2022 – Page 5 – PopCult Reviews

PopCult Podcast – Soft & Quiet/Triangle of Sadness

Two films. One a horror flick, the other a comedy. Both about big festering problems in society and take a close examination of them.

PopCult Podcast – Earwig/Tár

The fall is my favorite time of the year for movies and this season has been a good one. Today we have two very different movies made by incredibly talented people exploring some big, important ideas.

Movie Review – Broker

Broker (2022)
Written & Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

I was blown away by Shoplifters, filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 movie about a family of outcasts who find solace in each other from an often cruel world. It was my first encounter with the writer/director, and his attention to humanism was a wonderful thing to experience. This meant I was pretty excited to watch Broker, and I can’t say my expectations were met. Broker is not a bad movie, but it doesn’t reach the heights of Shoplifters. Nevertheless, we still get a remarkable story about another found family that has to face reality in the end and find some way to hold the love they had for each other while the world pulls them apart. Once again, Kore-eda shows us that the most compelling stories to be told are ones about humans and their complicated relationships with each other.

Movie Review – Skinamarink

Skinamarink (2022)
Written & Directed by Kyle Edward Ball

When you are a child, a dark house can be the most foreboding thing in the world. Something that was once familiar in the daylight becomes absolutely nightmarish when the sun sets. As you grow into an understanding of the world, those fears subside and are replaced with more “adult” anxieties. Yet, something remains in the back of your head. Some cold autumn night when you have to go down into the basement, or you wake up and need to use the restroom down a blackened hallway, those childhood terrors begin slithering back from the corners of your mind. This is the atmosphere that Kyle Edward Ball is attempting to invoke with his experimental horror feature Skinamarink.

Movie Review – Piggy

Piggy (2022)
Written & Directed by Carlota Pereda

Being fat is not fun sometimes. As a fat person growing up in a fatphobic culture, I have struggled with my body image. I know it’s far worse for women than me. Experiencing a disconnect between body and mind can be a horribly traumatizing experience. Piggy explores a terrifying weekend in one fat girl’s life when she becomes entangled in the murder spree of a serial killer in her small Spanish hometown. Much like Julia Ducournau’s work on Raw and Titane, this movie seeks to tell an intensely violent story while exploring issues surrounding being fat and being a woman.

TV Review – Atlanta Season Four

Atlanta Season 4 (2022)
Written by Stephen Glover, Ibra Ake, Jamal Olori, Stefani Robinson, Janine Nabers, Francesca Sloane, Karen Joseph Adcock, and Taofik Kolade
Directed by Hiro Murai, Angela Barnes, Adamma Ebo, and Donald Glover

Atlanta was always a show that was hard to describe. Yes, there were main characters: Earn, Vanessa, Darius, and Al/Paper Boi. But the series was also an experimental anthology, breaking away from those serialized stories to tell one-offs. Both types of stories always felt infused with a sense of magical realism that turned the show into a fantasy, an exploration of being Black in America in the Southeast but imagining beyond the limitations of reality. Atlanta never tried to capture Black voices outside of this particular place, I’m sure it spoke to aspects of the Black experience, but it clearly was a show about the place and time as much as the people. The third season, which saw our four primary characters touring Europe, was met with less enthusiasm than usual. That makes sense, it was the season the least connected to Atlanta, but I still found it to have some episodes that were masterpieces. It was nice to get back to the city in season four, and the creators involved didn’t skip a beat.

PopCult Podcast – Weird: The Al Yankovic Story/Hit the Road

The “true story” of a musical legend is revealed & we journey across Iran with a hilariously dysfunctional family.

Comic Book Review – Rogues

Rogues (2022)
Reprints Rogues #1-4
Written by Joshua Williamson
Art by Leomacs

Heist stories are always entertaining. It’s endlessly fun to watch as a group of scoundrels plans out a big theft, implements the plan, and then deals with all the ways things didn’t go as expected. It may appeal to a sense of karmic balance. No matter how much we think we know what we are doing, the randomness of the universe and the actions of other individuals can topple us in a second. The Flash comics have always had an interesting cadre of gimmicky rivals, outmatched only by Batman and Spider-Man. Joshua Williamson, who is no stranger to The Flash, having penned an okay run a few years back, returns sans the Scarlet Speedster in favor of his rogues’ gallery.

TV Review – The Rings of Power Season 1

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 1 (Amazon Prime)
Written by J. D. Payne & Patrick McKay, Gennifer Hutchison, Jason Cahill and Justin Doble, Stephany Folsom, and Nicholas Adams
Directed by J.A. Bayona, Wayne Che Yip, and Charlotte Brändström

When Amazon announced they would make a prequel series set in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, my first thought was, “Why?” I enjoyed Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies when they came out, but I couldn’t stand The Hobbit trilogy and was perfectly happy to let that cinematic world be as it is. But that’s the thing with capitalism; why let a story or I.P. just be when you could keep mining it for more content and eventually result in the public hating everything about it? How could we skip that opportunity? So, with some fragments of stories & unfinished tales plus a hell of a lot of creative agency to change things, we were finally given the billion-dollar bloat that is The Rings of Power.

Movie Review – Sick of Myself

Sick of Myself (2022)
Written & Directed by Kristoffer Borgli

Having a positive, productive relationship in the current modern context seems challenging. I got married in 2011 and, thankfully, since then, haven’t had to dip my toe back in the dating pool. I am lucky that I have an incredibly supportive partner, and we have just grown closer as the years pass by. For some couples, the pandemic was a moment where the relationship collapsed; for us, we were strengthened. I don’t think this is because we are exceptional in any way. We actively listen to the other person and absorb what they say. We still have arguments, though we don’t let them go beyond the moment they happen. This is a partnership where everyone has to come to the table with a win-win mindset. Anything else is just going to lead to dysfunction.