anti-war – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – For Sama

For Sama (2019)
Directed by Waad Al-Kataeb and Edward Watts

Our film series for March is 13 Countries, 13. On the website Letterboxd, if you pay for an annual subscription, you unlock a stats page that tracks your films watched. One feature I started looking at was the world map highlighting the countries from which you’ve seen movies. I decided to go through all the countries I hadn’t seen a film from and select a feature to watch at some point. While I won’t be watching them all in one go, I decided to pull some of them for this series.

Movie Review – The Ascent

The Ascent (1977)
Written by Vasil Bykaŭ, Yuri Klepikov, and Larisa Shepitko
Directed by Larisa Shepitko

Two years after the release of The Ascent, writer/director Larisa Shepitko would be dead at age 41. She would leave behind her husband, Elem Klimov, the writer-director of Come and See, and Anton, their six-year-old son. Throughout her life, Sheptiko had struggled with her health. While filming her first movie, she contracted Hepatitis A. Her work was repeatedly censored, which caused her to have a mental breakdown. During her hospitalization in a sanitorium, Sheptiko had a fall that damaged her spine, and that caused Anton’s birth to be tremendously more painful for her than the average labor. Strangely, her death was just an accident. She and three crew members were driving home after scouting locations northwest of Moscow. The driver fell asleep at the wheel. Doctors ruled that all four died instantaneously when the car crashed. There is a plaque bearing her face and name on a street in Lviv, Ukraine, where she grew up. Her husband finished her last film, made one more himself, lived to be 70, and died in 2003.

PopCult Podcast – PopCult Christmas 2024 Special

Ghosts visiting a jaded television executive. A mad scientist’s creation hoping to find a home among the normies. A Japanese POW camp becoming the site of a clash between soldiers and honor.

Movie Review – The Atomic Cafe

The Atomic Cafe (1982)
Written and directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty

The context of the atomic bomb at its inception is not the same as it was viewed by the public two decades later. Our relationship with this weapon of mass destruction continues to evolve. We no longer have children practice “duck and cover” drills under the fear that the Soviets or their allies might launch nukes on the United States. Those drills weren’t really about protecting anyone if a bomb was dropped. We can look at what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to see that our buildings would be of little protection to anyone. Those drills were about instilling fear of communists in the population. This is quite ironic, as no communist nation has ever dropped an atomic weapon on a civilian population. That “honor” is held by one country on this planet, and they did it twice.

Movie Review – Godzilla, King of Monsters

Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956)
Written by Shigeru Kayama, Takeo Murata, and Ishirō Honda
Directed by Ishirō Honda

6 August 1945. Hiroshima, Japan. Three American B-29 heavy bombers passed over the city. One of them, the Enola Gay, dropped a 15-kiloton atomic bomb. That is the equivalent of about 15 thousand tons of TNT. Over 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. Those who didn’t die immediately were blinded by the flash of the bomb, were crushed under the weight of collapsing buildings, suffered radiation poisoning the following days and months, and more. The U.S. would drop another even larger bomb on Nagasaki. There were plans to drop yet a third bomb on Japanese civilians. Japan had been in talks with the Soviet Union to surrender and end the war. For the United States, a post-war era in which the USSR was seen as a hero was a danger. The atomic bombings of Japan are up there with the Holocaust as some of the most horrific acts of violence humanity has committed on itself. It’s no surprise that many films have been made about this event and the atomic bomb itself. In this series, I want to look at how the bombing is analyzed and made a part of the culture, both through the eyes of the Japanese and the perpetrating nation, the United States.

Movie Review – Camp de Thiaroye

Camp de Thiaroye (1988)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembene and Thierno Faty Sow

Few things are accepted as fundamental as a person being paid for their labor. However, it was not that long ago that slavery was an open practice in the West and its colonized territories. Don’t get me wrong. Slavery isn’t gone. The specific Transatlantic slave trade was dissolved, yes, but slavery persists to this day. Prison labor is a form of slavery. Debt of all kinds is used to keep people under the boot. Human trafficking is a rampant problem that sees no end in sight. The Thiaroye massacre should come as no surprise then, yet still, it outrages the decent among us.

Movie Review – Night and Fog

Night and Fog (1956)
Written by Jean Cayrol
Directed by Alain Resnais

It’s an image that your brain can’t quite comprehend at first. Then the camera pulls out. And continues to pull out. And just keeps going beyond anything you could have anticipated or expected. Literal mountains of human hair piled up into a range of which I could not see the boundary. It seemed to go on forever. This isn’t just violence inflicted on one person to another. This is something different. There is a scope & scale that could not have happened by accident. Each action, each cut, each kill was planned. Starvation was part of the plan. This was the same thought an exterminator puts into eliminating an infestation of rats because that is how the Nazis saw these human beings as something to be erased. And with cold, calculated action, they built an entire machine to kill them all.

Movie Review – Grand Illusion

Grand Illusion (1937)
Written by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak
Directed by Jean Renoir

The actor/filmmaker Warren Beatty tells how, near the start of his career after making Splendor in the Grass, he was at a party where he met playwright Clifford Odets. Odets mentioned in passing the films of Jean Renoir, who was also at the same party. Beatty had yet to learn who this was but knew the name. “Renoir? Like the painter?” In Beatty’s words, Odets was “too kind” and didn’t embarrass him. He told the young actor yes. Jean Renoir is the son of the French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The playwright suggested Beatty track down Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game to better acquaint himself with the work of Renoir. Beatty got copies of both and a 16mm projector. Afterward, he remarked: “These may be the best movies I have ever seen.”

Movie Review – Gardens of Stone

Gardens of Stone (1987)
Written by Ronald Bass
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

There’s a good reason you probably have never heard of this Coppola film. It is bad. Like truly, the bottom of the barrel, not even the fun kind of bad. Yet, it doesn’t make me dislike the director or think he’d completely lost his creative touch. To understand why Gardens of Stone is so bad, you need to know what happened to Coppola during the production. It is no big reveal that Coppola centered his family in his life. You can see this in how he included them in every level of his film’s production. The man kept the people he loved the closest to him.

Movie Review – Hearts & Minds

Hearts & Minds (1974)
Directed by Peter Davis

The Cannes Film Festival has kicked off this year. Many new films will be unveiled, from the Hollywood studio ones to small, independent pictures. Forty-eight years ago, the documentary Hearts & Minds debuted at Cannes. However, its distribution in the United States would be held back when a restraining order was issued by one of the interview subjects, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow. Columbia Pictures, which owned the rights, refused to distribute the film to venues. This led to director/producer Peter Davis and his colleagues being forced to buy back their own movie from Columbia. Why would so many people and institutions work so hard to prevent the public from seeing a film? Because it is a searing condemnation of America and the atrocities it committed in Vietnam.