comedy – Page 6 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Drugstore Cowboy

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Written by Daniel Yost and Gus van Sant
Directed by Gus van Sant

Gus van Sant joins a growing list of directors who came to the forefront in the late 80s/early 90s, and I’m not sure how I feel about them. Previously, I’d discussed this about Steven Soderbergh and sex, lies, and videotape. On the most recent episode of the podcast, we reviewed Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, and I remarked how I’m very up and down with his body of work. For Van Sant, My Own Private Idaho will forever be an impossible film to beat. It is a full-fledged American cinematic masterpiece, so I was very interested in stepping back into the film just before and seeing what he had made. A considerable section of his fanbase declares this as their favorite of his movies.

PopCult Podcast – Hit Man/Riddle of Fire

Richard Linklater’s latest places Glen Powell in the shoes of a pretend hired killer. Then, we visit a 16mm dreamworld where three kids are on a quest to make a blueberry pie.

Movie Review – Heathers

Heathers (1989)
Written by Daniel Waters
Directed by Michael Lehmann

Screenwriter Daniel Waters originally envisioned Stanley Kubrick directing the screenplay he wrote while working at a Los Angeles video store in 1986. The initial script was three hours long, and the opening cafeteria scene, added in subsequent drafts, was meant to be an homage to the opening barracks scene in Full Metal Jacket. Well, Kubrick didn’t make Heathers, though I am fascinated by what the film would have been like. It is still a fantastic movie, a satire dripping with the most acidic venom toward its targets, a mockery of everything white, suburban, and middle-class in America.

Patron Pick – Ernest Goes to Jail

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 Matt Harris.

Ernest Goes to Jail (1990)
Written by Charlie Cohen
Directed by John Cherry

Mocking the Ernest films would be easy because they never aspire to be anything more than silly, stupid fun. So, I’m not going to do that. I grew up watching the Ernest movies. I lived in Middle Tennessee, where many of these movies were filmed. The Ernest character had been a commercial mascot for our local Purity Dairy, one of many advertising gigs the classically trained actor picked up early in his career. That’s something I always loved about Jim Varney; he was a working-class actor in the truest sense, not the bullshit contemporary right-wing sense. Varney lived just a few miles from my childhood home, and we saw him once at our local Kroger supermarket. By the time Ernest Goes to Jail came along, Varney was quite established.

Movie Review – Sherlock Jr.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
Directed by Buster Keaton

There are motion picture cameras. You can film yourself moving rather than just still photography. What do you do with this? That was the situation a handful of people found themselves in following the invention and popularization of movies. It might make sense at first to film people performing plays, operas, or similar things. But that’s a rather flat thing to do. The camera can move and control the audience’s perspective. How can you move that camera to make impossible things seem real? Joseph “Buster” Keaton was one of those people in the early days trying to figure out what this new medium could be capable of.

PopCult Podcast – Stress Positions/The Last Stop in Yuma County

Well, not every week is a fun one. Our first film is Brooklyn hipster snark against the backdrop of COVID. The second is a dull formulaic exercise in genre that wastes so much talent.

PopCult Podcast – Challengers/Sasquatch Sunset

In one film we follow the complex intersection of sex, sports, and relationships. In the second, we see life from the perspective of animals where mortality is sudden & cold.

Movie Review – Cluny Brown

Cluny Brown (1946)
Written by Samuel Hoffenstein and Elizabeth Reinhardt
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

During the Hays Code era, Lubitsch had his ups and downs. I think The Shop Around the Corner and To Be Or Not To Be are certainly highlights. I can’t say I was quite as fond of Ninotchka or Heaven Can Wait, though. His final completed film before his sudden death from a heart attack in 1947 was this rather underrated gem. I hadn’t seen Cluny Brown come up in any conversations about his work and I would argue it’s a reminder of how forward thinking the director could be given the right script. What we have is a movie that pushes back on gender norms as well as cynicism that seems to have taken root in a pretty awful way in contemporary media.

Movie Review – Heaven Can Wait

Heaven Can Wait (1943)
Written by Samson Raphaelson
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

I thought this was the film Warren Beatty’s 1978 Heaven Can Wait was based on. I was wrong. That film was a remake of 1941’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Why Beatty chose to title his movie after a well-known Ernst Lubitsch film while it was a remake of something else does not have an answer I could find. What makes it even more confounding is that both films have an element of fantasy & the afterlife. They play out in wildly different ways, but in the first fifteen minutes of this movie, I wondered when I’d start to see similarities with the ’70s film. Then, I checked Wikipedia and found my answer. I wish I could say I enjoyed Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait more, but it had some rough spots.

TV Review – Northern Exposure Season Two

Northern Exposure Season Two (1991)
Written by Robin Green, Henry Bromell, Andrew Schneider, Diane Frolov, Ellen Herman, and David Assael
Directed by Stuart Margolin, Sandy Smolan, Nick Marck, Steve Robman, Rob Thompson, Bill D’Elia, and David Carson

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a deftly handled realignment on a show as I have with Season Two of Northern Exposure. While Season One wasn’t terrible, it was pretty one-note until the end. For the most part, the show was a fish-out-of-water story about Joel Fleishman (Rob Morrow), an NYC doctor transplanted to the remote environs of Alaska. There’s only so much you can do with that premise, and by season two, the showrunners understood this and pivoted away from making every episode center on that concept. What we get instead is a wonderfully written & performed ensemble piece that is clearly influenced by the flights of fancy found in shows like Moonlighting.