drama – Page 12 – PopCult Reviews

TV Review – Succession Season Four

Succession Season Four (HBO)
Written by Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, Susan Soon He Stanton, Lucy Prebble, Jon Brown, Ted Cohen, Georgia Pritchett, Will Arbery, and Will Tracy
Directed by Mark Mylod, Becky Martin, Lorene Scafaria, Andrij Parekh, Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

***Lots of spoilers***

In Michael Parenti’s 1993 book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, the author goes through each stakeholder in bringing the day’s news to the average American. The most powerful in this hierarchy are the owners of the media conglomerates that own the United States’ newspapers & television stations. While written in the late 1980s and updated in the early 1990s, Parenti does not touch on the coming power of the internet, but we can understand that it, too, is folded into the realm of control of the monied classes. The world as we perceive it, taught in American schools and raised on American media, is a fabrication. The ideology behind these things is not a conspiracy where world leaders sit plotting around a table in a secret headquarters kind.

TV Review – Yellowjackets Season One

Yellowjackets Season One (Showtime)
Written by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco, Sarah L. Thompson, Liz Phang, Ameni Rozsa, Chantelle M. Wells, Katherine Kearns, Cameron Brent Johnson
Directed by Karyn Kusama, Jamie Travis, Eva Sørhaug, Deepa Mehta, Billie Woodruff, Ariel Kleiman, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, and Eduardo Sánchez

Yellowjackets was a show I knew of, a piece of background noise in the seemingly infinite media landfill of our age. What I knew about it before watching the first season is that it was about people getting stuck out in the wilderness. I also knew who some of the actresses in the series were, but beyond that, I couldn’t have told you much. It’s not too odd to know a decent amount about things I don’t watch simply through cultural osmosis. Nevertheless, something about what I had seen of Yellowjackets kept me interested enough to finally sit down and watch the first season. I was met with something I liked but didn’t love, an interesting mix of Desperate Housewives and Lost that intrigues me enough to be up for the second season.

Movie Review – Paris, Texas

Paris, Texas (1984)
Written by L. M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepard
Directed by Wim Wenders

By the time 1984 rolled around, New German Cinema as a formal movement was over. The directors (still with us) were still making movies, and many still are. Rainer Werner Fassbinder died from an overdose of cocaine and barbiturates in 1982, the same year this new wave of cinema is said to have ended. Germany was just five years away from reunifying its West & East fragments. The country’s fate was now tied even more closely with the rest of the continent and America. Wim Wenders’ work has always held a fascination with that link between nations, and Paris, Texas, eschews Germany to focus entirely on America. Wenders recontextualizes the Western genre, placing it in modern-day Texas and exploring the return of a “stranger” from out of the wilderness. The story is steeped in the mystery of a blazing romance that burned up everyone involved.

Movie Review – The Marriage of Maria Braun

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978)
Written by Peter Märthesheimer, Pea Fröhlich, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Fassbinder’s films often centered women in the protagonist roles and explored how they were trapped in damned if you do/damned if you don’t scenarios. The Marriage of Maria Braun was one of his largest productions with a budget of less than a million, but it certainly doesn’t show. This epic story goes from the middle of World War II into the 1950s. It also follows Fassbinder’s tendency to draw inspiration from the films of Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life), telling stories of women with dignity who humble themselves to survive in a world designed for the pleasure of men. These women are complex, vulnerable, strong, determined, and broken. They are presented as human beings, something that wasn’t done often with women in much Western media of the recent past.

TV Review – Somebody Somewhere Season One

Somebody Somewhere (HBO)
Written by Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen, and Patricia Breen,
Directed by Jay Duplass and Robert Cohen

“Real America,” they call it. The immense middle vastness of the United States, I suppose. Though it isn’t actually real. What they mean by that idea is exclusionary, shorthand for people “like you” who aren’t welcome here. It’s not entirely that simple, though. It’s a clash of the way of thinking in urban environments versus rural environments, which makes it more complicated because “Real America” is peppered with cities. Rural resentments towards cities are not totally unfounded; they are certainly misguided. These perceptions all come from a place that says there’s a limited amount of life in the world, and things unfamiliar to them threaten that sustained existence. If you step back, you can see that any sense of scarcity on the most basic human level of reality is a joke at this point, with excess wasted every day from sea to shining sea. There is room enough for everyone and plenty to keep them alive. Yet, we keep coming up with ways to ignore that.

