1960s – PopCult Reviews

Comic Book Review – Avengers Epic Collection: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes

Avengers Epic Collection: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (2014)
Reprints Avengers v1 #1-20
Written by Stan Lee
Art by Jack Kirby & Don Heck

When I was a kid with far more limited funds and had to pick a comic at the grocery store racks, I wanted the most bang for my buck. For me, that made team books far more appealing. You got a bunch of heroes and maybe more than one villain instead of a solo book. This made the Justice League, X-Men, Teen Titans, and Avengers more appealing. Yet, when I revisit some of these books, I find them lacking – especially Justice League and Avengers. Focusing on the latter, the Avengers is a comic that would have been the premiere book of the Marvel Age. Yet, it never overcame the appeal of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, or even its individual members’ books.

Patron Pick – Soundtrack to a Coup D’état

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.

Soundtrack to a Coup D’état (2024)
Written and directed by John Grimonprez

Being a media-obsessed person for my whole life, I have come to a new understanding since my university days about the United States and the way it uses media as a weapon. Depending on how far along your understanding of the mass media’s purpose and how power becomes gained & is wielded, you might not see the reality just beneath the surface. As Michael Parenti said in his book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, “Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade.”

Movie Review – The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew (1967)
Written by William Shakespeare, Franco Zeffirelli, Paul Dehn, and Suso Cecchi d’Amico
Directed by Franco Zeffirelli

Shakespeare was a product of his time. Yes, we can find instances of the playwright challenging the mores of his society, and he was a brilliant weaver of language. However, his views on marriage and women weren’t revolutionary, as we can see in the comedy The Taming of the Shrew. Perhaps it should make us feel better that from the play’s debut in the late 16th century, criticisms were leveled at what it says about women. I don’t expect these to have been very loud protests based on how women were treated in the centuries that followed.

Movie Review – My Night at Maud’s

My Night at Maud’s (1969)
Written and directed by Éric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer is considered the last of the French New Wave directors to be established as such. He was known to be secretive about his personal life, with his name being a mash-up of two people he respected: Eric from director Eric von Stroheim (Sunset Boulevard) and author Sax Rohmer. The filmmaker worked as a teacher in the French Alps but quit in the mid-1940s to move to Paris. Rohmer started attending film screenings where he met Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, and others. This led to a career as a journalist for the many popular film magazines at the time. When he began to get into filmmaking, he invented his pseudonym to keep his parents from learning he was working in the industry.

Movie Review – Winter Light

Winter Light (1963)
Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

It didn’t take me very long while watching Winter Light to realize what contemporary film was essentially a remake of it, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. Schraeder certainly localizes the story to upstate New York and removes or alters certain details, but narratively & thematically they share so much. Both are films where I can’t imagine them being set in any season other than winter. The cold, the snow, the silence. They are all significant parts of setting the atmosphere for this story of spiritual doubt and crisis. Ingmar Bergman was a person always in some type of spiritual introspection and with Winter Light he’s wondering about those who seem certain about the existence of a God who cares about humanity.

TV Review – The Prisoner

The Prisoner (1967)
Written by George Markstein, David Tomblin, Vincent Tilsley, Anthony Skene, Patrick McGoohan, Terence Feely, Lewis Greifer, Gerald Kelsey, Roger Woddis, Michael Cramoy, Roger Parkes, Kenneth Griffith, and Ian L. Rakoff
Directed by Don Chaffey, Pat Jackson, Patrick McGoohan, Peter Graham Scott, and David Tomblin

As a citizen of the Western World (born in the States, residency in the Netherlands), I have been told from birth that I am free and those outside my sphere are not. For many years, I took this to be the truth. Why? The people who told me I was taught to see as correct in all things. These are the institutions responsible for my freedom, after all. But as I got older, the more I read & observed, it became clear that I wasn’t free. Well, I was free, in about the same way as a dog chained in a backyard is free. I can move up to a point, but then the chain chokes me and reminds me of the limits of this supposed “freedom.” I am as free as the establishment that controls my world allows me to be. I don’t think that can be defined as actual freedom.

Movie Review – The Battle of Algiers

The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Written by Franco Solinas and Gillo Pontecorvo
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

From 1954 to 1962, the French government was at war with the Algerian people. Algeria had been a French colony since 1830 when King Charles X decided to take the land. They blamed pirates on the Barbary Coast and their ransoming of French captives. In reality, French sentiments towards their increasingly authoritarian king led Charles and his advisors to dream up a foreign conquest to calm the people. In the first thirty years of French occupation, it is estimated that up to one million Algerians were killed, nearly a ⅓ of the entire population.

Movie Review – Medea

Medea (1969)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

You hear about Medea’s homeland long before you see her. The film opens with the usurping of King Aeson and Jason, his son, being put in the care of the centaur Chiron. Chiron knows that one day, Jason will travel too far away from Colchis and steal the golden fleece. The film shifts to an almost documentary-like portrayal of an event on Colchis. We observe that the king’s own son is sacrificed, and Princess Medea, whose chief role is as a priestess, oversees the whole affair. It’s disturbing and portends trouble for Jason when he embarks on his eventual mission.

Movie Review – Theorem

Theorem (1968)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A visitor (Terence Stamp) appears in the lives of a bourgeois Italian family. This stranger goes about having sexual relationships with every member of the household. That’s the shy daughter, the repressed mother, the deeply disturbed father, the sensitive son, and the devoutly religious maid. The stranger barely speaks a word but seems to provide each person with the type of care & attention they are in desperate need of.

Movie Review – Oedipus Rex

Oedipus Rex (1967)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini had a deep interest in the mythic. In his early films, the mythic could be found among the peasant class that lived on the outskirts of post-war Rome as it was rebuilt into a modernized city, complete with mass consumerism. Despite being a very modern type of person – queer, atheist, communist – Pasolini was constantly returning to the past, especially to myths & fables where symbolism provided a mystical explanation for how the world came to be what it is. After experimenting with it in a short film, this was the director’s first feature-length color movie. The result is a picture where Pasolini pushes his filmmaking to new heights but still stumbles along the way.