2023 – Page 14 – PopCult Reviews

Book Update – March/April 2023

A Short Film About Disappointment by Joshua Mattson

Here’s the premise: Film critic Noah Body writes and uploads his reviews on a widely ignored content aggregator in the near future. He is a wannabe director who is forced to watch the worst movies knowing zero people are reading his work. Noah starts including details of his complicated & spite-filled personal life in these reviews. Through eighty movie reviews, we follow Body’s life and how it falls apart around him. That sounds really good, right? It’s a shame that this book is a nearly unreadable piece of crap. I loved the premise, but the final product was a brutal slog. One of the most significant issues is that the chapters aren’t movie reviews. The main character is not fun to read. I love having unreliable narrators or a challenging protagonist, but Body is just pretentious in a way that I derived no humor from. I checked on Goodreads, and this one has a lot of people listing it as DNF (Did Not Finish). I certainly felt like dropping it pretty early on. If I could give this review a title, it would be “A Long Book That Led to Disappointment.”

TV Review – The Last of Us Season One

The Last of Us Season One (HBO)
Written by Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann
Directed by Craig Mazin, Neil Druckmann, Peter Hoar, Jeremy Webb, Jasmila Žbanić, Liza Johnson, and Ali Abbasi

Media has conditioned us to think the “end of the world” will be explosively catastrophic. Think of the movies of Roland Emmerich or the Skynet awakening of James Cameron’s Terminator films. The reality is collapse is a rolling event; it begins in the corners of the developing world and inches its way toward the imperial core. This could take place over any amount of time, but it is guaranteed that all civilizations collapse at some point. The Biblical story of Noah’s flood, an event that also pops up in various other cultures, was probably just a localized flood that devastated the region. Over time it was exaggerated, and details were added. If the collapse hasn’t reached you yet, when it does, you might not even notice it. When you take in the weight of it all, you may wish for some big explosive moment instead of the dull, soul-crushing march that lies before you.

Movie Review – Beau Is Afraid

Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Written & Directed by Ari Aster

I’ve begun to feel like much of American culture & media is just a falsehood lately. For me, it’s been a combination of sitting back and soaking in the strangeness of social interaction in that culture, embracing my autism, and taking psychedelics. Everything feels chaotic in a very contrived, artificial way. We know that nothing about man-made societies is unintentionally chaotic; there are lots of moving parts behind the scenes. So, who benefits from the chaos? That seems easy to answer: the capital class, the owners, the managerial class. Chaos keeps people disoriented, unable to form bonds, and thus unable to achieve solidarity. Each person comes to feel isolated, terrified and atomized. Individuals are standing in the middle of their own personal hurricanes. This is the entire tone of Ari Aster’s latest picture, Beau Is Afraid.

PopCult Podcast – The Addiction/Memories

New York based director Abel Ferrara left Hollywood and came back to his NYC indie roots in 1995 by directing a very…um, pretentious vampire movie. This was also the same year the creator of Akira got an anime anthology devoted to three of his stories.

My Favorite Crying Scenes

The Kid (1921)
Written & Directed by Charlie Chaplin

We (Americans) easily forget how cruel & brutal life was just a handful of generations ago. When you watch a Chaplin film, you are reminded how crude most cities were at the time, with muddy thoroughfares and people living in hovels. Charlie Chaplin was a director concerned mainly with the socio-economic class he grew up in, the working poor. The Kid captures the importance of family in making your way through life, especially when you are poor. This sequence includes two beautifully performed crying scenes. The first is child actor Jackie Coogan’s heartbreaking tears as he is separated from his father. Then we get a pair of criers when Chaplin’s Little Tramp is reunited with his son. You can imagine the heartstrings being pulled in the audience who first saw this.

PopCult Podcast – To Die For/Underground

1995 was a year with some wildly diverse films. For instance, this week we have a Gus Van Sant picture that wants to comment on the media & celebrity. The other is probably the most controversial film you’ve never heard of and is about the collapse of Yugoslavia done as a slapstick comedy.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Welcome to the Habitrails

Welcome to the Habitrails
Written and Designed by AYolland
Can be purchased here

I don’t know if I ever lived in the suburbs. I lived in neighborhoods that resembled what I saw of the suburbs on television, but these were always relatively poor working-class places. They weren’t necessarily the artifice of the suburbs but the strange dark attempt to mimic them. So when I came across Welcome to the Habitrails, it immediately stood out as a theme I could sink my teeth into. I’ve always been a fan of modern existential horror, and there aren’t many ttrpgs in that vein. Because of Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy dominates, making Habitrails seem pretty unique.

PopCult Podcast – Kicking and Screaming/Fallen Angels

We’re continuing our flashback to 1995 with a very talky film about a bunch of white people (that narrows it down) as well as one of the “lesser” works of a Hong Kong filmmaking master.

Movie Review – The Super Mario Bros. Movie

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
Written by Matthew Fogel
Directed by Aaron Horvath & Michael Jelenic

Despite numerous adaptations to film & television, live-action & animated, Mario remains one of the most nebulous pop culture characters regarding his narrative arc. Most cartoon shows begin in media res; Mario is already the hero and, accompanied by his friends Luigi, Toad, and Peach, fights the good fight against Bowser & his Koopa Troopas. The hybrid Super Mario Bros. Super Show television series exists as this strange liminal object, with the framing device of Captain Lou Albano & Danny Wells, as Mario & Luigi, respectively, introducing audiences to cartoon stories about them. Yet, there is never an apparent effort made to establish the timeline of events. The 1993 live-action movie starring Bob Hoskins & John Leguizamo veers off into its own unique & bizarre direction, positing a parallel dinosaur-dominated timeline. As much presence as Mario has in American & Japanese culture since the 1980s, no one seems very concerned about the story behind the plumber. In this way, The Super Mario Bros. Movie exists as the first origin story that adheres closely to the designs & relationship dynamics of the video games.

PopCult Podcast – Welcome to the Dollhouse/La Haine

We’re going back to 1995 for April to watch & re-watch some fantastic films. Our first picture is a darkly comic examination of life in the East Coast suburbs. Our second film is a French crime-drama that moves at a breakneck speed and is a perfect piece of cinema.