drama – Page 10 – PopCult Reviews

TV Review – Reservation Dogs Season Three

Reservation Dogs Season Three (FX)
Written by Sterlin Harjo, Dallas Goldtooth, Tazbah Chavez, Erica Tremblay, Tommy Pico, Bobby Wilson, Migizi Pensoneau, Ryan RedCorn, Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, and Chad Charlie
Directed by Danis Goulet, Tazbah Chavez, Blackhorse Lowe, Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, and Erica Tremblay

Reservation Dogs was one of those rare shows that presented the life of poor people without pitying them. It didn’t dull the edges of poverty or how it feels to come from a marginalized group, but it never wallowed in misery. American Indigenous communities are composed of survivors, those who have endured horrific abuse over generations. This final season of the series centered on the effects of white-run boarding schools on generations removed from them but never made the white perspective anything more than an afterthought. That is the correct way to tell these stories because the Indigenous people carry the trauma of that treatment with them. I can tell that series creator and showrunner Sterlin Harjo wanted to connect two seemingly distant generations to show how history resonates through to the present.

Patron Pick – Like Crazy

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.

Like Crazy (2011)
Written by Drake Doremus & Ben York Jones
Directed by Drake Doremus

Improvisation is a complicated skill. When you see performers who are incredible improvisers, they can make it look effortless. The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual is a comprehensive textbook I’ve read through a couple times over the years, and it taught me a lot about what is happening during an improvised performance that the audience never sees and is likely not aware of. The performers operate at “the top of their intelligence,” meaning they act as a character while intellectually & emotionally analyzing the story and the relationships in a scene. This is immensely hard to do and makes it look so casual. I’ve come to look at improv through this lens, often impressed at how brilliant some performers are. Like Crazy is a film improvised off a 50-page outline. The problem here is the actors needed far more direction and structure for this to work.

TV Review – My Brilliant Friend Season Two

My Brilliant Friend Season Two (HBO)
Written by Elena Ferrante, Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Saverio Costanzo
Directed by Saverio Costanzo and Alice Rohrwacher

The subtitle of this season and its source material that the story is derived from is The Story of a New Name. This reflects the changes in Lila Cerullo’s (Gaia Girace) life and how one makes a name for oneself in transitioning from childhood into adulthood. Lila goes from being a Cerullo to a Carracci, and economically, she moves from poverty to comfortable working-middle class. For Lenu Greco (Margherita Mazzucco), she can leave their Neapolitan neighborhood but finds her roots as a child of poverty evident to her new acquaintances, causing others to view her as perpetually unrefined enough to ever achieve a higher status. Season Two is about the child’s transformation, whether having their dreams snatched away or transformed into something new.

TV Review – The Bear Season Two

The Bear Season Two (FX)
Written by Christopher Storer, Joanna Calo, Karen Joseph Adcock, Catherine Schetina, Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Alex Russell, Rene Gube, and Kelly Galuska
Directed by Christopher Storer, Joanna Calo, and Ramy Youssef

Ultimately, people don’t want to be in a state of conflict & antagonism. They want to learn, grow, and find ways to work together with others. So much of our world is informed by a media landscape that projects contrived, unnatural division. Reality television, so poorly named, delivers manufactured arguments & clashes intended for us to believe they are the truth. Even scripted narrative content is always about wars or personal contentions that go on and on and on. When do we get to see people heal genuinely or move past petty grievances in an authentic manner that isn’t cloying & artificial? The Bear is not a light show; its themes are weighty & dark. Yet, its characters are brilliantly full of life. They are capable of not living in the same rut their whole lives. Watching them struggle and grow is an absolute delight.

