comedy – Page 42 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Knives Out

Knives Out (2019)
Written & Directed by Rian Johnson

Knives Out appears on the surface to be a modern take on the classic Agatha Christie murder mystery, and on a certain level, it is precisely that. However. writer-director Rian Johnson has cleverly managed to subvert our expectations and tell the story he’s interested by dressing it up in the tropes and formulas in this genre. About a third of the way into the story, the audience is privy to the circumstances of the murder, and it seems as though the rest of the picture will be a cat & mouse game. The murderer will be continually trying to be one step ahead of the law and will likely get caught. But that’s still not the story Johnson is telling.

Movie Review – The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)
Written & Directed by Noah Baumbach

In the same way, Woody Allen made his career focused on movies about intellectual types in New York, Noah Baumbach has taken that motif and added a genuine examination of family. Allen’s characters were always nebbish & neurotic but always seemed to be swinging singles. Baumbach’s characters are caught up in familial dysfunction. The Meyerowitz Stories delivers its narrative at a fast pace and will remind viewers of one of Baumbach’s contemporaries and sometimes collaborator, Wes Anderson. The picture is a more grounded take on the near fairytale-like world of The Royal Tenenbaums, complete with Ben Stiller as one of the siblings. Though this may sound incredibly derivative, the film has a familiar & seemingly forgotten tone you don’t find in movies these days.

Movie Review – The Love Guru

The Love Guru (2008)
Written by Mike Myers and Graham Gordy
Directed by Marco Schnabel

Sometimes I ask myself why I am doing this marathon, why I am making myself sit through such revolting movies. This is probably the worst one I’ve watched so far, and that’s after last week’s Dragonball: Evolution debacle. I would say that Mike Myers was an actor I enjoyed once. I love the Wayne’s World movies and think So I Married An Axe Murderer is his best picture. Shrek always left me lukewarm but was forgivable. Austin Powers was silly and inoffensive, and I definitely laughed quite a bit at the first two. Riding high off the successes of all of these pictures led us to The Love Guru, a movie that just hits the same handful of jokes over and over without ever being funny.

Movie Review – A Bread Factory Parts One & Two

A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold (2018)
A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While (2018)
Written & Directed by Patrick Wang

This duo of films tells the sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, epic & modest tale of The Bread Factory, an arts space in the fictional town of Checkford, New York (a thinly disguised Hudson). Based on the real-life Time and Space Limited, a forty-year-old center for creative arts in upstate New York, the film attempts to tell a story both fragmented and centered around the creeping loss of these small nooks of self-expression. The primary threat in Part One is the arrival of May Ray, a Chinese performance art duo that is given tax breaks and compensation by the city government to make their new headquarters Checkford. The owners of A Bread Factory, Dorothea and Greta, must jockey the city council to keep May Ray from killing their place for local arts & performance.

Movie Review – Disney’s The Kid

Disney’s The Kid (2000)
Written by Audrey Wells
Directed by Jon Turteltaub

Why am I doing this? I perfectly reasonable question to ask. As someone who watches lots of movies, reads up on actors, directors, writers, genres, etc., I will eventually come across movies I half-remember or never even knew got made. These are not low budget, indie picture but films with considerable financial backing, starring well-known performers, and distributed by major studios. Yet, they have been forgotten, very intentionally. There are approximately 700 English-language films released in the United States annually. With all of the quality control mechanisms and studio notes, we still get complete stinkers put on the big screen. Or the studio realizes in the wake of filming that they have just financed a disaster and try to cobble together something palatable in the editing room. Regardless, these movies are released and then systematically ignored by the people who made them, hoping general audiences allow them to fade into obscurity. Well, I’m here to watch them and write about them for this “We’d Rather You Forgot’ film series.

TV Review – The Righteous Gemstones Season 1

The Righteous Gemstones Season 1 (HBO)
Written by Danny McBride, John Carcieri, Jeff Fradley, Grant Dekernion, Edi Patterson, Kevin Barnett, & Chris Pappas
Directed by Danny McBride, David Gordon Green, and Jody Hill

Growing up in the Southern United States, the early morning airwaves, even on weekdays, were populated with televangelists like Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, and Jimmy Swaggert. There was the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) that ran 24-7 with regular sermon segments, a variety show, children’s programming, and always a number at the bottom of the screen imploring you to donate to keep the ministry going. Even as a child, something felt dissonant between the teachings of Jesus and the wealth-obsessed gaudiness of these television ministers. The Righteous Gemstones explores the world of a family involved in this ministry, a global multi-million dollar enterprise.

Movie Review – Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)
Written & Directed by Gus Van Sant

The film about cartoonist John Callahan begins the same way his life is composed, a series of fragments, time scrambled around. We see him recovered and then back at the bottom again, sneaking bottles of tequila in the alley behind a liquor store. His body lies motionless on the pavement, his Volkswagen Beetle totaled, all glimpsed before he meets Dexter and goes on the drinking binge that will change his life forever. We see him whipping at high speed in his wheelchair, cars screeching to a halt before we know the circumstances that put him in that chair.

Movie Review – The Death of Dick Long

The Death of Dick Long (2019)
Written by Billy Chew
Directed by Daniel Scheinert

The Coen Brothers so successfully cornered the market on rural crime/mystery that a review of any film that falls into that genre will inevitably mention them. So here’s the mandatory mention. The Death of Dick Long is very much in the vein of movies like Blood Simple, dark and funny with a biting wit. The filmmaker understands his characters to a depth that they avoid becoming caricatures. It would be easy to lazily portray everyone here as ridiculously stupid, but the film manages to show them like idiots in a totally realistic way. The lies told to cover up what happened are so paper-thin the audience cringes knowing these guys are going to get caught.

Movie Review – The Art of Self-Defense

The Art of Self-Defense (2019)
Written & Directed by Riley Stearns

When David Fincher’s Fight Club came out in 1999, I was a college freshman, just the right age and gender for the film to hit me firmly between the eyes. I thought the movie was genius, and at some point in the 2000s, I started feeling like the picture held a certain phoniness, that is was macho posturing that claimed it was condemning a certain mindset while actually supporting that ideology. I love Fincher, but Fight Club is a picture that hasn’t aged well for me, and that might be because of the young men who flocked to its images but didn’t necessarily explore its philosophy. Riley Stearns’ The Art of Self-Defense feels like a wry satire of the sort of young men who wanted to start their own fight clubs after watching the film. In the age of incels and the questioning and exploration of what it means to be a man, there couldn’t be a better time for this picture.

TV Review – Joe Pera Talks With You

Joe Pera Talks With You Season 1 (Adult Swim)
Written by Joe Pera, Connor O’Malley, Jo Firestone, Amalia Levari, and Dan Licata
Directed by Marty Schousboe

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a fascinating cultural anomaly, part of a state yet physically separate. The Yoopers have been shaped by a brutally cold winter landscape. There’s a strong sense of independence because of their geographic isolation. They take pleasure in the sports and activities of winter because it lasts nearly eight months for them in some years. This isn’t a barren wasteland though, Yoopers have a rich culture of arts, food, and even a quirky sense of humor. Joe Pera was born in Ithaca, New York, but is based out of Michigan now.