Movie Review – Alice in the Cities

Alice in the Cities (1974)
Written & Directed by Wim Wenders

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. – “The Stolen Child,” W.B. Yeats

The world is Hell, and more so for children than anyone else. They are ultimately the most powerless of the humans on the planet, seen as property by their parents, animals to be tamed by systems of education, and future labor to be squeezed dry by our institutions. I was an elementary school teacher from 2010 to 2020 and saw the spectrum of joy & pain that children are forced to endure. I had homeless students, transient & ping-ponging between schools for years, raised by severely drug-addicted guardians, and subject to physical/sexual abuse. Wim Wenders, one of the great directors of late 20th century German cinema, thought a lot about what was heaped on the shoulders of children and, after adapting The Scarlet Letter years earlier, found he sympathized far more with Pearl, Hester Prynne’s daughter than he did any of the adults in the story. So he decided to cast the young actress who played Pearl in this next film, where he focuses on her experience.

Movie Review – The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972)
Written & Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

We only see one room of Petra Von Kant’s home for the entirety of this film, creating a sense that we’re in a realm of metaphor rather than concrete reality. This is a crypt, and we watch her rise from her grave at the start, only to return to it. The all-female cast understands what Fassbinder is doing; this is a camp film, not as extreme with filth as John Waters and not as on the nose as what camp became in the 1960s. This is camp in the traditional queer definition, the actresses summoning up the energy of women like Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and their peers. It’s a lot of talking, but you might learn something if you pay attention.

Movie Review – The Five Devils

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The Five Devils (2023)
Written & Directed by Léa Mysius

The Five Devils opens and concludes with a character looking directly into the camera at the audience. That makes sense because much of the film’s narrative centers on voyeurism. So it is appropriate that we are reminded through bookends that the characters within the film could look back at the audience. That first glimpse is followed by a little girl sitting up in bed, and this cut implies the girl was dreaming this moment, that the gaze was directed at her. As the film progresses, this same little girl becomes the one spying on the adults, trying to piece together the cryptic things they say in her presence to create a more significant meaning. She wants to understand who these grown-ups are and how she came into being. What she discovers is how fragile her existence is in the face of different choices that her parents could have made. And while this movie markets itself and even feels like a horror film through the start, it ends up not being that at all, which left me feeling unsatisfied.

Movie Review – Imitation of Life

Imitation of Life (1959)
Written by Eleanore Griffin & Allan Scott
Directed by Douglas Sirk

This was the final film from Douglas Sirk. He didn’t die following its release. He just left the United States and lived in Switzerland for the next twenty-eight years when he passed. He taught briefly in the 1970s at Munich’s University of Film and Television. But this was it. When asked about this stint in America making movies, Sirk said in a 1975 interview: “When I went to the United States, I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. But I always wanted my characters to be more than ciphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.” Sirk and his wife, Hilde, would quickly become tired of the Hollywood scene and return to Europe, but never Germany for too long. The memories were too harsh.

Movie Review – Written on the Wind

Written on the Wind (1956)
Written by George Zuckerman
Directed by Douglas Sirk

Is melodrama something that naturally occurs in real life? Our inclination is to say, “No, people behave melodramatically. Life isn’t that way on its own.” But sensationally strange things happen in the real world all the time. What we often attach to melodrama are the characters’ reactions to the dazzling explosions of emotion. People, especially Americans, flock to melodrama. Look at the popularity of sensationalist politics and reality television that has only built over the last two decades. It could be argued that America is the most melodramatic country on the planet. Check out the frequency of road rage, mass shootings, political violence, racism, and the list goes on & on. My personal view is that Americans are drawn to this exaggeration of life because it makes the mundane misery of their actual existence feel somewhat more important. Rather than engage in the collective struggle to improve life for themselves and their fellow human beings, Americans fall listlessly into an opium-like fantasia where they are central characters in a big story.