Patron Pick – Fences

Fences (2016)
Written by August Wilson
Directed by Denzel Washington

There is no argument against the acting in this film. It is solid from top to bottom, with Viola Davis stealing the show from a strong Denzel Washington. The emotions feel real, lived in, and presented with authenticity. The film adheres rigidly close to the original stage play to the point that the deceased August Wilson has sole screenwriting credit. That may not be the best direction for a film based on the play rather than a recorded performance of the stage play. Director Washington does a decent job giving filmic qualities to the material, but not enough. The world feels constricted because we never leave the house while so much time passes. Additionally, some themes about masculinity and fatherhood feel muddled, and the ultimate message is troubling.

Movie Review – Pauline at the Beach

Pauline at the Beach (1983)
Written & Directed by Eric Rohmer,

Eric Rohmer was the right age to join his colleagues from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema in becoming a filmmaker. Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, whom he worked alongside as editor of the magazine, became the two most prominent names associated with the French New Wave. He did make movies, but not at the same breakneck pace as the others, and he didn’t receive the same level of acclaim until much later in his career. The filmmaker was very secretive about his private life, including that Eric Rohmer wasn’t his real name but a combination of actor/director Erich von Stroheim and writer Sax Rohmer. Unlike his colleagues, Rohmer outlasted them in terms of career length, finding his most significant acclaim in the 1970s & 80s. It was in the 1980s that he began a thematic series titled “Comedies and Proverbs,” with each film based on common sayings in French culture. One of these was Pauline at the Beach.

Movie Review – Tender Mercies

Tender Mercies (1983)
Written by Horton Foote
Directed by Bruce Beresford

Tender Mercies will break your heart, but that’s a good thing. It’s a film that is incredibly sensitive & thoughtful. It’s the story of an alcoholic, not during the midst of a bender or at their most self-destructive. Instead, this is a drunk who has lost everything that had any value. His career, his money, his wife, his daughter. He can’t get them back, but he can try and build something new. It’s a film whose presentation is simple, much like the quiet life lived in its desolate setting. It asks us how we can keep living when so much tragedy falls into our laps, some of it our fault and some of it happenstance.

TV Review – The Bear Season One

The Bear Season One (FX)
Written by Christopher Storer, Sofya Levitsky-Weitz, Karen Joseph Adcock, Catherine Schetina & Rene Gube
Directed by Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo

I felt obligated to watch this one, but I knew it would be good. I can’t say The Bear was what I expected. I knew it was about a restaurant and starred Jeremy Allen White, but I was under the impression it was set at an upscale restaurant. Definitely not. And the first half of season one didn’t stand out as anything overly special. Ariana & I talked about how much the show used a premise akin to something like Cheers. If this had been made in the 1980s or 90s, it would have been a three-camera comedy-drama, probably with a “will they, won’t they” plot stringing the audience along for multiple seasons. We even have a Carla in the form of Tina, but even that character conflict is resolved relatively quickly, and the show moves on.

PopCult Podcast – RMN/Past Lives

Two more new releases take the spotlight this week. In one we journey to Transylvania, but there’s no vampires here. Instead, it’s a tense & moody exploration of various ethnic groups at each other’s throat. In our second film, we span 24 years as a Korean woman retains thoughts of her childhood crush while moving on with her life and changing in so many ways.

Movie Review – El Norte

El Norte (1983)
Written by Gregory Nava & Anna Thomas
Directed by Gregory Nava

The United States will never seal up their southern border. They will never stop using it as a political football, either. The States rely heavily on cheap, undocumented labor as part of capitalism. Allowing these workers to enter the country (even through illegal means) helps the wealthy squeeze native-born workers out of fair wages in exchange for compromising for lower pay to “be competitive.” This is a problem created by America as they additionally spend taxpayer money through the defense budget to continuously keep Central & South American countries economically & politically destabilized. They get to extract valuable resources from these regions and pay almost nothing, which leads to refugees seeking work elsewhere. The cruelty of this system is not an accident; it’s the catalyst that keeps the engine of capitalism running. It cannot be reformed; it must be abolished. In El Norte, we follow one such pair of economic refugees desperate to find a new life north of their home.