2021 – PopCult Reviews

Comic Book Review – American Cult

American Cult: A Graphic History of Religious Cults in America from the Colonial Era to Today (2021)
Edited by Robyn Chapman
Written and illustrated by Steve Teare, Emi Gennis, Ellen Lindner, Rose Colon Guerra, Janet Harvey, Jim Rugg, Andrew Greenstone, Lara Antal, Josh Kramer, Mike Dawson, Ryan Carey, Mike Freiheit, Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg, Ben Passmore, Jesse Lambert, Vreni Stollberger, J.T. Yost, Robyn Chapman, Robert Sergel, Lonnie Mahn, and Brian “Box” Brown

The United States has been a place where the religiously fanatical have flocked since its founding. Most people who studied what passes for U.S. history in schools will know about the Puritans and the Salem Witch Hunts. You’ve probably heard of Jonestown and The Heaven’s Gate cult. The Westboro Baptist Church made sure they became infamous to convince themselves they were “beloved” by their demonic image of god. American Cult touches on several of these well-known cults and still delivered surprises to me. It also presents several cults you may not have heard about, with some continuing to have a place in your life through the goods they manufacture to stay afloat. What can’t be argued is that the particular nature of America and Americans makes them susceptible to cults in a way few other societies ever have been.

Movie Review – Neptune Frost

Neptune Frost (2021)
Written by Saul Williams
Directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman

American mass media is like a virus. It has infected the globe to the point that if you go to any movie theater that exists in this world, you will find US films playing, even if they are shown bootleg. This is not an accident, yet it’s not exactly a conspiracy. It is another salvo in the American Empire’s conquest of the planet since World War II. Neptune Frost is a Rwandan film and an Afrofuturist musical about living under colonialism. However, Lin Manuel Miranda and Ezra Miller produced the film. So, I have to wonder how authentic the film can be to Rwandan voices with these Westerners involved.

TV Review – Foundation Season One

Foundation Season One (AppleTV+)
Written by David S. Goyer, Josh Friedman, Olivia Purnell, Lauren Bello, Leigh Dana Jackson, Marcus Gardley, Caitlin Saunders, Sarah Nolen, and Victoria Morrow
Directed by Rupert Sanders, Andrew Bernstein, Alex Graves, Jennifer Phang, and Roxann Dawson

You’ve bought a reprieve, but war with Empire is inevitable. In the meantime, remember this day, remember what we’re striving towards. I know a thousand years can seem like an eternity, but it’s the blink of an eye when measured against the whole of human history, and it could so easily slip through our fingers if we’re not vigilant. – Hari Seldon (Jared Harris)

Comic Book Review – Daredevil: Lockdown and Devil’s Reign

Daredevil: Lockdown (2021)
Reprints Daredevil #31-36
Written by Chip Zdarsky
Art by Mike Hawthorne, Marco Checchetto, Stefano Landini, Francesco Mobili, and Manuel Garcia

Devil’s Reign (2022)
Reprints Devil’s Reign #1-6 & Devil’s Reign Omega
Written by Chip Zdarsky
Art by Marco Checchetto

Throughout Chip Zdarsky’s current run on Daredevil, he’s made it a point to show how it’s not just organized crime that creates problems in urban environments. The police & the city government will agitate the public to serve their own purposes, often to continue a flow of money & power from criminal enterprise. Lockdown finds Matt Murdock serving time in prison while being allowed to keep his identity secret due to a Supreme Court ruling within the Marvel Universe. Being spotlighted as Daredevil doesn’t afford him any benefits, though and he quickly becomes targeted by his fellow inmates but also a corrupt warden.

Comic Book Review – Daredevil: Truth/Dare and Doing Time

Daredevil: Truth/Dare (2021)
Reprints Daredevil #21-25, Annual #1
Written by Chip Zdarsky
Art by Marco Checchetto, Manuel Garcia, Francisco Mobili, Mike Hawthorne

Daredevil: Doing Time (2021)
Reprints Daredevil #26-30
Written by Chip Zdarsky
Art by Marco Checchetto and Mike Hawthorne

Chip Zdarsky has completely sold me on Daredevil, a character I previously was lukewarm towards. The Marvel street-level characters outside of Spider-Man never really caught my attention. For years, I’ve tried picking up a Daredevil issue here and there to see if a new creative team could garner my interest, but they’ve continuously sputtered out. Zdarsky’s take on Daredevil works so well for me because the title is basically a two-hander. The story being told is just as much about Matt Murdock as it is about Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. Years prior, Fisk was elected mayor of NYC, a concept I don’t think any writer has done much interesting with until now. By spending so much time with Fisk, we have really understood and even empathized with the character. He’s undoubtedly a villain, but he’s also a person.

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TV Review – Saturday Morning All-Star Hits

Saturday Morning All-Star Hits (Netflix)
Written by Kyle Mooney, Ben Jones, Dave McCary, and Scott Gairdner
Directed by Ben Jones & Dave McCary

Nostalgia is one of the most dangerous sentiments people can have, made even worse when an entire society becomes regressively lost in it to avoid confronting present-day problems. Unfortunately, America is currently a society obsessed with nostalgia, with each generation suckling at memories from their childhood and yearning to return to that state of unknowing. “Make America Great Again” implies a better time, and even those who wear this proudly do so without acknowledging that it would not have been better for adults in their economic class. The pull of nostalgia is most potent during times of societal collapse and is one of the many tendrils of fascism that very slyly closes around the throat of the future. Kyle Mooney and co-creator Ben Jones have managed to create a streaming series that bathes in the aesthetics of nostalgia but doesn’t succumb to the lies that it was better “back then.”

Patron Pick – Belfast

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 own thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Belfast (2021)
Written & Directed by Kenneth Branagh

The Troubles. For the people of Northern Ireland, that phrase is a reminder of a brutal period of thirty years where communities were at war. While the factions were referenced in the media as Catholic and Protestant, there was much more complexity to what was happening. This irregular war came out of unionists & loyalists (Protestants) wanting to remain as part of the United Kingdom. The nationalists & republicans (Catholics) sought to reunite with Ireland to form a single nation. That’s the basic explanation, but I could write a whole book about the details and go deeper and how the entire thing goes back to the early 17th century. Many people have already written those books.

Movie Review – The Scary of Sixty-First

The Scary of Sixty-First (2021)
Written by Dasha Nekrasova and Madeline Quinn
Directed by Dasha Nekrasova

One of the pieces of cultural lore that has rippled through people’s minds has been the revelations surrounding Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was a native Brooklynite whose first professional job was teaching at the Dalton School while lacking a college degree. Odd, right? Eventually, he was dismissed from the school and entered finance, working at Bear Stearns. As Epstein rose in wealth and prominence, he began cultivating some extremely prominent acquaintances. There are some unknowns about what he did with this wealth & power. However, there are also some things we know for sure. It is an absolute fact that he engaged in the human trafficking of women and children and that they were used for his and his friends’ sexual gratification. Epstein’s life ended when he allegedly “committed suicide” while in prison, a situation whose details are deeply incredulous.

Movie Review – The Souvenir Part II

The Souvenir Part II (2021)
Written & Directed by Joanna Hogg

The Souvenir was not the sort of film we expect sequels for anymore. It’s an intimate, funny & poignant story about a young woman coming into her own and dealing with her first tragic love. The second film is about the ripples in that relationship and the death that ended up rippling through a young filmmaker’s life. It became a significant influence on her art. All of this is directly autobiographical, based on Hogg’s own experiences coming into her own as a filmmaker and the effects her ill-fated relationship had on that work.