comedy – Page 8 – PopCult Reviews

PopCult Podcast – Love Lies Bleeding/Drive-Away Dolls

As Billy Eichner once said, “Let’s go, lesbians!” On this week’s sapphic episode we look at a two lesbian neo-noirs with two very different takes on the genre.

Movie Review – Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

I remember when this film came out, and a significant part of the discourse was how annoying the main character was. In revisiting it, I didn’t find that to be true. Oh yes, Poppy is very positive, but she reminded me of the Kindergarten teachers I worked alongside as an elementary teacher. Her seemingly endless cheeriness serves a purpose in Leigh’s story. It’s a protection against the nihilism of the world around her, which I think we all can admit is easy to sink into. I know that in real life, I probably would feel overwhelmed and overstimulated being in Poppy’s presence for long periods. The mistake many characters make, and I suspect it is the same with the audience, is that because Poppy is so cheerful, she must be a fool. And that is not true in the slightest.

Movie Review – Topsy-Turvy

Topsy-Turvy (1999)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Following the success of Secrets & Lies, Mike Leigh got more financial backing for his next project. It would be his first foray into making a historical film, and of course, it would focus on something closely associated with the British. In this case it was the comic operas of Gilbert & Sullivan. While critics loved the picture & it won two Oscars for design, audiences did not show up like they did for the last one. Topsy-Turvy failed to make back its budget, but this would not be the end of Leigh’s exploration of England’s past. In the meantime, he gave us a very different style of historical film that doesn’t try to hide some of the uglier aspects of the time.

PopCult Presents: Screenplay – Corp Borg Episode 3

The third of our next six-part Screenplay series is here!
And you can listen to it by subscribing to our Patreon

Movie Review – Life is Sweet

Life Is Sweet (1990)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh could be seen as a director who makes funny little movies about British working-class people’s lives. That is true to an extent. However, there’s so much more happening under the surface of these films, which is Leigh pointing out to us how complex & nuanced lives we see as surface-level can be. Our lives are more complicated than someone like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. We experience life more fully than them, as we are still in contact with what makes us part of the natural world: the struggle for survival. Being working-class in the West is very complex, as you’ve been afforded some distractions & escapes that people in the developing world can only dream of. Yet, you still experience regular anxiety over housing/bills/food/etc. Life is often complicated by our perspective and class position.

Movie Review – High Hopes

High Hopes (1988)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

To see Mike Leigh’s name credited as the maker behind a movie is to signify something. It means you will be treated to some of the best conversations between very human, grounded characters you’ve ever heard. The story will be focused on the working class, with an even-handed mix of misery and mirth. The whole thing will be very British but not in the nationalistic sense; in the communal sense, British people living quiet lives with moments of drama in them. High Hopes was not Leigh’s first picture. Previously, he directed Bleak Moments (1971) with his second feature, Meantime, but he did not come to theaters until 1983. Because Leigh’s preferred method of working is to allow the actors to improvise dialogue during rehearsal sessions, the filmmaker had trouble getting financial backing. But with High Hopes, Leigh’s career finally kicked off in full, leading to a string of fantastic movies that continue to come out today.

PopCult Podcast – Motorama, The Dark Backward, and Late-Stage Capitalist American Grotesque

While watching this week’s movies, we think we might have stumbled upon a genre of film hidden right in front of our eyes the whole time. Motorama and The Dark Backward becoming a jumping off point for bigger conversation.

Patreon Pick – Gaza mon amour

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.

Gaza mon amour (2020)
Written and directed by Tarzan Nasser and Arab Nasser

The popular image of something and reality are often oceans apart, especially when we in the West conceptualize something. At the time of this writing, Gaza is something beyond decency, brutally ravaged by a genocide that just keeps going in broad daylight. That doesn’t mean life has always been like this for the Palestinians. They have had a persistent resiliency, even while walled off and treated in the most subhuman manner. The human spirit is a tough thing to extinguish. It isn’t impossible, but it can happen. Gaza mon amour is a film about the persistence of the heart in the latter years of a person’s life and how the desire for love lives on.

PopCult Presents: Screenplay – Corp Borg Episode 2

The second of our next six-part Screenplay series is here!
And you can listen to it by subscribing to our Patreon

Movie Review – Mandabi

Mandabi (1968)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

Despite the brutal French colonial presence in Senegal, most Senegalese do not understand or speak French. This led Ousmane Sembène to want to make a film entirely in the indigenous tongue of Wolof. Like most of Sembène’s work, it was almost lost to us. Film prints were locked away in vaults in France. Sembène’s son, Alain, and filmmaker Martin Scorsese worked together, slogging through bureaucratic hell to get the films in their hands for restoration.