via YouTube this episode has what you are looking for.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Ex Novo

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Ex Novo (Sharkbomb)
Written & Designed by Martin Nerurkar & Konstantinos Dimopoulos

You can purchase this game here.

Worldbuilding and mapmaking make up many of the solo games I come across on itch.io. It makes sense because these activities are things people already do casually. These games provide formal structures to guide your imagination and create an end product that can stand on its own or be used as a jumping-off point for another solo system or as a setting for a campaign you’re running for others. Ex Novo is one of the more popular and well-known of these types of role-playing “toys.”

Patron Exclusive – Double Down Episode Two

The second 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.

Ariana & Seth are back in the theater to share their thoughts on this 1990 sequel to the 1987 hit original. This time around, the Predator is hunting in the jungles of Los Angeles in the distant future of 1997. Danny Glover stars as a cop who seems really bored more of the time trying to figure out who is killing the gangs. Meanwhile, Gary Busey shows up as fed out to capture the enemy’s advanced tech.

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

Comic Book Review – Batman by Grant Morrison Omnibus Volume Two

Batman by Grant Morrison Omnibus Volume Two (2018)
Reprints Batman #700-702, Batman and Robin #1-16, and Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1-6
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Tony S. Daniel, Frank Quitely, Scott Kolins, Andy Kubert, David Finch, Philip Tan, Cameron Stewart, Andy Clarke, Frazer Irving, Chris Sprouse, Yanick Paquette, Georges Jeanty, Ryan Sook, Pere Pérez, and Lee Garbett

The Grant Morrison run of Batman is not a perfect thing. The transition from the first chapter to this second has got to be one of the clunkiest, with desperate attempts to try and mesh Morrison’s intentions with their story with Dan DiDio’s editorial edicts. This is why the first three comics reprinted here focus so much on trying to take the death of Batman we see in “Batman RIP” and the death of Batman we see in “Final Crisis” and have them make a single cohesive narrative. In my opinion, it is a big mess. However, that leads to one of the best parts of Morrison’s run, Batman and Robin. The side story of The Return of Bruce Wayne? Eh, I’m not the biggest fan, but it does coherently tie up the Doctor Hurt storyline that began in the first volume.

Movie Review – My Own Private Idaho

My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Written & Directed by Gus Van Sant

A person’s inner life can be such a vast, complex landscape. The way we process experiences & emotions may have some universality, but ultimately, the way you feel inside going through these things is something no one else can ever truly know. For the character of Mikey in My Own Private Idaho, almost his whole life is made up of this intimate inner world due to his chronic narcolepsy. He can never quite get anywhere or finish a conversation before passing out. Gus Van Sant tells his story from this character’s perspective, which means the audience sees the narrative in fragments. We’re in one place, then another, only to return to where we started. Did we really go anywhere at all? Or was this just the lovely dream of a lonely person with a very uncertain future ahead of them? Maybe it’s all these things. Perhaps the dream world is just as real as the tangible one for someone like Mikey.

Movie Review – Maurice

Maurice (1987)
Written by Kit Hesketh-Harvey and James Ivory
Directed by James Ivory

The English boys’ boarding school culture has long been an environment where homosexuality has been experimented with. It makes sense adolescent young men feel a surge of hormones and spend lots of time building intense friendships with each other. While not as prominent in the United States, we can look at the arena of high school sports as a similar venue. I’m never surprised when I learn a player on a football team develops feelings for a teammate. However, as much as these conditions are fertile for young men to come out as homosexual, they are more often than not met with toxic masculine brutality if they do. It’s one of the frustrating contradictions at the heart of male bonding in the West. Male camaraderie is supposed to be one of the most important things, yet it must never be romantic.

Movie Review – Paris Is Burning

Paris Is Burning (1990)
Directed by Jennie Livingston

Exclusion is a standard tool used by the institutions that make up the United States. The ones who get excluded are typically BIPOC, LGBTQ, economically destitute, and/or disabled in some fashion. By pushing these people to the fringes of society, often by reactionaries who ultimately gain nothing through the act of exclusion, they are forced to create subcultures. These subcultures respond to being told they are not beautiful or have value. The marginalized simply redefine the terms of what beauty & value can be.

TV Review – Succession Season Four

Succession Season Four (HBO)
Written by Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, Susan Soon He Stanton, Lucy Prebble, Jon Brown, Ted Cohen, Georgia Pritchett, Will Arbery, and Will Tracy
Directed by Mark Mylod, Becky Martin, Lorene Scafaria, Andrij Parekh, Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

***Lots of spoilers***

In Michael Parenti’s 1993 book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, the author goes through each stakeholder in bringing the day’s news to the average American. The most powerful in this hierarchy are the owners of the media conglomerates that own the United States’ newspapers & television stations. While written in the late 1980s and updated in the early 1990s, Parenti does not touch on the coming power of the internet, but we can understand that it, too, is folded into the realm of control of the monied classes. The world as we perceive it, taught in American schools and raised on American media, is a fabrication. The ideology behind these things is not a conspiracy where world leaders sit plotting around a table in a secret headquarters kind.

PopCult Podcast – BlackBerry/Ham on Rye

A couple of quirky offbeat films make up our pair for this episode. One tells the story of the rise & fall of the most popular cellphone before the iPhone came along. The second is surreal, dreamlike, unsettling odyssey through suburbia.