drama – Page 2 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Julius Caesar (1953)

Julius Caesar (1953)
Written by William Shakespeare, adapted by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Once upon a time, I was a student at university who didn’t know exactly what to major in. I had chosen mass communications, but after taking some of the English prerequisite classes for all students at my liberal arts college I found I really loved those teachers and the subject matter. Upon becoming an English major, I had some new required classes. Two of those were Shakespeare: Comedies and Shakespeare: Tragedies. I wasn’t a stranger to the work of the Bard. I was homeschooled but still assigned Romeo and Juliet to read. An afterschool Literature Club that our local homeschool group formed had us read Julius Caesar and even performed excerpts from it at the homeschool group talent show. I got to deliver Mark Antony’s “Friends, romans, countrymen” speech which I am sure if I reviewed the crumbling VHS tape I’d pick on several areas of improvement.

Movie Review – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Written and directed by Andrew Dominik

I have watched the films of Andrew Dominik in a slightly odd order. First, I saw Killing Them Softly, his third film. Then I watched Blonde, his dismal adaptation of a Joyce Carol Oates novel about Marilyn Monroe. Now I come to his second film, the one that garnered him attention in the States, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It was an excellent film; kept its focus on the characters and never got caught up in the tropes of cinematic Westerns, which is the point.

PopCult Podcast – The End/Queer

A group of post-apocalyptic survivors live underground and sing about their feelings. A heroin addicted writer hanging out in 1950s Mexico develops intense feelings for a handsome younger man.

Movie Review – Stranger Than Paradise

Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
Written by Jim Jarmusch and John Lurie
Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Everywhere looks the same. This sentiment is shared by Eddie, one of three central characters in Stranger Than Paradise. He shares this as he and his friends stomp across a snow-covered railroad track, feeling down & out. If you are from the States or have spent much time in the vast middle of the continent, then you know how concrete blasted, copied & pasted so many communities are. Corporate stores and eateries pop up like seeds planted in the asphalt. As someone who grew up in a small town with a main street littered with McDonald’s, CVS, Domino’s Pizza, etc., you do start to feel that any personality the place you lived in once had has been systematically replaced with dull homogeny.

Movie Review – My Night at Maud’s

My Night at Maud’s (1969)
Written and directed by Éric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer is considered the last of the French New Wave directors to be established as such. He was known to be secretive about his personal life, with his name being a mash-up of two people he respected: Eric from director Eric von Stroheim (Sunset Boulevard) and author Sax Rohmer. The filmmaker worked as a teacher in the French Alps but quit in the mid-1940s to move to Paris. Rohmer started attending film screenings where he met Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, and others. This led to a career as a journalist for the many popular film magazines at the time. When he began to get into filmmaking, he invented his pseudonym to keep his parents from learning he was working in the industry.

PopCult Podcast – The Order/A Real Pain

A troubled FBI agent discovers a white supremacist conspiracy in rural Idaho. Two cousins embark on a tour in Poland to reconnect with their deceased grandmother.

Movie Review – Hana-bi

Hana-bi (1997)
Written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

One of my favorite things as a film fan is coming across a filmmaker doing something all their own. No film exists in a vacuum, so you’ll always see influences from others. But how that filmmaker mixes their ingredients makes all the difference. Takeshi Kitano started his media career as a comedian and TV host in the early 1970s. It was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, in 1983, where Kitano made his feature film debut. It was a non-comedic role as a Japanese soldier who brutalized Allied prisoners. In 1989, he made his directorial debut with Violent Cop, a neo-noir film. And then it was this movie, translated into English as “Fireworks,” that won Kitano the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, only the third Japanese director after Akira Kurosawa and Hiroshi Inagaki to win the honor.

Movie Review – Winter Light

Winter Light (1963)
Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

It didn’t take me very long while watching Winter Light to realize what contemporary film was essentially a remake of it, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. Schraeder certainly localizes the story to upstate New York and removes or alters certain details, but narratively & thematically they share so much. Both are films where I can’t imagine them being set in any season other than winter. The cold, the snow, the silence. They are all significant parts of setting the atmosphere for this story of spiritual doubt and crisis. Ingmar Bergman was a person always in some type of spiritual introspection and with Winter Light he’s wondering about those who seem certain about the existence of a God who cares about humanity.

Movie Review – Ikiru

Ikiru (1952)
Written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

After watching a little over half a dozen Kurosawa films in my life, I have concluded that I prefer his modern films more than his historical ones. That isn’t to say films like Seven Samurai or HIdden Fortress are bad. It’s more that I have difficulty emotionally connecting with that era of Japan. It’s certainly entertaining, but I don’t get invested. Perhaps that’s why I’ve gravitated towards Yasujirō Ozu’s films; they are contemporary to the period they are made in and focus on people living their lives with little melodrama. Ikiru is like if Kurosawa tried his hand at an Ozu picture. It has some thematic similarities, but tonally, this is pure Kurosawa. You can see him shaping the minds of audience members who would go on to become prolific filmmakers in their own right, mimicking the techniques of a master they first observed here.

Movie Review – The Ice Storm

The Ice Storm (1997)
Written by James Schamus
Directed by Ang Lee

In our series “Hazy Shades of Winter,” we’ll be looking at films set during winter that also exude the cold, lonely feeling that the season can often bring about. Winter has often been seen as a necessary time of death in many cultures, with the spring being a renewal period. As a result, wintery films often feature themes of grief and desolation or even more interesting, deep self-reflection. As you’ll see in this series, characters often come to significant revelations about their current status; this may be the realization that a marriage is over or the recognition that a person has lost their religious faith. In the winter, the leaves have all fallen away, trees are laid bare, and there is nowhere to hide your secrets.