PopCult Reviews

Book Update – May/June 2021

Honored Guest: Stories by Joy Williams

I recently surveyed the crop of writers that made up the “freshman class” of Vintage Contemporaries. Vintage Contemporaries was a Random House imprint started in the 1980s and intended to publish paperback editions of literary authors of the era. This is where you would have found legends like Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, and many more. Among those writers was Joy Williams. Williams is a Massachusetts writer whose focus is often on the gradual decay of American life. She looks at it from all angles with middle-class characters who become disconnected from the communities they thought they would never leave. Adults are usually in failed or failing majors, and children are left to their own devices by grown-ups who are busy having affairs or in their own existential spirals.

June 2021 Digest

Features
My 40 Favorite Movies Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four
My Favorite Films of 1981
PopCult Podcast Episode 6, Episode 7
My Favorite Ned Beatty Performances

My Favorite Movies of 1981

Raiders of the Lost Ark (directed by Stephen Spielberg)
From my full review
Raiders certainly holds up as a great adventure movie. The writing is sharp, and the characters are fully realized so that everyone has a personality without becoming an obnoxious exaggeration. Belloq could easily have moved into a farce of a French snob, but he is grounded and feels like a more realistic person. The same is said for the Nazi antagonists alongside him. They are both character types from genre films but also not grotesque cartoons. In modern cinema, we often get more exposition around villains to explain motivation and layout a master plan. While Belloq does have his own designs on the Ark, I don’t think there was ever a scene that felt like awkward exposition. His goals are clearly stated, and then the story moves on.

Patron Pick – Playtime

This is a special reward available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 a month levels. Each month those patrons will get to pick a film for me to review. They also get to include some of their own thoughts about the movie, if they choose. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Playtime (1967)
Written by Jacques Tati, Jacques Lagrange, and Art Buchwald
Directed by Jacques Tati

I had just watched this for the first time recently, but it was a close contender for my 40 Favorite Movies list. I don’t like to put recent first-time viewings on a list like that; I prefer for time to pass, to revisit the movies, and then decide if it has earned that spot. However, Playtime is one of the greatest films ever made, without a doubt. It delivers incredible cinematography, physical performances, sight gags, and production design. It’s hard to say there is much of a story here, but it doesn’t matter. The film’s title informs us that this is an exercise in cinematic play. Jacques Tati is influenced by the great physical comedians in all the best ways and distills what he learned from them into what is the closest I think we’ll ever get to Where’s Waldo on film.

Movie Review – Escape From New York

Escape from New York (1981)
Written by John Carpenter and Nick Castle
Directed by John Carpenter

Our flashback to 1981 has come to a close with this film. Be on the lookout for a list of my favorite movies of 1981 tomorrow. For now, we bring things to a close with Escape from New York. Over the last year, I have expanded my viewings of John Carpenter movies quite a bit. I rewatched The Thing, a film I already love a lot. I also gave Halloween another chance and walked away, liking it a lot. Seeing it in the context as a slasher before that became such a dominant and overdone horror genre helped. I watched The Fog & They Live! for the first time and liked both of them. This was also my first viewing of Escape from New York, and…well, I think this is at the bottom of the list compared to the other movies personally.

TV Review – Starstruck

Starstruck (HBO Max)
Written by Rose Matafeo and Alice Snedden
Directed by Karen Maine

As we continue with me watching things, you might be looking at this and wondering ‘another romcom?’ and my answer would be: If you pay me (link to patreon), I might consider something else, but for now, mama’s gotta do what feels right.

Starstruck is a BBC-Three show picked up by HBO, starring Rose Matafeo as Jessie and Nikesh Patel as Tom Kapoor. It feels like one of those fan-fics you would encounter on Tumblr while bored one night, except Jessie would be either ‘you’ or Y/N (your name) and has less sex in it.

Weekly Wonderings – June 28th, 2021

We finally have our tentative moving date: August 18th. Things have opened up enough now that we can enter our new home country. We went through the calendar and made a list of checkpoints between now and then to have a clear map of where we are going and how to get there. There’s a lot of things to do. Some can be done right away; others will take time to get done. Overall, we are both very excited because it’s clear that things in the United States are not going well. As I write this, the Pacific Northwest is being swallowed by a historical heatwave. Residential air conditioning in that region isn’t equipped for that level of heat; I don’t imagine our air conditioning in the Southeast would stand up to temps in the 110+ range either. I don’t think we can outrun the climate collapse, but my wife and I are of the mind that we want to be somewhere where we can live out our lives comfortably for however much longer we have on this planet.

My 40 Favorite Movies Part 4 (of 4)

Sunset Boulevard (1950, dir. Billy Wilder)
My full review

Funny enough, my first exposure to the narrative of Sunset Boulevard was an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures. The episode was titled “Sepulveda Boulevard” and put Montana Max in the William Holden role while Elmyra played the Norma Desmond analog. Hampton the Pig served as the stand-in for Otto Preminger’s faithful butler. So when I was an adult, I already understood the general narrative of this fantastic film. Billy Wilder delivers a tremendous variation on the noir film by reframing it as a Hollywood movie.

PopCult Podcast Episode 7

Ariana and I take on the roles of casting directors as we share our Top 5 Actors/Actressess We Would Not Cast. Then we go into our thoughts on Barry Jenkins’s brilliant new Amazon Prime series The Underground Railroad.

We’d love to know what you thought of this episode so leave your comments here or leave a voice message on our Anchor page. We might share your comment on an upcoming episode of the show.

You can listen to the podcast here or on Spotify or Google Podcasts.

TV Review – Loki Season 1, Episode 3

Loki Season 1, Episode 3 (Disney+)
Written by Bisha K. Ali
Directed by Kate Herron

This week, there was some fervor over the revelation that Loki (whether in male or female form) is pansexual. However, it doesn’t stop my continued annoyance with Disney over its seemingly incessant queerbaiting. Yes, the character said they were attracted to men and women, yet we will never see Loki engaged in a romantic relationship with a man on screen. Disney loves to add lines of dialogue or knowing glances but actually showing two people of the same sex in a relationship together where at least one of them is a main character will simply not happen. Disney is a global corporation run by people whose key drive is to amass money; they will exploit people’s desire to feel represented by giving them the tiniest crumbs while never giving them authentic representation. Meanwhile, actual independent LGBTQ creators make films, comics, etc., and are completely ignored because they aren’t big-budget mass market entertainment. You will never find self-fulfillment with a megacorporation.