biographical – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer (2023)
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Western culture is obsessed with singular individuals. Any brief survey of historical events reveals that while there may be people in positions of leadership or authority, they rarely act alone. The Nazis were not simply Hitler. Many of them passed through the war untarnished and even got cushy jobs working for the United States government, like Werner Von Braun. A general depends upon an army. The U.S. government is not just the President. Oppenheimer was placed in a leadership position at Los Alamos, but the construction and deployment of the atomic bomb cannot be placed at his feet alone. That also doesn’t excuse his involvement, either.

PopCult Podcast – All of Us Strangers/The Iron Claw

We finally get to talk about two films from 2023 we have been so excited for. The first is a dreamlike queer fantasy about reckoning with the past so you can start living. The second is the tragic real life story of a professional wrestling dynasty.

PopCult Podcast – All That Jazz/Mikey and Nicky

The new movies we want to see just aren’t available to us yet. So we dipped into the ol’ Letterboxd watchlist and pulled out two classics from the 1970s we’ve needed to watch.

Patron Pick – All Good Things

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.

All Good Things (2010)
Written by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling
Directed by Andrew Jarecki

Just because a recipe looks good on paper does not mean the final dish will be a masterpiece. Let us peruse the ingredients list for All Good Things. The cast is stacked: Ryan Gosling, Kirstin Dunst, Frank Langella, Philip Baker Hall, Nick Offerman, Kristen Wiig, Lily Rabe. Not a bad line-up at all. The cinematographer worked on Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, among many other films. The director, Andrew Jarecki, had wowed audiences with his documentary Capturing the Friedmans seven years earlier. But it is in this last ingredient we have identified the problem. Jarecki made a fantastic documentary, but that is different from a narrative feature, and this film stands as a great example of how success in one does not translate into the other.

Movie Review – The Time That Remains

The Time That Remains (2009)
Written and directed by Elia Suleiman

Filmmaker Elia Suleiman tells all his stories through an autobiographical lens. I imagine it can feel overwhelming to tell the story of the Palestinians when you are one of them, especially when multiple experiences are happening at once within the occupied territory. You have the Palestinians of Gaza, the Palestinians of the West Bank, and those who live outside these two yet are still not free. Suleiman presents himself and many of his characters in his work as cold & distant from what is happening. To be in the torment your people have endured for decades just isn’t something that a person can be expected to walk away from with their sanity intact. The camera is another distancing tool and film tropes, too. They allow a person to examine something painful without needing to be directly inside of that pain.

Movie Review – Priscilla

Priscilla (2023)
Written and directed by Sofia Coppola

I became aware of Elvis in the late 1980s. Having been born in 1981, I arrived a handful of years after the music icon was found dead, a result of drug addiction & a life not generally lived well. I have faint memories of a rerun of John Carpenter’s Elvis TV movie, starring Kurt Russell as The King. I also remember seeing tabloid news programs talking about Elvis sightings, guessing this was around 1987, the tenth anniversary of his passing. I have never felt any connection to the singer. I know his catalog of songs like anyone of my generation does. They were just in the pop cultural air. I’ve never watched any of his films. I’ve never sat and listened to his albums.

Movie Review – Varda by Agnes

Varda by Agnes (2019)
Written and directed by Agnes Varda

Few of us get to depart from life able to talk about what all those years meant. As a filmmaker, Agnes Varda seemed acutely aware of the sands running through the hourglass, and her last twenty years of filmmaking (ages 70-90) seemed to come out of that urgency. The stories she was telling always connected to her, whether flowing out into the lives of others or having their lives bring up long-forgotten memories from her past. This is why her documentaries during this period feel more communal than ever. Varda is a perfect contemporary example of the wise elder, the sage who imparts their experiences from a life spent in intense thought and conversation. In this final film, released just months after her passing, Varda focuses on three key concepts: inspiration, creation, and sharing.

Movie Review – Tucker: The Man and His Dream

Tucker: A Man and His Dream (1988)
Written by Arnold Schulman & David Seidler
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

The Tucker automobile had captured Coppola’s mind since childhood. While at UCLA’s film school, the burgeoning director further developed his idea for this biopic. Marlon Brando was approached to star as the lead, then Jack Nicholson, and then Burt Reynolds. Coppola decided he wanted to make it experimental, a modern musical where he would reference Bertolt Brecht and Kabuki performances. His colleague Paul Schrader’s Mishima film inspired him, and Coppola wanted Tucker to be like that. In 1986, George Lucas encouraged Coppola to make his Tucker movie; he thought Tucker was one of the best things the filmmaker had developed in a while. Lucas would produce it, but he convinced the director to back away from the project’s experimental nature. Instead, Coppola would take inspiration from the work of Frank Capra, an exploration of the American Dream and the hope that industrialization brought in the wake of World War II. This would be Coppola’s final production of the 1980s.

Movie Review – Nitram

Nitram (2022)
Written by Shaun Grant
Directed by Justin Kunzel

There is no horror that man can imagine worse than what he does to his own kind. It can feel like this moment in history is the worst it’s ever been, but that’s simply because we think things most powerfully as we experience them. Memory has been proven to be one of the most fail-ridden human functions, and imagination is always based on present anxieties. We still have such a limited understanding of the human mind, and people with severe mental disabilities can be frightening because we lack that comprehension. When someone does something genuinely horrible or commits an atrocity, we want to reduce things down to concepts of “good” and “evil,” but if we are honest violent individual acts are rarely able to be defined in such terms. There is a justified fear of looking into the eyes of someone who could apparently kill dozens without cracking, but only through understanding can we ever hope to prevent these things from repeating themselves.

Movie Review – The Wolf of Wall Street

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Written by Terence Winter
Directed by Martin Scorsese

Of all Martin Scorsese’s 21st century films, this was the big one, the movie that reminded everybody how good he is. That doesn’t mean his previous work in the 2000s/2010s was terrible; it just didn’t always match what the director was best at. You might say, “Hey, where are your reviews for Shutter Island and Hugo? Well, I watched & reviewed them both in the recent past and wasn’t too keen on revisiting those pictures. In my opinion, Shutter Island was always okay, while I dislike Hugo. They are two examples of Scorsese going outside his wheelhouse and trying something I have to admire, no matter my feelings about the final product. And while The Wolf of Wall Street feels more like a Scorsese picture, he’s still trying new things.