satire – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Eddington

Eddington (2025)
Written and directed by Ari Aster

I wrestled with making this or One Battle After Another my top film of the year, and I ultimately decided this should be the one. That likely won’t surprise longtime readers, as I haven’t hidden my love of Ari Aster’s work. Like everyone else, I was a little thrown off by Beau Is Afraid, but I still loved that film. There was an honesty in how Aster addressed the anxieties of the modern age—the creeping, agoraphobic paranoia that feels as if it has swallowed American society whole. He understands that we are living in a time where reality is warped to a breaking point, and with that comes a deep, growing sense of unease. If I had to compare Eddington to another film, I’d probably say Todd Haynes’s Poison: a contemporary horror story that leans more toward the slow-burn dread of Carcosa than a gory slasher.

Movie Review – No Other Choice

No Other Choice (2025)
Written by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Lee Ja-hye
Directed by Park Chan-wook

It’s always struck me as strange, bordering on obscene, how completely hands-off society is when it comes to job placement. We build entire educational systems around the promise of employability, saddle people with debt, tell them to “do everything right,” and then, at the moment where guidance would actually matter, shove them into the dark and say good luck. Even with a degree, even with experience, the expectation is that you will wander an increasingly incoherent job market on your own, refreshing dashboards like a lab rat pressing a lever for food pellets that never arrive. The application process is almost entirely online now, regardless of what boomers insist about “walking in and demanding a job.” I’ve played the LinkedIn game; I found nothing of substance. My wife did too and only ended up employed because of someone one of my sisters happened to know.

Movie Review – Bugonia

Bugonia (2025)
Written by Will Tracy
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

In the West, we are no longer living in a shared reality with our neighbors. I think COVID accelerated this, with the internet acting as a pipeline of ideological sludge that has led to a backslide reminiscent of the Dark Ages, but with smartphones. I have a family member who has fully embraced a reactionary mindset, going so far as to become a flat Earther. When someone has deteriorated that far into mental illness, it is beyond the ability of their family members to help them; only someone professionally trained will have the patience, while I am too emotionally entangled. This person has always held fringe beliefs, but it was through the internet that they linked up with similarly delusional people; a feedback loop of insanity. Bugonia is a film about people who cannot accept that the source of so much suffering in our world is human cruelty and instead fall back on increasingly incoherent explanations.

31 Days of Character Creation #9 – Cabal

Cabal is a game where the character is the evil corporation you create. Employees are assets the company moves around to work towards its nefarious agenda. Essentially, if you want to play a mix of Succession with horror elements, you have found the game for you. Here’s how Cabal is described on its Kickstarter page:

Cabal is an RPG that works in reverse to the way tabletop RPGs usually function. Instead of each player creating their own character, you create a single character between you. This character is an organisation with its own secret plan and goals. It might be a conspiracy, a corporation, an activist group, an occult society of magicians or even a collection of hidden alien refugees. The size, influence, resources and pawns of the group depend entirely on what attributes the players choose between them for the organisation.

Movie Review – Heathers

Heathers (1989)
Written by Daniel Waters
Directed by Michael Lehmann

Screenwriter Daniel Waters originally envisioned Stanley Kubrick directing the screenplay he wrote while working at a Los Angeles video store in 1986. The initial script was three hours long, and the opening cafeteria scene, added in subsequent drafts, was meant to be an homage to the opening barracks scene in Full Metal Jacket. Well, Kubrick didn’t make Heathers, though I am fascinated by what the film would have been like. It is still a fantastic movie, a satire dripping with the most acidic venom toward its targets, a mockery of everything white, suburban, and middle-class in America.

Movie Review – To Be Or Not To Be

To Be Or Not To Be (1942)
Written by Edwin Justus Mayer
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

When To Be Or Not To Be was released in theaters, the public wasn’t sure how to feel. It was a film about Europe under the control of the Nazis, but it was also a comedy. Beloved comedian Jack Benny was even dressed up as one as part of a complex plan to trick the Nazis. Benny’s father walked out of the theater in disgust, seeing his son wearing that uniform. Eventually, the actor’s father was convinced to return and ended up watching this film 46 times over its run in theaters. However, some critics found the film to be in bad taste, especially a scene where Benny shaves a dead Nazi to help keep the ruse going. They also felt the film’s setting, Warsaw, made light of the bombing of that city. Lubitsch would always emphasize that his goal was to mock the ideology of Nazis while poking fun at the often shallow nature of actors. I would argue he accomplishes both things exceptionally well.

PopCult Podcast – Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World/Dad & Step-Dad

A whirlwind day in the life of a Romanian woman hustling & grinding to stay afloat. A lazy weekend with two men concerned with the upbringing of a son they share. These strange films make up the podcast this week.

Movie Review – Naked

Naked (1993)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

For those not alive in the 1990s, a specific element is difficult to recapture. Due to a simplistic view of numbers, many people felt doom & gloom over the fact that the calendar would one day soon start with “20” rather than “19.” It sounds quaint compared to today’s world, where nothing seemed entirely significant about “2020” until there was. I do think the Cold War fueled many of the anxieties of the 1980s and preceding decades, but with “communism defeated,” you’d think the children of the West would be enjoying an endless capitalist bacchanal. It wasn’t the case because capitalism was spiraling; it was a long journey from the edge of the sink to the bottom. Mike Leigh was feeling that gloom; the conservative Thatcher era in the UK had left so many people barely holding on by a thread, and with that economic crush, they were becoming nastier to each other.

Movie Review – Xala

Xala (1975)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

In the mid-15th century, the Portuguese landed on the shores of Senegal and began a centuries-long occupation that included the British, the Dutch, and the French. It would not be until 1958 that Senegal declared its independence and merged with French Sudan to form the Mali Federation. That would not last long, and by 1960, they went back to their individual states. The process of decolonization is not quick & easy. When the colonizers withdraw, there is still tremendous work to do, a lot of which centers around removing the ideologies & ways of doing imposed on the colonized people by their occupiers. Ousmane Sembène is keenly aware of this, and in his film Xala, he produces an angry screed at how Western capitalism is allowed to fester in the systems of the post-colonial African people.

Movie Review – Mandabi

Mandabi (1968)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

Despite the brutal French colonial presence in Senegal, most Senegalese do not understand or speak French. This led Ousmane Sembène to want to make a film entirely in the indigenous tongue of Wolof. Like most of Sembène’s work, it was almost lost to us. Film prints were locked away in vaults in France. Sembène’s son, Alain, and filmmaker Martin Scorsese worked together, slogging through bureaucratic hell to get the films in their hands for restoration.