drama – Page 6 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – sex, lies, and videotape

sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
Written and directed by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaker I feel ambivalent about. Of his prolific filmography, I’ve seen sixteen of his movies, and I still don’t have a strong opinion about him. This is likely because his subject matter, themes, and tone are profoundly eclectic. The director seems quite at ease making crowd-pleasing Hollywood fare as much as he enjoys experimenting with technology and structure. Often, I have a sense of the filmmaker as a person from their work. Directors like Scorsese, Kubrick, and Altman conjure specific emotions and images for me. Soderbergh remains a blank, an enigma that exists outside of any definitions I can articulate.

PopCult Podcast – About Dry Grasses/Housekeeping for Beginners

Two European features make up this week’s episode. One follows a misanthropic rural schoolteacher in Turkey as he burns every bridge around him. The other is about a queer found family in North Macedonia.

Movie Review – Au Hasard Balthazar

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
Written and directed by Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson was not a part of the French New Wave. He was in his fifties by the time Godard, Truffaut, and company started their cinematic revolution. Bresson is a reminder that French films were already doing things far differently from their Hollywood counterparts. When you watch a Bresson film, you might feel a distance from yourself and his characters, which can be misinterpreted as “coldness.” To understand Bresson and his work, you need to know of his three primary influences: His Catholic upbringing, his time as a prisoner of war, and his love of art, particularly painting. He was never interested in filmmaking as a way to create great wealth, though he lived comfortably his whole life. Instead, film was the most apt means for the director to express his thoughts about the human condition.

Movie Review – Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing (1989)
Written and directed by Spike Lee

Every ten years since 1952, the British film magazine Sight & Sound has conducted a poll among invited critics and directors to determine an ever-shifting list of the 250 greatest films of all time. The most recent list of poll results was released last year, with Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (dir. Chantal Akerman) topping the list. I decided to pick a few films near the top that I have not seen or have only seen pieces of to further my cinematic education.

Movie Review – Angel

Angel (1937)
Written by Samson Raphaelson and Frederick Lonsdale
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Alfred Hitchcock was one of the directors who acknowledged Ernst Lubitsch’s influence on them. These filmmakers made very different types of movies, but sophistication was a common thread. They shied away from exploitation and tried to make pictures that challenged the audience’s intellect – one doing it comedically and the other through suspense. I think Angel is the most Hitchcockian Lubitsch film I’ve seen. While watching it, I was reminded of Vertigo. At the heart of this movie is a woman pretending to be someone else while keeping her private life hidden away. There is a man who pursues her out of curiosity. It’s not exactly like that classic Hitchcock film, but shares some structural threads.

PopCult Podcast – Totem/La Chimera

These were two fantastic films made by two fantastic directing women. The first is an intimate study of a life changing day in a little girl’s life. The second is the mythic journey taken by a rogue British archaeologist in Italy.

Patron Pick – Betty Blue

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.

Betty Blue (1986)
Written and directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

Certain movies don’t take long to reveal that they were written by a man who has difficulty seeing women as anything other than to make a man feel good about himself. Betty Blue is such a movie, rife with all the cliches of French cinema. That doesn’t make it a disposable, awful film. It comes across as more comical with how severe and melodramatic it sometimes takes itself. The film is also a great example of a very particular subgenre of cinema called Cinéma du look. The term was coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in 1989 and has been applied to the films of Luc Besson and Leos Carax. It’s style over substance, spectacle over narrative. It’s slick commercial aesthetics with a focus on the alienated in society. It’s also very male-gaze-y.

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 – Vera Drake

Vera Drake (2004)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh’s second foray into historical drama takes us back to the early 1950s. The UK is still healing from the wounds of World War II, and people get on with their lives. It’s also the first of his films that I don’t think quite hits the mark. There’s a very potent moral space to be explored with Vera Drake, but Leigh and his acting collaborators seem to avoid it. That would be the more interesting place to go than where we do, which is a fairly bog standard story. If you have even the slightest experience with cinema, then you’ll likely know where this film is going the minute you learn about Drake’s side gig and the volunteer work she does for her community.

Movie Review – All or Nothing

All or Nothing (2002)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh doesn’t cast people that meet the Hollywood standards of “beauty,” but damn if his performers are not always beautiful & captivating. They reveal that actual beauty is not a series of symmetrical physical features on the face or a toned body but in the ability to capture moments of the human experience. We often must rush past these moments in our daily lives because the systems that rule us demand we go faster. Within a Leigh film, the actor can sit in a moment, examine & explore it, and find the truth within it. Leigh’s films are all about the reality of what it means to be a human being alive in these times, seeking connection & meaning.