PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Medea

Medea (1969)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

You hear about Medea’s homeland long before you see her. The film opens with the usurping of King Aeson and Jason, his son, being put in the care of the centaur Chiron. Chiron knows that one day, Jason will travel too far away from Colchis and steal the golden fleece. The film shifts to an almost documentary-like portrayal of an event on Colchis. We observe that the king’s own son is sacrificed, and Princess Medea, whose chief role is as a priestess, oversees the whole affair. It’s disturbing and portends trouble for Jason when he embarks on his eventual mission.

Movie Review – Theorem

Theorem (1968)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A visitor (Terence Stamp) appears in the lives of a bourgeois Italian family. This stranger goes about having sexual relationships with every member of the household. That’s the shy daughter, the repressed mother, the deeply disturbed father, the sensitive son, and the devoutly religious maid. The stranger barely speaks a word but seems to provide each person with the type of care & attention they are in desperate need of.

Patron Pick – Pootie Tang

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

Pootie Tang (2001)
Written and directed by Louis C.K.

Let’s talk about Louis C.K. For a few years in the 2010s, this stand-up comedian had hit the big time. He had a hit TV series on FX that allowed him to play creatively with the format and even push the line between comedy, drama, and absurdism. After about a decade of success, the allegations came out. Multiple women accused C.K. of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior over many years in several different settings. His main proclivity seemed to be pleasuring himself in front of women without their consent. These women were either comedians trying to break out or crew on the set of shows C.K. worked on. His career has never quite recovered, though he still has plenty of celebrity comedian buddies backing him up. Before all of that, he created the character of Pootie Tang for the Chris Rock Show.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – The Electric State Part Three

Read Part Two here

Two months ago.

Wyatt Butler sat hunched over in his desk chair, listening to his ex-wife Christine rightfully chide him for failing to pick up their son for Wyatt’s weekend. A case had fallen on the private investigator’s desk, a wealthy woman suspecting her husband of cheating, and she offered cash that Wyatt couldn’t pass up.

PopCult Podcast – Megalopolis/A Different Man

An example of directorial excess gone awry. An examination of dark irony and masculine confidence.

TV Review – Northern Exposure Season Five

Northern Exposure Season Five (1993-94)
Written by Diane Frolov, Andrew Schneider, Rogers Turrentine, Mitchell Burgess, Robin Green, Jeff Melvoin, Barbara Hall, David Chase, and Jed Seidel
Directed by Daniel Attias, Michael Fresco, Jim Charleston, John David Coles, Nick Marck, Mark Horowitz, Michael Katleman, Michael Lange, Michael Vittes, Oz Scott, Bill D’Elia, Lorraine Senna, Tom Moore, and James Hayman

Joshua Brand and John Falsey, the co-creators and showrunners of Northern Exposure, were dealing with some stress by the end of season four. They had helped create shows like St. Elsewhere and I’ll Fly Away, but with this series, they finally found something they could cultivate and grow. The first problem came when writer Sandy Veith sued Universal, the production company behind NE, claiming they had stolen his idea and given him no credit or compensation. Universal may have cribbed some of Veith’s ideas and fed them to Brand & Falsey, who didn’t know where they had come from. Veith’s script was about an Italian-American doctor working in a small town in the U.S. South. Falsey was struggling with alcoholism and related sickness. He would be in that fight until his passing in 2019. It felt like it was time to leave. Who would they be replaced with? Cue David Chase.

Comic Book Review – Squadron Supreme

Squadron Supreme (2021)
Reprints Squadron Supreme #1-12 and Captain America #314
Written by Mark Gruenwald
Art by Bob Hall, Paul Ryan, John Buscema, and Paul Neary

In 1969, writer Roy Thomas and artist Sal Buscema pitted the Avengers against the Squadron Sinister, a team of slightly familiar villains created by the bigger baddie Grandmaster. The creators intended it to be a DC Comics’s Justice League pastiche. The characters and their counterparts were as follows: Hyperion/Superman, Nighthawk/Batman, Doctor Spectrum/Green Lantern, and The Whizzer/The Flash. The idea would stick around and be reworked by Mark Gruenwald with a retconned explanation that these villains were based on the Squadron Supreme, the premier hero team of another Earth in Marvel’s Multiverse. Nighthawk would eventually cross over to the main Marvel Earth and join the Defenders for a short time. In 1985, Gruenwald took the idea further and devoted a year-long mini-series to this team. It’s a story noted as a possible inspiration for Mark Waid & Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come.

Movie Review – Oedipus Rex

Oedipus Rex (1967)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini had a deep interest in the mythic. In his early films, the mythic could be found among the peasant class that lived on the outskirts of post-war Rome as it was rebuilt into a modernized city, complete with mass consumerism. Despite being a very modern type of person – queer, atheist, communist – Pasolini was constantly returning to the past, especially to myths & fables where symbolism provided a mystical explanation for how the world came to be what it is. After experimenting with it in a short film, this was the director’s first feature-length color movie. The result is a picture where Pasolini pushes his filmmaking to new heights but still stumbles along the way.

Movie Review – The Gospel According to St. Matthew

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

It may seem like an incredibly odd match. A queer, atheist, communist Italian man making a film about the life of Christ. Even more bizarre, it was In an effort to find relevance in the landscape of the post-war world, Pope John XXIII had asked for an audience with contemporary non-Catholic artists. Pasolini had been raised in the Church and accepted the invitation, knowing so much of his identity clashed with the institution. The meeting occurred in Assisi, and the subsequent traffic jam caused by the Pope’s presence in town left the filmmaker stuck in his hotel longer than he had expected. Pasolini claims he paged through a Bible in the hotel room, reading through each of the Gospels and settling on Matthew as the perfect one for the film he had in mind. His opinion was that the three other Gospels embellished or lacked a clear perspective on Christ; Matthew’s gospel was the most human.

Movie Review – Mamma Roma

Mamma Roma (1962)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s work stands out from his Italian peers of the era. He’s completely caught up in doing his own thing, making movies with a particular style nobody else brought to the table then. While his first few films, like this one and Accattone, are set contemporaneously, the filmmaker would quickly lose interest in that and dive deeper into the past through classic stories that shaped the world he was born into. Pasolini also held peasants in high regard, even though, as a gay man, he was often the subject of hate from them. That hate, of course, was stoked by the remnants of Italian fascism & generations of patriarchy that lie dormant until their more recent return to prominence (see Italy’s current fascist PM). Mamma Roma is a story of a peasant rising from her “lowly” beginnings to finally have a peaceful, more secure life, only to deal with challenge after challenge.