2019 – Page 12 – PopCult Reviews

My Filmmaking Year Begins

Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie, I can live somebody else’s life for a while. I can walk in somebody else’s shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I’m not just stuck being myself, day after day.

The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people.

Roger Ebert, remarks when receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (June 23, 2005)

Movie Review – The Art of Self-Defense

The Art of Self-Defense (2019)
Written & Directed by Riley Stearns

When David Fincher’s Fight Club came out in 1999, I was a college freshman, just the right age and gender for the film to hit me firmly between the eyes. I thought the movie was genius, and at some point in the 2000s, I started feeling like the picture held a certain phoniness, that is was macho posturing that claimed it was condemning a certain mindset while actually supporting that ideology. I love Fincher, but Fight Club is a picture that hasn’t aged well for me, and that might be because of the young men who flocked to its images but didn’t necessarily explore its philosophy. Riley Stearns’ The Art of Self-Defense feels like a wry satire of the sort of young men who wanted to start their own fight clubs after watching the film. In the age of incels and the questioning and exploration of what it means to be a man, there couldn’t be a better time for this picture.

Movie Review – Joker

Joker (2019)
Written by Todd Phillips & Scott Silver
Directed by Todd Phillips

We are incapable of having a nuanced conversation about anything in popular culture. As I scroll through endless hot takes on Warner Bros.’ latest DC Comics property turned movie Joker, I find myself getting numbingly-exhausted. Apparently, Joker is either A) a clarion call to Trump-loving incels or B) the most magnificent piece of cinema ever produced, so we should end filmmaking now. Joker is a beautiful, ugly, well-acted, terribly-written, film that says so much while being so profoundly shallow and on the nose. This is going to be a long review and go into a lot of detail, much of which will involve me rambling about things you may find tangentially unconnected from Joker, but this is my review so…nyah.

PopCult September 2019 Digest

Features
My Favorite Stephen King Adaptations
Short Film Showcase #3
Short Film Showcase #4
Best of the 2010s: My Favorite Films of 2016

Movie Reviews (*** = popcult recommends)
Revenge
Leave No Trace ***
Pet Semetary (2019)
Stand By Me
It Chapter Two
To Kill a Mockingbird ***
Support the Girls
Cinema Paradiso
In Fabric ***
Between Two Ferns
Tigers Are Not Afraid

Television Reviews
Best of All in the Family Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Comic Book Reviews
The Wild Storm Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4
Heroes in Crisis

Comic Book Review – Heroes in Crisis

Heroes in Crisis (2019)
Reprints Heroes in Crisis #1-9
Written by Tom King
Art by Clay Mann & Mitch Gerards

Most event comics in the DC Universe are now bloated multi-title crossovers that stretch their thin story premise to an unreasonable length. They find some way to hammer the word “crisis” into the title as a way of drumming up nostalgia in burnout fanboys. If you read my reviews of the DC event books a couple of summers ago then you know I have had my nostalgia glasses removed and see most of my love for these books evaporating. I’m an adult now, and the understanding I had of story structure and character development has evolved since those days. Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis are just convoluted and boring books at this point. Then Tom King comes along, riding the acclaim of work like The Vision and Mr. Miracle. It’s announced he’ll be writing Heroes in Crisis, an event book.

Short Film Showcase #4

Little Deaths (1996)
Written & Directed by Lynne Ramsay

I need to explore the early work of Lynne Ramsay. She’s made two of my favorite films of the 2010s, We Need To Talk About Kevin & You Were Never Really Here. Small Deaths was her debut short after graduating from the U.K.‘s National Film and Television School. The film is composed of three vignettes centered around an unnamed girl growing into adolescence and early adulthood.

Comic Book Review – The Wild Storm Volume 4

The Wild Storm Volume 4 (2019)
Reprints The Wild Storm #19-24
Written by Warren Ellis
Art by Jon Davis-Hunt

Several major plot threads are wrapping after a year and a half of build-up. The feud between International Operations and SkyWatch has escalated to the point that the unware citizens of Earth are in peril. John Lynch is hunting down the people he experimented on while Mark Slayton is hunting down Lynch. Jacob Marlowe and the Halo Corporation are trying to throw a wrench into everything while pushing the agenda of the Khera. Unnoticed by almost everyone is Angelica Spica and her growing group of compatriots see a different path forward for humanity. What surprised me most about this final volume is how for all Ellis’ build-up the story falls apart and becomes a pretty standard superhero battle.

Movie Review – Tigers Are Not Afraid

Tigers Are Not Afraid (2019)
Written & Directed by Issa Lopez

It’s hard not to be struck with the influence Guillermo Del Toro has had on this film and a handful of contemporary Mexican cinema. Tigers Are Not Afraid is full to the brim with knowing nods to The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. While Del Toro often uses the past as a setting to examine his ideas of innocence and darkness, writer-director Issa Lopez chooses the contemporary cartel crisis as the stage for her story. My biggest problem when we compare these works is that Tigers Are Not Afraid has issues with pacing that cut through what should be white-knuckle tension. This is a story about children in peril, men chasing after them with the intent to kill, and there are a lot of moments where this feeling is not conveyed on screen.

Movie Review – Between Two Ferns: The Movie

Between Two Ferns: The Movie (2019)
Written & Directed by Scott Aukerman

The way I consume comedy has changed in the last decade. When I was in college, it was about listening to albums, often bootlegged. I remember hearing and relistening to Dave Chappelle: Killin’ Them Softly, Patton Oswalt’s Feelin’ Kind Patton, and more. One comedian I discovered in those days was Zach Galifianakis. This was during his short-lived stint on VH1 hosting Late World, a talk show explicitly designed around him. Galifianakis was one of those comedians that made me think outside the album as the primary way to access a performer’s sense of humor and aesthetics. Galifianakis constructed a comedic persona, akin to Pee-Wee Herman or Steven Wright, something like themselves but unlike as well. His point of view came from a fascination with confident dumb people which is the person he plays on Between Two Ferns.

Movie Review – In Fabric

In Fabric (2018)
Written & Directed by Peter Strickland

It’s difficult to determine when and where we are during In Fabric. This intentional disorientation helps add to the sense of the eerie and unsettling. The commercials on television are drenched in a 1970s hue, music synthesized and distorted. Yet at home, our characters appear to be living contemporary lives. The location is a fictional city of Thames Valley on Thames which may be rural or metropolitan. The adverts for Dentley & Soper’s department store are stylized occult rituals, the owner and his staff of mesmerized attendants invoking the customer to come and buy from their holiday sale.