2000s – Page 2 – PopCult Reviews

Patron Pick – Quigley

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.

Quigley (2003)
Written and directed by William Byron Hillman

When you see a film like Quigley, many questions flow through your mind. “Are we meant to believe 50-year-old Curtis Armstrong is actually 35?” “Was this just a money laundering scheme by the mob?” “Are we laughing with Gary Busey or at him?” If Quigley were to come out today, it would, like the work of Neil Breen, be caught up in the meme machine. Yet, this picture was released in the early 2000s, shot on video, and released straight to the VHS format. At every turn, I was confused by this picture, wondering how aware the people on set were that this was utter garbage. A paycheck is a paycheck, I suppose.

Patron Pick – Shanghai Noon

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 Bekah Lindstrom.

Shanghai Noon (2000)
Written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar
Directed by Tom Dey

“The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia.” – Mark Fisher

If you were raised in the US or live there, you are in a period of artistic decline. The big movie studios, always focused on the dollar, have genuinely given up on any pretense of their output having long-lasting cultural meaning. In the golden era of the studio, some executives and presidents understood they had to make crowd pleasers but always tried to push the medium forward. They would give money to some smaller pictures that ended up being the ones remembered all these decades ago.

Patron Pick – Men in Black II

Men in Black II (2002)
Written by Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

Around this time, I began to viscerally feel that the popular fare I would see in theaters mainly was trash. I was in college when Men in Black II came out, and I remember going to the theater to see it. I spent August at a friend’s house, and one of their local friends had connections at the local theater. This meant we would get to enter without having to buy tickets. Men in Black II was one of those films. I couldn’t have been happier not to pay to see this thing. When this was requested as a Patron pick, I wondered if I would change my view. Maybe there was something good about it I missed back then. There wasn’t.

Movie Review – Collateral

Collateral (2004)
Written by Stuart Beattie
Directed by Michael Mann

We end our brief survey of neo-noir films with this crime flick from Michael Mann. I wouldn’t say I adore all of Mann’s work, but I would never question how gorgeous his movies look. He invented an aesthetic we mainly associate with the 1980s yet kept with it for the next few decades. Whether the scripts work or not, Mann will deliver a moody, atmospheric experience, and that is half of what most noir stories are. You need to feel the seediness and grime for the story to work its magic. Mann accomplishes something even more impressive here, he got Tom Cruise to play the villain.

Movie Review – Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Written and directed by David Lynch

I’ve mentioned on the blog before how I discovered David Lynch as an eight-year-old who was somehow allowed to watch Twin Peaks. For a long time, I knew him as “the guy who made Twin Peaks.” Even in college, as I began to explore his greater body of work, I was like most people; I just didn’t understand the abstractness of it all. What shifted my understanding was reading Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews with the director focusing on his work in chronological order up to Mulholland Drive. Through this text, I came to understand the source of Lynch’s creativity – from deep inside his subconscious and expressed through images without any implied context – and how intuitive his work is. This happened around the same time I was taking Literary Theory & Criticism, which was probably the most influential academic experience I’ve ever had.

Comic Book Review – Starman Omnibus Volume Two

Starman Omnibus Volume Two (2022)
Reprints All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant #1, Batman/Hellboy/Starman #1-2, JSA: All-Stars #4, Starman #44-81, Starman #1,000,000, Starman: The Mist #1, Starman/Congorilla #1, Stars and STRIPE #0, and The Shade #1-12
Written by James Robinson with David Goyer & Geoff Johns
Art by Tony Harris, Peter Snejbjerg, Mike Mayhew, Dave Ross, Mike Mignola, Mike Mckone, John Lucas, Brett Booth, Lee Moder, Cully Hamner

The second half of James Robinson’s Starman is mainly comprised of two storylines: Stars My Destination and Grand Guignol. Intermixed within are Times Past stories, filling in gaps in the backstories of the Golden Age Starman and Scalphunter. There’s a brief interlude for the DC One Million crossover that Robinson still uses to build on the legacy themes so prominent in this work. It should also be noted how popular Starman was at this point. It was enough to warrant a crossover with Batman and Hellboy. That’s amazing for a character who took his bow in the last issue of his series and hasn’t been seen since. Very few comic book superheroes get this sort of finality to their story. Yet, DC has never brought Jack Knight back.

Movie Review – Vera Drake

Vera Drake (2004)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh’s second foray into historical drama takes us back to the early 1950s. The UK is still healing from the wounds of World War II, and people get on with their lives. It’s also the first of his films that I don’t think quite hits the mark. There’s a very potent moral space to be explored with Vera Drake, but Leigh and his acting collaborators seem to avoid it. That would be the more interesting place to go than where we do, which is a fairly bog standard story. If you have even the slightest experience with cinema, then you’ll likely know where this film is going the minute you learn about Drake’s side gig and the volunteer work she does for her community.

Movie Review – All or Nothing

All or Nothing (2002)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh doesn’t cast people that meet the Hollywood standards of “beauty,” but damn if his performers are not always beautiful & captivating. They reveal that actual beauty is not a series of symmetrical physical features on the face or a toned body but in the ability to capture moments of the human experience. We often must rush past these moments in our daily lives because the systems that rule us demand we go faster. Within a Leigh film, the actor can sit in a moment, examine & explore it, and find the truth within it. Leigh’s films are all about the reality of what it means to be a human being alive in these times, seeking connection & meaning.

Movie Review – Moolaadé

Moolaadé (2004)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

This was Ousmane Sembène’s final film. He passed away in Dakar in 2007 at the age of 84. For this last picture, the filmmaker focused his energy on a critique of his own culture. Female genital mutilation or circumcision is a common practice in several African countries. It’s traditionally performed with an iron sheet or knife. An elder will remove part or all of the female genitals with no anesthesia and then suture the wound with a needle or plant thorn. As much as 15% of girls forced to endure the procedure die from excessive blood loss or the infections that follow. Sembène wants to intensely critique his culture and highlight how some traditions must stop.

Movie Review – A Decade Under the Influence

A Decade Under the Influence (2003)
Directed by Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese

Across the globe, there have been numerous cinematic movements. Two of the most influential were the French & Italian New Waves. Through revolutionary experimentation with style & content, the artists behind these movements were able to show how film could tell stories far beyond what people had once imagined. These films often touched on political topics, particularly social injustice and hypocrisy among the ruling classes. The United States saw a similar but much smaller film movement in the 1960s, but something different from the upheaval brought about by their European counterparts. John Cassavettes helped birth American independent cinema, but it was not widely recognized at the time. It would be the 1970s when the States would see their own transformation of movies.