2010 – PopCult Reviews

Comic Book Review – X-Men Forever: Once More…Into the Breach

X-Men Forever: Once More…Into the Breach (2010)
Reprints X-Men Forever #21-24 and Giant-Size X-Men Forever
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Tom Grummett, Rodney Buchemi, Wil Quintana, and Mike Grell

Chris Claremont’s strange & fascinating experiment X-Men Forever comes to the end of its first of two acts. The story thus far has revealed that mutants die younger than humans due to the intensity of their powers burning up their bodies. Wolverine was killed by a strange copy of Storm while the real Storm was revealed to still be a little girl. Rogue seems to have permanently absorbed Nightcrawler’s powers and appearance. Nathan Summers is still in the present and living with his grandparents in Alaska. Kitty Pryde accidentally absorbed one of Wolverine’s claws and part of his personality while phasing through him just before his death. Sabretooth has joined the team, and Nick Fury has embedded SHIELD agents in the school. Jean Grey seems to have struck up a romance with Beast. All the while, the Consortium plots in the background how to take down the X-Men.

Patron Pick – The Way

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.

The Way (2010)
Written and directed by Emilio Estevez

I’m not someone who likes to just walk around. However, there are people in this world who find enjoyment in doing just that. This film is about a group of people hiking the Camino de Santiago, a network of pilgrimages leading to the shrine of James the Apostle in northwestern Spain. This film is inspired explicitly by Emilio Estevez’s son Taylor, who drove the route with his grandfather, Martin Sheen, in 2003. Taylor met the woman he would marry on this journey and seemed to have had a profound experience through the journey. At first, Estevez and Sheen thought a documentary might be the route, but then they decided to make a more expansive narrative feature.

Patron Pick – All Good Things

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.

All Good Things (2010)
Written by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling
Directed by Andrew Jarecki

Just because a recipe looks good on paper does not mean the final dish will be a masterpiece. Let us peruse the ingredients list for All Good Things. The cast is stacked: Ryan Gosling, Kirstin Dunst, Frank Langella, Philip Baker Hall, Nick Offerman, Kristen Wiig, Lily Rabe. Not a bad line-up at all. The cinematographer worked on Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, among many other films. The director, Andrew Jarecki, had wowed audiences with his documentary Capturing the Friedmans seven years earlier. But it is in this last ingredient we have identified the problem. Jarecki made a fantastic documentary, but that is different from a narrative feature, and this film stands as a great example of how success in one does not translate into the other.

TV Review – The Venture Brothers Season Five

The Venture Brothers Season Five (Adult Swim)
Written by Doc Hammer & Christopher McCulloch
Directed by Christopher McCulloch

If you make it to season five of The Venture Brothers, you must enjoy the show. Coming off the incredible high of the season four finale, I was interested in seeing where the show went next. Season three had been concerned with building out the world and many supporting players, with Hank & Dean getting little screen time. Season Four allowed the brothers to develop into more complex characters, especially Dean, as he faced the challenges of being a grown-up. Season Five is a happy medium between these: the brothers keep developing as characters, and our supporting players pop up consistently. Doctor Orpheus and his Triad comrades are the only characters who don’t get much attention.

TV Review – Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Chrimbus Special

Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Chrimbus Special (2010)
Written by Tim Heidecker, Jonathan Krisel, Doug Lussenhop, Jon Mugar, and Eric Wareheim
Directed by Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, and Benjamin Berman

I can’t say I “got” Tim & Eric the first time I saw them. That was in the context of their first show for Adult Swim, Tom Goes to the Mayor. It would be discovering their follow-up, Awesome Show Great Job, that cemented them as some of my favorite modern comedians. I would eventually revisit Tom Goes to Mayor and appreciate it immensely. I still see how their tone & style of comedy might not be for everyone, but it certainly keeps me laughing. I decided to revisit this exceptional episode of their series where they invented their own grotesque take on Christmas.

Movie Review – The A-Team

The A-Team (2010)
Written by Joe Carnahan, Brian Bloom, and Skip Woods
Directed by Joe Carnahan

Some of my earliest memories of watching television are of The A-Team. This might be seen as troubling to some because this action series was criticized at the time for delivering a way too sanitized version of violence. This was because no one ever died in The A-Team. No matter what happened to them. They could be bound & gagged inside a vehicle filled with C-4 and blown up. There would be a take after the explosion that showed the person scrambling out of the inferno to safety. In that way, the show was seen as possibly encouraging the youth to do violent things to each other. I have never found any stories of a direct connection between the violence of the A-Team and any act performed in real life. The same cannot be said for the likes of Tucker Carlson and his ilk.

Movie Review – The Way Back (2010)

The Way Back (2010)
Written by Peter Weir and Keith Clarke
Directed by Peter Weir

Seven years passed from Master and Commander to this, Peter Weir’s final film (for now). One of the most jarring things about the 21st century when looking at Weir’s work is how these two movies do not feel like his. His work through the 1970s to the 1990s always possessed a New Age atmosphere, spiritual but not attached to any particular dogma, humanist and appreciative of the natural world. These things are present in The Way Back but do not result in the same rich work as a film like Witness, Fearless, or The Truman Show does. The Way Back is not a terrible film, but it is definitely not one deserving of a second visit, and it ends with an incredibly clunky third act.

Movie Review – MacGruber

MacGruber (2010)
Written by Will Forte, John Solomon, and Jorma Taccone
Directed by Jorma Taccone

Saturday Night Live has a decades-long legacy of adapting characters from the sketch comedy series into feature films. It started with The Blue Brothers and has given us such varied movies as Wayne’s World, The Coneheads, and It’s Pat, to name just a few. More often than not, these movies are not very good, with Wayne’s World and The Blues Brothers being the rare exceptions. These days you see films designed more as vehicles for the actors rather than recurring characters they played. MacGruber is a hybrid of both an extended version of a sketch character and a spotlight on Will Forte and his collaborator’s personal comedic aesthetics. That means if you don’t gel with what they find funny, this will likely be a tough one to get through.

Best of the 2010s: My Favorite Films of 2010

Best of the 2010s: My Favorite Films of 2010

14.The Last Circus (directed by Alex de la Iglesia)
From my review:
If Michael Bay made films that have substance he would be Alex de la Iglesia. In this pic, a man is haunted by his father’s destruction at the hands of the fascist Franco government and attempts to honor his pop’s memory by continuing the family tradition of clowning. He ends up the “sad clown” to a masochist “happy clown,” and both vie for the affections of a beautiful acrobat. The violence gets pretty bad in this one as both men grow increasingly insane. One of the most fun, and still intellectually rich movies I’ve seen in a while. There’s also a lot of classic film references, particularly in the big finale which reminded me a lot of Tim Burton’s Batman work visually.

Movie Review – Black Swan

Black Swan (2010)
Written by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin
Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Nina is a ballerina working in a New York ballet company with aspirations of maybe becoming the lead dancer one day. Her chances arrive sooner than she realizes when prima ballerina Beth, aging and bitter about what the director has made her do over the years, is pushed aside for Nina in the lead role of Swan Lake. Thomas, the company’s director, is growing increasingly frustrated with what he says is Nina’s constraining inhibitions. While technically perfect she lacks the passion he wants to see and uses new company member Lily as an example of real emotion in the work. Nina’s mother doesn’t help things by creating a perpetual childhood in their apartment, treating the young woman the same as she did when Nina was a girl. All of this pressure begins to show the cracks in Nina’s psyche as she glimpses a shadow-self, a doppelganger wandering the streets living a life parallel to our protagonist. What is real and what is in the life of the mind begin to blur and dissolve.