PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022)
Written & Directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Reality is breaking down. By this, I mean humanity has fragmented into billions of hyper-individualistic pods, each of which often seems to be creating its own version of reality in its head. You can see this most prominently in the QAnon types who construct wildly elaborate fantasies of their childhood favorites not really being dead, that Trump is still the president, and the inevitable arrival of disease-curing medbeds. These are all real delusions that a significant portion of the American population is under now. The youth are escaping in their own way too. A TikTok trend a few months ago (or was it years? Time is also falling apart) had teenagers and young adults speaking with conviction about manifesting themselves into a parallel reality where they were students at Hogwarts. They would describe elaborate scenarios of having relationships with fictional characters they’d been reading about since they were children. I would look at this and say they were just lucid dreaming, but it was a version of tangible reality to them. We create dream realms because the systems we live under have done a shit job preparing us to face the horrors of the present moment.

Movie Review – The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
Written by Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
Directed by Tom Gormican

At this point, we must acknowledge that Nicolas Cage is a movie institution. He makes movies he is passionate about or jobs that help pay for something new in his life. His motivations are the same as any working person; he just sometimes gets paid an obscenely large amount for what he does. For example, Pig (2021) was made on a budget of around $3 million and earned back just a little more than that at the box office. This tells us that Cage didn’t agree to star in that film for the payday but because he genuinely believed in the project. As much as a cartoon as he’s become in the zeitgeist, I still see him as a genuine artist who doesn’t care what you or I think at the end of the day. He’s in the movies that he wants to be in. With this picture, he allows the filmmakers to deconstruct his film persona for some laughs and genuine human insight.

Movie Review – Dora and The City of Lost Gold

Dora and The Lost City of Gold (2019)
Written by Nicholas Stoller, Matthew Robinson, and Tom Wheeler
Directed by James Bobin

Of all the shows I have reviewed in this series on cinematic television adaptations, this is the only one created during my adulthood. Not having children or having spent a lot of time around Zoomers as babies, I don’t really have any emotional attachments to the source material. I’ve seen the numerous parodies of Dora that show up in pop culture, and I understand the show’s concept, though. So I was a bit surprised but intrigued when it was announced that a live-action Dora movie was in the works. I always prefer an unexpected and weird take on a well-known property rather than regurgitating something we all know. This is why I am very interested in the Greta Gerwig Barbie film. It sounds like something that isn’t just a straightforward adaptation. And that’s what we get with Dora and The Lost City of Gold, a movie that balances a genuine love of the show with the ability to poke fun at it.

Movie Review – The Man From UNCLE

The Man from UNCLE (2015)
Written by Guy Ritchie and Lionel Wigram
Directed by Guy Ritchie

I have never seen a single episode of The Man from UNCLE, but I understood the basic premise via cultural osmosis. An American spy and a Soviet spy team up to fight the menace of a third party, THRUSH. This group was composed of people so dangerous that even nations that were ideologically opposed would join forces to stop them. When you understand the depth & breadth of red scare propaganda in the United States, then the fact that the seriesThe Man from UNCLE was such a huge hit is pretty extraordinary. The main enemy in the story is the remnants of the Nazis, which given historical context, is sort of funny that the U.S. is fighting against them. My biggest takeaway from the movie adaptation is that this is one of the gayest films I’ve seen in quite a while.

Movie Review – The A-Team

The A-Team (2010)
Written by Joe Carnahan, Brian Bloom, and Skip Woods
Directed by Joe Carnahan

Some of my earliest memories of watching television are of The A-Team. This might be seen as troubling to some because this action series was criticized at the time for delivering a way too sanitized version of violence. This was because no one ever died in The A-Team. No matter what happened to them. They could be bound & gagged inside a vehicle filled with C-4 and blown up. There would be a take after the explosion that showed the person scrambling out of the inferno to safety. In that way, the show was seen as possibly encouraging the youth to do violent things to each other. I have never found any stories of a direct connection between the violence of the A-Team and any act performed in real life. The same cannot be said for the likes of Tucker Carlson and his ilk.

Movie Review – Bewitched

Bewitched (2005)
Written by Nora Ephron & Delia Ephron
Directed by Nora Ephron

By the time 2005 rolled around, television to film adaptations were pretty standard in Hollywood. That year alone, we got movie versions of The Honeymooners, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Firefly (Serenity). Nora Ephron was also a known quantity in the studio system. She’d been responsible for big hits like When Harry Met Sally… and Sleepless in Seattle. Bewitched was a popular sitcom when Ephron would have been a young woman, and its themes of feminism and identity hiding inside a “silly premise” felt perfectly fitting to the filmmaker’s talents. And then your stars are Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, both of whom are in high demand in the mid-2000s. What could go wrong? Everything actually. Every-fucking-thing.

PopCult Podcast – Undone/The Rehearsal

Reality keeps getting harder to discern these days.

Movie Review – My Favorite Martian

My Favorite Martian (1999)
Written by Sherri Stoner & Deanna Oliver
Directed by Donald Petrie

When I decided to do this first round of Television to Movies, I wanted to do at least one movie where I had little to no knowledge of the source material. My Favorite Martian is one of those shows. I was vaguely aware of the premise without knowing much detail, so the film was a reasonably fresh experience for me. That said, I could key in on specific elements being carryovers from the series because they were presented in a way that the audience was meant to see them as important. I also picked this movie because its two leads, Jeff Daniels & Christopher Lloyd, are pretty good actors, and so they might be able to elevate what could otherwise be a lame script.

Comic Book Review – Daredevil: Lockdown and Devil’s Reign

Daredevil: Lockdown (2021)
Reprints Daredevil #31-36
Written by Chip Zdarsky
Art by Mike Hawthorne, Marco Checchetto, Stefano Landini, Francesco Mobili, and Manuel Garcia

Devil’s Reign (2022)
Reprints Devil’s Reign #1-6 & Devil’s Reign Omega
Written by Chip Zdarsky
Art by Marco Checchetto

Throughout Chip Zdarsky’s current run on Daredevil, he’s made it a point to show how it’s not just organized crime that creates problems in urban environments. The police & the city government will agitate the public to serve their own purposes, often to continue a flow of money & power from criminal enterprise. Lockdown finds Matt Murdock serving time in prison while being allowed to keep his identity secret due to a Supreme Court ruling within the Marvel Universe. Being spotlighted as Daredevil doesn’t afford him any benefits, though and he quickly becomes targeted by his fellow inmates but also a corrupt warden.

Movie Review – The Addams Family

The Addams Family (1991)
Written by Caroline Thompson & Larry Wilson
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

Few television-to-film adaptations are as good as the first two Addams Family movies. I didn’t realize it until recently, but The Addams Family television series only ran for two seasons, with an impressive 64 episodes total. In syndicated reruns, the series would gain a cult fanbase that kept it in the cultural spotlight. Beyond the theme song and encounters with “normals,” the film’s tone is not based on the television show. Instead, the filmmakers drew inspiration from the original New Yorker comics by Charles Addams. This was the correct decision, and the result is studio comedy that sits in the perfect middle ground between crowd pleaser and dark humor. It’s also a strange case where the sequel is arguably better than the original film.