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TV Review – The Kingdom II

The Kingdom II (1997)
Written by Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel
Directed by Lars von Trier and Morten Arnfred

Trying to describe where Lars von Trier’s sequel to his 1993 mini-series The Kingdom goes is quite a challenge. The thing your 21st-century sensibilities will be struck with first is going to be the cinematography. A lot of The Kingdom looks like absolute shit. This isn’t a byproduct of a filmmaking amateur but a stylistic decision made by von Trier. His 2000 masterpiece Dancer in the Dark employs early digital and has a similar grainy look to it. While the director was inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, he wasn’t simply going to mimic that style and instead employed his unique visual take on this horrific & comedic story. Through grainy handheld camerawork and especially the editing in post, he can construct a comedic rhythm that makes this show genuinely hilarious.

Comic Book Review – Parasocial

Parasocial (Image Comics)
Written by Alex de Campi
Art by Erica Henderson

The other day, I was looking over the upcoming DC Comics solicitations and realized something. I am old now. I just looked at the covers, the blurbs for stories they were announcing, the lead-ups & preludes to the next big event, and I thought, “Boy, am I tired.” I know part of this is that the writers that are up and coming in comics right now are, for the first time, my age or younger than I am. It was an inevitable point I would reach one day, but experiencing it is still strange. Having grown up reading comics written by mostly Baby Boomers, there’s a particular style & tone I’m used to. It’s not better than what is new; it is just different. When I read something like Parasocial, I have mixed feelings – I like a lot of the ideas, but the execution is not what I expected, so I’m left feeling ambivalent.

PopCult Presents: Screenplay – Corp Borg Episode 1

The first of our next six-part Screenplay series is here!
And you can listen to it for FREE!

Comic Book Review – Monica

Monica (Fantagraphics)
Written & Illustrated by Daniel Clowes

When I think of the great indie comics creators from my younger days, I typically think of three names: Charles Burns (Black Hole), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth), and Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). Each artist has a distinct style, and their personality comes through in all their work. The common theme between them all is a bleak look at humanity. Clowes’ work, in particular, focused on the alienation of Generation X, whose identities were tied to ironic nostalgia and difficulty being vulnerable with others. But time has passed, and Clowes is no longer a young man. As good as his early work is, he’s matured into something incredible, and Monica is a perfect example of this sophistication.

Patron Pick – The Zone of Interest

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 Matt Harris.

The Zone of Interest (2023)
Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer

A droning echo from deep in the bowels of the underworld is the first thing you hear as the screen remains black. This is a descent into Hell. The music distorts and warps, communicating this mood of decay & rot. It is also a signal that this will not be a film about the spectacle of war or even the direct horrors of the Holocaust. Instead, this will be a story from right on the periphery. The title, The Zone of Interest, was a term Nazis used euphemistically to refer to the complex of over 40 death camps in Auschwitz, Poland. Filmmaker Jonathan Glazer uses his talents to deliver a story about genocide unlike any other I’ve seen. This is a film where the details are withheld, and it is through inference that the true horror emerges.

Comic Book Review – Carmilla, The First Vampire

Carmilla, The First Vampire (2023)
Written by Amy Chu
Art by Soo Lee

Of all the “classic” monsters, vampires have just never clicked for me. I’ve seen many different takes on vampires from multiple cultures, but I’ve never found them particularly scary. I think part of this is that the vampire has shifted in the culture from being a strange, animal-like predator to either a fetishistic totem of erotic fiction or a metaphor for Other-ed groups we’re meant to empathize with. When that happens, the monstrous fades, and they become just a storytelling trope. I stay open to new takes on vampires, hoping that someone might make them horrific again, and Chu & Lee’s Carmilla graphic novel does a decent job of it.

Book Update – January/February 2024

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

As a teenager, I came across this book in the now-defunct Wizard Magazine. I am trying to remember the context in which it was brought up, but I do remember the striking cover. Years later, when I took Chaucer & Medieval Literature in college, someone told me Hyperion was a retelling of The Canterbury Tales. Only at the end of 2023, at 42, I picked up Dan Simmons’ acclaimed science fiction epic to read. Wow. What an incredible treat to enjoy.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Little Town: Bright Hills Episode Six

Little Town
Designed & Written by Gustavo Coelho

You can purchase this game here.

Read the previous episode here.
Start at the beginning of this series here.

April 20
Scene 1 – Time Limit 11
Location: Bright Hills PD, early morning, rainy

Dr. Jasmine Bradley sits in the waiting room of the Bright Hills Police Department. The man whose life she saved last night is in an interrogation room being questioned for the murder of a local teenager. Despite not knowing him for that long, she doesn’t believe he did it. Something beyond the norm is obviously happening in this small Tennessee town. It’s early morning, the sun peeking over the hills, giving the sky a purple-pink shade. The smell of coffee brewing in a pot nearby floats through the station. Deputy Brooks clacks away on a typewriter, writing up a report. Local handyman Red, Brooks’s cousin, emerges from the restroom with his toolbox.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Little Town: Bright Hills Episode Five

Little Town
Designed & Written by Gustavo Coelho

You can purchase this game here.

For this session of Little Town, I decided to play around with the system a bit more. If you solo play tabletop RPGs, then you know this is what often happens. You have the idea of what you want and find ways to bend and twist the mechanics to fit that. For me, it was the idea of having another character I controlled connected to the mystery who could have parallel scenes to my protagonist. I have them sharing a Clock so as not to complicate things, and as you’ll read, they meet reasonably quickly. I was thinking of how Twin Peaks presented Dale Cooper as its protagonist, but many characters had side stories that didn’t always intersect with what he was up to.

Read the last episode here.

TV Review – The Kingdom Season One

The Kingdom (Mubi)
Written by Lars von Trier, Niels Vørsel, and Tómas Gislason
Directed by Lars von Trier & Morten Arnfred

Twin Peaks is my favorite television show, and it was a worldwide phenomenon that we rarely see these days. As choices in media have expanded exponentially with streaming, in 1990, broadcast television was still the dominant home entertainment option. Twin Peaks was unlike anything American TV networks had ever shown, and this uniqueness allowed it to flourish outside the States in places like Japan, Denmark, and more. Filmmaker Lars von Trier was so inspired he developed his own TV series about a Copenhagen hospital filled with similarly eccentric characters with a supernatural bundle of secrets roiling beneath the building’s foundations.