adaptation – Page 7 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962)
Written by Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Sidney Lumet

There are some pieces of art that, when you finally experience them, you know you’ve seen or read, or heard something that will resonate through centuries. I had never read a word of Eugene O’Neill, but I knew a bit about him and that he’d written this play and The Iceman Cometh, among others. I could have told you this was about a family of four people. That was where my knowledge stopped. I knew this would have to be a part of this series on film adaptations of American theater, and now I understand why it had to be. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is among the best I’ve ever seen. I’m talking about the entire scale of art in general. This movie connected with me in a way a lot of contemporary cinema fails to over & over again. I credit that to the bravery of O’Neill in writing genuinely human characters. Everyone is a villain here, everyone is a hero, and everyone’s a victim, and in this way, it mirrors all our lives.

PopCult Podcast – Scream 6/How To Blow Up a Pipeline

Young people these days get up to all sorts of crazy things. Some kids in NYC are going to school & trying to avoid attacks from a serial killer. Then you have these kids in Texas blowing up a damn oil pipeline. Zoomers, amirite?

Movie Review – A Raisin in the Sun

A Raisin in the Sun (1961)
Written by Lorraine Hansberry
Directed by Daniel Petrie

The history of Black people in America is a roller coaster of emotions. That’s being said by someone who can only speak about it from an outside perspective. I’m white, so I know I’ll never fully comprehend what it means to be Black in that nation. I can say that the popular perception of the struggle for Civil Rights is entirely out of whack, at least in the white circles I lived & worked inside of in Tennessee. There’s this penchant to view these things as the “ancient past” when the brutality to hold onto segregation happened during my parents & grandparents’ lifetimes. There’s an anxiety in the white mind that leads to statements like “stop living in the past,” never mind the Southern obsession with the Confederacy, and wanting to cherish its insipid ideology. The telling of the past that doesn’t seek to soothe & fantasize about history is what people bristle at. It’s simply the truth; horrible things happened in the past, and a thread running through reality connects to the present day.

Movie Review – Picnic

Picnic (1955)
Written by William Inge and Daniel Taradash
Directed by Joshua Logan

We come to the first movie in the American Theater on Film series that doesn’t work. I wondered why I didn’t hear as much about Picnic as other entries in this series I’m doing, and now it makes sense. Picnic is attempting something ambitious, it is one of the better movies in the series for cinematic visuals, but its core ideas are muddled and clunkily handled. There are cinematographic moments here that are absolutely stunning, and that’s what makes it sting so badly that the story itself is not well done. It should not surprise me that Picnic looks so good as it was the fantastic James Wong Howe behind the camera, one of the all-time great cinematographers. Does that man know how to light and frame a scene!

Movie Review – 12 Angry Men

12 Angry Men (1957)
Written by Reginald Rose
Directed by Sidney Lumet

What is justice? Any direct education I was ever given in America never taught me the answer. That was found in observation, reading, and listening. American institutions spend much time telling people what to believe justice is. They do it through copaganda like Law & Order, CSI, and the other generic procedurals that get vomited up on television every year. My perennial punching bag Aaron Sorkin spent a lot of time musing over law & justice in his work too. But what we see on the screen in this regard rarely reflects what is happening in real-time all around us. And, as much as I love 12 Angry Men as a piece of art, it doesn’t show us anything close to the truth about how the justice system operates in America. What it does instead is to provide an impressionistic breakdown of the ideologies that keep America from being a place where freedom actually exists.

Movie Review – A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Written by Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and Oscar Saul
Directed by Elia Kazan

Things are terrible in the States and getting worse. Every day there’s another story about someone making an honest mistake and getting shot, typically being killed. People are like snarling dogs, mistrustful of others, and ready to snap at anyone who gets too close. I would argue things have always been pretty bad, and it’s just that more people are awake & aware of the situation now. Despite the American media’s vociferous attempts to lay on the myths & the fairy tales, American society has often been cruel in a downward direction. Tennessee Williams captured this mundane inhumanity in his incredible stage play, adapted here by himself & others. It’s the story of people caught up in pain and unable to connect with each other meaningfully.

Movie Review – The Little Foxes

The Little Foxes (1941)
Written by Lillian Hellman
Directed by William Wyler

The art of performance was born from the theater. People got up in front of a crowd and acted out stories. There were no screens. It was often by the light of a fire. Or, in more developed regions, an amphitheater. When the film first became a popular trend among “the kids,” there were many adaptions of stageplays. They weren’t shot with much emphasis on style as the aesthetics of the film medium were being figured out at the time. However, after several decades movies became their own way of telling stories, with the elements of cinematography and editing helping to shape things.

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.

Patron Pick – Where the Crawdads Sing

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 thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Bekah Lindstrom.

