Category: 2022

September 2022 Posting Schedule

2022 has seen PopCult Reviews showing tremendous growth and August was a milestone month. The blog first crossed the 2000 view in a month mark in April with 2,390 views. Since then views haven’t dipped lower than 2,500 a month. In August we cracked another milestone with 3,316 views. August also had our highest views per day metric with 104 and the most visitors in a single month with 2,435 people. Over on the podcast we cracked 400 all-time listens. We’re going to keep this momentum going and I’m excited to see where we are by the end of 2022.

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Book Update – July/August 2022

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

The pandemic saw a revolutionary transformation of labor, specifically working from home as a viable option. This novel is told entirely through Slack chats for a New York-based public relations firm. It starts with Gerald discovering his consciousness has been uploaded into the company’s Slack channels. His coworkers think this is an elaborate prank and dismiss his calls for help. The PR firm’s most prominent job at the moment is helping a high-end dog food company recover from reports that their food may be poisoning Pomeranians across the country. We are introduced to the employee in-jokes & drama, all while bizarre things happen in the background. I thought this was an entertaining read, nothing life-changing but clearly written by a sharp mind who found a way to make an unconventional format work. Because this is essentially written like a stage play, it makes for a quick read. I knocked it out in a couple of days. If you are looking for something that isn’t fluff but also not too heavy, this one is worth checking out.

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Movie Review – We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022)
Written & Directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Reality is breaking down. By this, I mean humanity has fragmented into billions of hyper-individualistic pods, each of which often seems to be creating its own version of reality in its head. You can see this most prominently in the QAnon types who construct wildly elaborate fantasies of their childhood favorites not really being dead, that Trump is still the president, and the inevitable arrival of disease-curing medbeds. These are all real delusions that a significant portion of the American population is under now. The youth are escaping in their own way too. A TikTok trend a few months ago (or was it years? Time is also falling apart) had teenagers and young adults speaking with conviction about manifesting themselves into a parallel reality where they were students at Hogwarts. They would describe elaborate scenarios of having relationships with fictional characters they’d been reading about since they were children. I would look at this and say they were just lucid dreaming, but it was a version of tangible reality to them. We create dream realms because the systems we live under have done a shit job preparing us to face the horrors of the present moment.

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Movie Review – The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
Written by Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
Directed by Tom Gormican

At this point, we must acknowledge that Nicolas Cage is a movie institution. He makes movies he is passionate about or jobs that help pay for something new in his life. His motivations are the same as any working person; he just sometimes gets paid an obscenely large amount for what he does. For example, Pig (2021) was made on a budget of around $3 million and earned back just a little more than that at the box office. This tells us that Cage didn’t agree to star in that film for the payday but because he genuinely believed in the project. As much as a cartoon as he’s become in the zeitgeist, I still see him as a genuine artist who doesn’t care what you or I think at the end of the day. He’s in the movies that he wants to be in. With this picture, he allows the filmmakers to deconstruct his film persona for some laughs and genuine human insight.

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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.

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Movie Review – Men

Men (2022)
Written & Directed by Alex Garland

Alex Garland has been a complicated director for me. I can’t say I’ve ever loved his work, but I find it fascinating. Every time he releases a film or, in one instance, made a television series, I am there for it. I don’t think you can argue that Garland is an uninteresting filmmaker though you could say he has a lot of missteps or doesn’t necessarily communicate his ideas clearly. When the first trailer for Men dropped, I knew I would be watching it as soon as possible and that it would be a unique viewing experience as all his work has been. Men has gotten a lot of negative press and seems to be both a critical and box office failure. I knew all these things going into it but ended up loving it more than I have most of Garland’s other work. It is undoubtedly his most esoteric movie, and I understand the adverse reactions entirely.

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