PopCult Reviews

Comic Book Review – X-Men Forever Volumes Three and Four

X-Men Forever: Come to Mother…Russia! (2010)
Reprints X-Men Forever #11-15
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Tom Grummett

X-Men Forever: Devil in a White Dress (2010)
Reprints X-Men Forever #16-20 & X-Men Forever Annual #1
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Graham Nolan and Tom Grummett

Chris Claremont’s X-Men Forever continues its fascinatingly weird alternate take on the 1990s X-Men. As discussed in the first review, Claremont was given this out-of-canon book to continue his X-Men run and started by shrinking the team to a smaller, more easily handled number. He instituted several other big changes – killing off Wolverine, revealing Storm is still a child, and showing that the adult Storm is some kind of imposter. Nathan Christopher Summers was never sent to the future and more. He’s not done and in Come to Mother…Russia, Claremont keeps providing new takes on familiar faces. One of these is a character who retired in Uncanny X-Men and even walked away from the book when Bob Harras pressured him to bring back Colossus.

Movie Review – Cure

Cure (1997)
Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Something about disrupting the flow of daily patterns drastically unnerves the average person. The next time you have the opportunity, allow an awkward silence between you and another person. Study their reaction. You can learn a lot about how someone handles that silence when all they have is their own mind to listen to. In Cure, it appears we have a serial killer using hypnotism to get seemingly regular folks to kill their loved ones. Yet when the audience finally sees how it goes down, it’s far simpler than that. This interloper disrupts the pattern and, with minimal effort, shatters these people’s minds.

TV Review – My Brilliant Friend Season Four

My Brilliant Friend Season Four (2024)
Written by Elena Ferrante, Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Saverio Costanzo
Directed by Laura Bispuri

I was skeptical going in. The cast of the show was going to be changed. It made sense. These were meant to be people living through their 30s and into middle age. Keeping on actors who were mainly in their early to mid-20s would make that hard to pull off. Metaphorically, it makes sense. For a long time, it is difficult to see ourselves as adults, so our self-perception is still that of a child. Then, one day, we suddenly realize we are adults due to a single event or a series of them. That child hasn’t really been around for a long time. Season four manages to pull this off, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t missing Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Starforged: Messiahs Part One

The Starforged story being told here is the culmination of over a year of playing in my little homemade science fiction toy box. Listed below are the various interconnected chapters where you’ll see several characters mentioned here. I can’t guarantee it’s good writing, but it exists.
Starforged | Starforged: Nexus of Destiny | Starforged: Abyss of Shadows | Starforged: Wrath of the Vok | Sundered Isles

PopCult Podcast – Smile 2/Juror #2

A contemporary urban horror continues its path of destruction in a new life. A man serving on a jury realizes his connection to the crime being discussed and that he may have the means to save someone’s life.

Movie Review – The Battle of Algiers

The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Written by Franco Solinas and Gillo Pontecorvo
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

From 1954 to 1962, the French government was at war with the Algerian people. Algeria had been a French colony since 1830 when King Charles X decided to take the land. They blamed pirates on the Barbary Coast and their ransoming of French captives. In reality, French sentiments towards their increasingly authoritarian king led Charles and his advisors to dream up a foreign conquest to calm the people. In the first thirty years of French occupation, it is estimated that up to one million Algerians were killed, nearly a ⅓ of the entire population.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – The Electric State Part Five

Read part four here

Two Months Ago

Crystal stumbled out of the barn and braced herself against one of its faded red exterior walls. She was having trouble breathing and slid down to the ground. A beat. Randy James stepped out into the moonlight, an annoyed look on his face.

“Why do you have to be like that, Crissie?” he asked, a slight whine in his voice.

“Th-that kid,” Crystal started. “How can you…do…that?”

Randy James clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “You have such shortsightedness, you know that? You just refuse to see the bigger picture, like everyone else. You don’t see them out here, freaking out, boohooing. Maybe you need to grow the fuck up, Crissie.”

Comic Book Review – X-Men Forever Volumes One and Two

X-Men Forever: Picking Up Where We Left Off (2012)
Reprints X-Men Forever #1-5
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Tom Grummett

X-Men Forever: The Secret History of the Sentinels (2012)
Reprints X-Men Forever #6-10
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Paul Smith and Steve Scott

This year, 2024, I read through the entirety of Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men run. It’s one of the all-time great comic book runs with highs and lows, but always something new and interesting. It came from when comic book characters were not IPs making billions of dollars in box office revenue. With less scrutiny came more creativity & risk. But, by 1991, Marvel Comics wanted an X-Men comic that wasn’t so weird and had traditional team dynamics with missions against the villains of the month. Claremont stepped away. But he wouldn’t burn his bridges; Claremont understood the spotlight shifted to the hot young artists like Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld in the early 1990s. He kept plugging away with little projects here and there, even writing for DC Comics. Eventually, he started writing new stories for Marvel about many of the characters he helped to create. The idea was to have Claremont write an out-of-continuity series that continued his X-Men as if there had never been an interruption. Sounds great, right? It’s one of the most insane X-Men things I’ve read in a long time.

Movie Review – The Chambermaid

The Chambermaid (2018)
Written by Lila Avilés and Juan Márquez
Directed by Lila Avilés

I was profoundly impressed by Lila Avilés’s Totem, which will be on my list of favorite films in 2024. Her previous feature, The Chambermaid, was mentioned in an interview I came across about Totem. I put that on my To Be Watched list, and with this December film series, A Christmas Gift to Myself, I had the perfect opportunity to watch it. The film is not focused on a plot, much like Totem; it is a character study about a pivotal moment in a person’s life. They are not someone most of us would likely notice, yet their life is complicated and full of powerful moments of connection.

Movie Review – Luz

Luz (2018)
Written and directed by Tilman Singer

I decided to do a different kind of film series for December. There were several films that I had been adding to my Watchlist based on either enjoying more recent work by the filmmakers or simply curiosity. So, for the first half of December 2024, I will give myself a Christmas present, watch through nine of these pictures, and write up reviews. The last week and a half of the month will be focused on my Favorites of 2024 lists. This first film ended up on the list due to enjoying this year’s Cuckoo, filmmaker Tilman Singer’s sophomore effort. We reviewed that film over on the podcast, and while it didn’t blow me away, I enjoyed the point of view and style and wanted to see what Luz was like.