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)
Written by Lucy Alibar
Directed Olivia Newman

I know this movie is not made for people like me. However, it was a Patron request, and I honor those. If you loved the book and/or adore the film, you probably will not like my review. One of the best things I can say about my experience watching this movie is, “Thank god for the ability to speed up playback.” I successfully turned this two-hour-plus viewing into just over 90 minutes which I think is the sweet spot for this type of movie. I argue that most movies should clock in around 90; if they go over that, they must justify taking up more people’s time. This is nowhere close to being the worst movie I have ever seen, but that would have at least made it fun to watch. Unfortunately, it is a flat, passionless, inauthentic drivel like most American movies. It is not offensive but doesn’t make you feel anything. It manipulates rather than attempts to draw up some truth about the human experience through its story. Also, I see an absence of truth in advertising because not once do we get to see the singing crawdads.

A dead body is found in the marshlands of North Carolina circa 1969. It is local sports hero Chase Andrews (Harris Dickson), and the blame is placed on Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a reclusive swamp lady. Through extensive flashbacks, we learn Kya’s life story, from being raised by a drunken & violent father (Garret Dillahunt) to her romance with Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith). Eventually, Tate leaves for college, which Kya doesn’t have access to due to her economic class. In Tate’s absence, she begins a relationship with Chase. But that is complicated with Tate returning after a long period of absence. Oh, the love triangle. Kya also embarks on a career as a nature illustrator, using her artistic gift to sketch and draw the lovely things she sees in the swamp around her. We also get a courtroom drama as the flashbacks share the spotlight with present-day goings on.

In the vein of The Notebook, this is pure melodrama. It’s not the kind I particularly like. If I watch a film in this genre, I would prefer things like Douglas Sirk’s movies or Todd Haynes’ takes on melodramas. The relationships in the picture don’t feel genuine; they are very much of the contrived Hollywood type that often distorts & presents a twisted version of how real romance & love work. As escapist fare, I think this will satisfy the audience looking for this sort of thing. I think the story is very much in the line of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, and the other films & stories that follow the “diamond in the rough” trope. There’s a murder mystery added on to help differentiate it. The reveal at the end about the circumstances around Chase’s death was pretty good, but for me, it didn’t make up for the overall tone & quality of the picture.

Having recently revisited some Tennessee Williams stories via my May series titled “The American Theater on Film, Volume One,” I realized how lacking in genuine passion this story was. The romance feels cookie cutter, and neither male character ever felt like someone you could see a real girl falling for beyond just as a side fuck. The “artsy” young women I’ve known acknowledge the surface-level beauty of dudes like Tate & Chase and may even call them up when they are horny. But ultimately, they are looking for some depth to go along with the exterior beauty.

There’s such an inauthenticity in how these characters are presented. We are constantly reminded that Kya is a “dirty swamp rat” in the same way She’s All That was desperate for us to believe Rachel Leigh Cook was a dog. It is a suspension of disbelief that is such a big ask it becomes comical. In many ways, this is up there with the dreck Marvel puts out in that almost every person that appears on screen is insanely gorgeous when I know, having grown up in the South, most people do not look like this. How refreshing would it have been to cast people that look real? It would have added so much more to the narrative. But that is not why this was made into a movie. It was made for audiences to swoon over the “beautiful” people on screen. This movie didn’t invent this but man, is it boring to keep seeing it churned out year after year.

If you are an adult who has ever, let’s say, read a book, watched a television show, or seen another movie, then nothing about this plot will surprise you. It’s like a copy/paste of every melodrama made with little effort to spice it up. The male leads look interchangeable. The characters are all hetero. There are two mandatory kindly Black people whose entire purpose is to help Kya feel better about herself.

I think there is a real heart-wrenching story deep in the fluff that could have made a compelling movie. However, this focuses on nothing but the fluff. It’s part of a massive genre of disposable films being made in America. If you ever look at the weekly dump of streaming cinema, you’ll find an avalanche of pictures. They are a form of money laundering for a whole host of criminal organizations, both domestic and international. This is nowhere near the worst; it had a theatrical release. But you will forget it almost as soon as the end credits roll. The romance is undercooked and thus dull to watch. The camera does occasionally give us a beautiful shot of nature. If young people find some enjoyment in the movie, that’s fine. It’s not offensive. It’s just a big disappointing yawn.

Movie Review – Christiane F.

Christiane F. (1981)
Written by Herman Weigel
Directed by Uli Edel

“Scared Straight” is a subgenre of exploitation cinema focused on discouraging the youth from engaging in certain activities. A movie like Reefer Madness falls into this category, an ignorant to the point of farce examination of smoking weed. You could even throw something like America’s Most Wanted into this mix too. I can remember the way homosexual men were portrayed on that show was always in the context of being child molesters. Needless to say, scared straight media rarely presents a solid foundation of facts, instead opting for reactionary panic. In America, the book Go Ask Alice was published as the “real diary” of a teenage girl who succumbed to drug addiction. It’s much less well-known now, but when it came out in 1971, it fueled a lot of parents’ and teenagers’ minds with horror movie-level fears about drugs. That isn’t to say movies about the dangers of drugs are all bad. In the same way, not all drugs are harmful to you. I’m highly progressive in my views on drugs and their use, but there is one drug that scares me; maybe I’ve just been successfully brainwashed, or maybe not. The one that I would never touch is heroin.