patron’s pick – PopCult Reviews

Patron Pick – Carry-On

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.

Carry-On (2024)
Written by T.J. Fixman
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

It took just a few minutes of watching Carry-On to realize I was watching a type of copaganda. Instead of shilling for the “boys in blue,” this film attempts to make the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) seem like an essential job that protects Americans and is staffed by cool people who look like action stars. The plot is a yawn-inducing cut & paste of every other terrorist thriller you’ve seen, like tossing 1990s thrillers and the TV series 24 into a blender with some pro-TSA propaganda. I’m not very surprised that a Netflix original is a piece of disposable shlock; that’s sort of the brand at this point.

Patron Pick – Anora

Anora (2024)
Written and directed by Sean Baker

Of Sean Baker’s films that I have seen (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket, and this one), it is pretty clear he has an interest in sex workers. More specifically, Baker is fascinated with the class politics of being a sex worker. It is a job where the class divide is screamingly evident every second of the transaction. In this way, sex work is one field of labor that highlights the contradictions in the United States, where lies are fed to us from birth about the “American Dream” and meritocracy. It is also very important to Baker that these characters be presented as human beings so that the audience sees the desperation of our protagonists to escape their economic lot in life. He also doesn’t fear these characters being deeply flawed and often unlikable.

Patron Pick – Pootie Tang

Pootie Tang (2001)
Written and directed by Louis C.K.

Let’s talk about Louis C.K. For a few years in the 2010s, this stand-up comedian had hit the big time. He had a hit TV series on FX that allowed him to play creatively with the format and even push the line between comedy, drama, and absurdism. After about a decade of success, the allegations came out. Multiple women accused C.K. of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior over many years in several different settings. His main proclivity seemed to be pleasuring himself in front of women without their consent. These women were either comedians trying to break out or crew on the set of shows C.K. worked on. His career has never quite recovered, though he still has plenty of celebrity comedian buddies backing him up. Before all of that, he created the character of Pootie Tang for the Chris Rock Show.

Patron Pick – Babes

Babes (2024)
Written by Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz
Directed by Pamela Adlon

I went into this film with not the highest of expectations. I wanted to enjoy it, though. Ilana Glazer was hilarious on Comedy Central’s Broad City, though I haven’t been incredibly impressed with her work outside of that series. Pamela Adlon is an actress I’ve enjoyed the performances of, from voicing Bobby Hill to her more recent live-action turns. Better Things, her now-concluded FX show, is on my TV list to watch from beginning to end. All this to say, I wanted to give Babes a fair show, but my god, this is one of the worst films I have seen in a very long time. It has me reeling about how infantile media made for adults is becoming in the States, but maybe it’s always been like this, and I’m just perceiving it now.

Patron Pick – Saw 3

Saw 3 (2006)
Written by Leigh Whannell and James Wan
Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

I have never seen a single film in the Saw franchise before this one. That made my viewing experience quite an incoherent one. If you asked me what I knew about this franchise, it would have been that Tobin Bell played the bad guy Jigsaw, and he made elaborate death traps. Asked about characters or plot beyond that I would simply have to shrug both before and after watching Saw 3. I have no idea. It became very clear within moments of the film starting that I was supposed to recognize several of these characters. The weird thing is that no new characters were introduced, so I understood them to be new. Thus, I kept wondering who the ongoing series characters were and who were the ones just being introduced to die.

Patron Pick – Inside Out

Inside Out (2015)
Written by Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen, Meg LeFauve, and Josh Cooley
Directed by Pete Docter with Ronnie del Carmen

Pete Docter has been a significant part of Pixar since their feature film debut with Toy Story in 1995, being one of the contributors to the script. His feature directorial debut was the well-regarded Monsters Inc., followed by Up. Inside Out was his third feature, with his most recent entry being 2020’s Soul. From just a little reading about Docter and seeing his work, I can tell he’s very introspective and thoughtful. Inside Out was inspired by his watching his daughter start internalizing her emotions as she began adolescence and wishing he could know what she was thinking. He and his team consulted with psychologists throughout the process to ensure their anthropomorphized portrayal of the human psyche was true to science.

Patron Pick – Quigley

Quigley (2003)
Written and directed by William Byron Hillman

When you see a film like Quigley, many questions flow through your mind. “Are we meant to believe 50-year-old Curtis Armstrong is actually 35?” “Was this just a money laundering scheme by the mob?” “Are we laughing with Gary Busey or at him?” If Quigley were to come out today, it would, like the work of Neil Breen, be caught up in the meme machine. Yet, this picture was released in the early 2000s, shot on video, and released straight to the VHS format. At every turn, I was confused by this picture, wondering how aware the people on set were that this was utter garbage. A paycheck is a paycheck, I suppose.

Patron Pick – The Way

The Way (2010)
Written and directed by Emilio Estevez

I’m not someone who likes to just walk around. However, there are people in this world who find enjoyment in doing just that. This film is about a group of people hiking the Camino de Santiago, a network of pilgrimages leading to the shrine of James the Apostle in northwestern Spain. This film is inspired explicitly by Emilio Estevez’s son Taylor, who drove the route with his grandfather, Martin Sheen, in 2003. Taylor met the woman he would marry on this journey and seemed to have had a profound experience through the journey. At first, Estevez and Sheen thought a documentary might be the route, but then they decided to make a more expansive narrative feature.

Patron Pick – Enter the Void

Enter the Void (2009)
Written by Gaspar Noé and Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Directed by Gaspar Noé

No one knows what happens when we die. There has undoubtedly been a lot of time devoted to thinking about death. Some people claim they know through various intense near-death experiences, but we don’t really. One of the biggest questions that surrounds death is what happens to the conscious mind. In sleep, we dream. But where does that mind go when there is no body to return to? The easiest answer would be, “Remember what it was like before you were born.” That’s what death is like. Nothing.

Patron Pick – Federer: Twelve Final Days

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.

Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024)
Directed by Asif Kapadia and Joe Sabia

Once upon a time, I played tennis nearly every day. In the late 1990s, my family started frequenting the public tennis courts. Being homeschooled, solo sports were the easiest to play rather than team-based ones. I also watched a bit of tennis and knew the players at the time: Sampras, Agassi, Seles, Hingis, Kournikova, etc. Then I went to college, and other than taking tennis as a physical education prerequisite for my bachelor’s degree, I haven’t touched on the sport since. I had heard of Roger Federer; he was emerging as a top player when I stopped paying attention, but I couldn’t say I knew much about him. After watching this documentary about his retirement from the sport, I still can’t tell much about him.