political – Page 4 – PopCult Reviews

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.

Movie Review – This Film Is Not Yet Rated

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006)
Written by Kirby Dick, Eddie Schmidt, and Matt Patterson
Directed by Kirby Dick

The United States is currently experiencing one of its most consistent features: moral panic. Every generation has gone through multiple cycles of this nonsense, yet we seem to learn nothing from them. Social media is the root of all evil in society. Or it’s LGBTQ people existing. Or it’s an accurate survey of American history. Or it’s rap music, dancing, comic books, video games, television, comprehensive sex education, the list goes on and on and on. Shortly after its creation, the novel was said to be aiding in the decay of society. All these young people spending hours in books thinking about people and places that don’t exist. Oh, the humanity!

Comic Book Review – The Flintstones Deluxe Edition

The Flintstones Deluxe Edition (2022)
Reprints The Flintstones #1-12 and Booster Gold/Flintstones Special
Written by Mark Russell
Art by Steve Pugh and Rick Leonardi

You might see a Flintstones comic book and think it’s some kiddie fare not worth your time. I thought that too in 2016 when I saw DC Comics was publishing it as part of a line of Hanna Barbera books. I was utterly wrong. In my opinion, this is one of the best comic book runs DC has published in over a decade. Writer Steve Pugh delivers a stunning satirical analysis of life in the United States using the Flintstone family and the world of Bedrock. This book left me wondering why The Flintstones has yet to be rebooted as an animated series in this style. That would be stunning.

Movie Review – Gaza Fights For Freedom

Gaza Fights For Freedom (2019)
Written by Abby Martin and Mike Prysner
Directed by Abby Martin

You can watch this documentary in its entirety here. It is age-restricted so I cannot embed it, sadly.

One of the talking points of the pro-occupation crowd is to talk incessantly about 7 October 2023. If you respond by bringing up other relevant dates and incidents that establish a slow-rolling genocide, the counterargument is that they are talking about “right now,” not the “ancient past.” When asked for their justifications of why the occupying force should have any claim in Palestine, they will respond with “evidence” from a dubious religious text by practitioners of the religion this occupying force has appropriated that this is their homeland circa two millennia earlier.

Movie Review – Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)
Written by Marguerite Duras
Directed by Alain Resnais

Some historical events seem to be glossed over. We’re taught they happened, but then the textbook quickly moves on to other topics. One of these is the atomic bombing of Japan. I personally believe this sits beside the Holocaust as the two most monstrous acts ever performed by humans on each other. Because I came along decades after the act, I was fed the very manicured propaganda around it. Even worse, I was homeschooled and given Bob Jones University’s take. I think most of us couldn’t really articulate what happened directly following the dropping of those bombs or what the mood in Japan was in the following weeks or months. But such a thing could not happen without the people’s lives being devastated beyond anything we Americans have experienced.

Movie Review – Night and Fog

Night and Fog (1956)
Written by Jean Cayrol
Directed by Alain Resnais

It’s an image that your brain can’t quite comprehend at first. Then the camera pulls out. And continues to pull out. And just keeps going beyond anything you could have anticipated or expected. Literal mountains of human hair piled up into a range of which I could not see the boundary. It seemed to go on forever. This isn’t just violence inflicted on one person to another. This is something different. There is a scope & scale that could not have happened by accident. Each action, each cut, each kill was planned. Starvation was part of the plan. This was the same thought an exterminator puts into eliminating an infestation of rats because that is how the Nazis saw these human beings as something to be erased. And with cold, calculated action, they built an entire machine to kill them all.

Movie Review – The Rules of the Game

The Rules of the Game (1939)
Written by Jean Renoir and Carl Koch
Directed by Jean Renoir

Lately, I have spent much time wondering what it felt like for the average person in the West during the lead-up to World War II. Did people sense something in the air that the world was about to change? Was there a palpable unease as you started to see where allegiances lay among the people around you? BIPOC, LGBTQ, and disabled people were already keenly aware of how nasty the dominant class could be. But what about the average white person? The ones who get a few more crumbs when brushed off the table by the wealthy, could they feel the fangs of something dark & horrible sinking into this world? Or was it business as usual?

Seth’s Favorite Books Read of 2023

Fiction
In A Lonely Place: Stories by Karl Edward Wagner

This was a republishing of an out of print horror short story collection by Wagner, a fellow native of Tennessee. He set out to become a doctor in the late 1960s but became quickly disillusioned with the medical industry’s focus on reactive rather than preventative care. Instead, he leaned into writing with horror & fantasy being his favorite genres. Wagner struggled with mental illness and used alcohol to self-medicate. He died in 1994, at age 48, from heart and liver failure due to alcohol. His stories are in the classic pulp vein, a little sleazy & very scary.

Movie Review – One Sings, the Other Doesn’t

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1976)
Written and directed by Agnes Varda

Time feels distorted. It didn’t just start with COVID-19 either. Our understanding of even recent history is blurred, with significant historical events from just a decade or two prior feeling like they happened so long ago or disconnected from our point in time. Part of this is the poor perception of the human brain, whose recall & memories have been proven very unreliable. It also emanates from the neoliberal project outlined in Francis Fukyama’s The End of History and The Last Man. The argument made via neoliberalism is that all possible political ideologies have been discovered & developed and that we live in a period in which no more historically significant events will happen. Essentially, human development is now a capitalist machine meant to run forever, powered by the “benevolence of capitalism.”

Book Update – September/October 2023

Books of Blood Volume 2 by Clive Barker

Because it was October and I enjoyed Books of Blood Volume One so much (I have read it twice), I decided to pick up the following collection by Clive Barker. This one does not have stories as strong as volume one. There are good ones here, but the weaker entries make volume one much more substantial.

“Dread” – This is one of the best and most fully developed stories in the collection. A college student comes under the thrall of a svengali who is fascinated with making people confront what they dread. This has a fantastic conclusion that is vividly rendered by Barker.