PopCult Reviews

October 2020 digest

Features
Horror Reading Recommendations
Black Horror Spotlight
Book Update: September-October 2020

TV Review – Lovecraft Country Season

Lovecraft Country (HBO Max)
Written by Misha Green, Wes Taylor, Jonathan I. Kidd, Sonya Winton-Odamtten, Kevin Lau, Shannon Houston, and Ihuoma Ofordire
Directed by Yann Demange, Daniel Sackheim, Victoria Mahoney, Cheryl Dunye, Helen Shaver, Charlotte Sieling, Misha Green, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, and Nelson McCormick

Back in 2017, I read & reviewed Matt Ruff’s novel, Lovecraft Country. My main take away is how I didn’t feel that the book lived up to the title, barely connecting its narrative to horror tropes associated with author H.P. Lovecraft. I think the exploration of ties between the Black experience in America, the racism woven throughout Lovecraft’s work, and the cosmic horror he presents are all ingredients for something that could be incredibly special. My thoughts were that I hoped the pending HBO series would find a way to deliver on the promise of the book, mainly because the showrunners were Black. Sadly, Lovecraft fizzled out in the same way as the novel.

TV Review – The Third Day

The Third Day (HBO Max)
Written by Dennis Kelly, Kit de Waal & Dean O’Loughlin
Directed by Marc Munden & Philippa Lowthorpe

I have been a massive fan of Dennis Kelly & Marc Munden since I first saw their collaboration in the UK version of Utopia. I haven’t yet sat down to watch the American remake on Amazon, but the reviews & comments I’ve seen from those familiar with the original doesn’t put me in any rush to do so. These two creators are brilliant at constructing character-centered stories around fantastic concepts and presenting them in visually striking ways. The bells & whistles never got in the way of the story and, in fact, served to enhance the narrative, a rare feat. The duo has done it again, this time with more collaborators on HBO’s recent The Third Day.

Book Update – September/October 2020

Pew by Catherine Lacey

Pew is our narrator’s name, who gets the moniker when they are found sleeping on a church pew Sunday morning. This person is genderless, racially ambiguous, and never speaks out loud cause growing consternation in the traditionally conservative community they end up in. Pew seems to be a person outside the boundaries of time and space, an eternal being unsure of their own purpose. They become jostled from one location to the next as a charitable family because fed up with the inability to categorize Pew based on cultural norms, and they end up with the local pastor, elderly relatives, and a black family on the other side of town.

Movie Review – The Witches (2020)

The Witches (2020)
Written by Robert Zemeckis, Kenya Barris, and Guillermo del Toro
Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Robert Zemeckis, like I said about John Landis while reviewing An American Werewolf in London, is a director that gave us some fantastic movies in the 1980s and then seemed to fade in subsequent decades. In Zemeckis’s instance, he seemed to keep putting out quality work in the 1990s, but it was the new millennium and deluge of motion capture technologies that took him into a new realm of filmmaking that often hasn’t paid off. These instances always cause me to wonder if all that success ultimately had a negative consequence, removing the things that made Zemeckis’s movies fun because he simply wanted to play with some complicated new toys.

Comic Book Review – JSA by Geoff Johns Book Four

JSA by Geoff Johns Book Four (2020)
Reprints JSA #32-45
Written by Geoff Johns & David Goyer
Art by Peter Snejbjerg, Leonard Kirk, Keith Champagne, Steve Sadowski, and Patrick Gleason

There is something deeply satisfying about reading Geoff Johns’s JSA run. When I was a kid with a limited amount of money to spend while perusing the comic rack on the wall at Kroger, I always leaned towards the team books because it was more economical in my line of thinking. I wanted to expand my knowledge of obscure characters, and team books always gave you the most characters for your buck. So, as an adult, when I stumbled across this run by Johns, it was like my childhood dream come true. He always found creative ways to weave together disparate strands of the DC Universe by using those commonalities.

Movie Review – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)
Written by Peter Baynham, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jena Friedman, Anthony Hines, Lee Kern, Dan Mazer, Erica Rivinoja, Dan Swimer, and Nina Pedrad
Directed by Jason Woliner

My experience was seeing the first Borat film was one of those never able to forget things. I was living in Bellingham, Washington at the time, and a group of friends went to the theater on opening night, so the place was packed. We were all familiar with Da Ali G Show and Borat, but we had no idea what we were in store for with this movie. The sometimes subtle other times explosively over the top manner in which Sacha Baron Cohen skewered American culture was unlike anything I’d see in a movie theater before. I would expect it from indie movies but not from a studio picture. Of course, we couldn’t stop quoting the picture for hours after we left the theater, and eventually, because of cultural overuse, I sort of began to dislike the movie. Having revisited Borat since I think it is a seminal work of satire, one of the most brutal takedowns of the United States at the time.

Movie Review – An American Werewolf in London

An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Written & Directed by John Landis

I don’t think I have ever been able to put my thumb on John Landis. He is such an enigma of a director to me. He makes fantastic comedies like The Blues Brothers, The Three Amigos, and Coming to America in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he churned out crud like The Stupids, Blues Brothers 2000, and stopped directing films in 2010. I would never say he’s my favorite director, but I don’t hate his work as a whole either. It just wholly stumps me when I think about his career building potential in one decade only to ultimately flounder in another. Right in the middle of his seemingly impervious series of hits came this horror-comedy that is much more horror, in my opinion, An American Werewolf in London.

Movie Review – Possession

Possession (1981)
Written & Directed by Andrzej Żuławski

The most terrifying experiences we have daily are through our nightmares. The worst is when the nightmare feels so real you forget you are asleep, becoming lost in a world of symbols rather than logic. Your anxieties manifest as material beings tormenting you, familiar landscapes become claustrophobic mazes, and the faces of those you love can serve as masks for dark thoughts and fears. Writer-director Andrzej Żuławski places his horror film Possession in this realm from the first frame. Now the question of whose nightmare we are living inside of is definitely up in the air.

Movie Review – Kajillionaire

Kajillionaire (2020)
Written & Directed by Miranda July

Miranda July began her career doing performance art videos, some of which I remember coming across online in the 2000s. Her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), was a beautiful little indie about strange people trying to find connections with each other. Six years later, she followed up with The Future, another indie about strange people that didn’t have the widespread popularity of her first film but is still a fantastic picture. And then it was nine years of no original works from July. Instead, she made many appearances acting in things like Portlandia or in the fantastic Madeline’s Madeline. July also published two books of short stories in that time. In 2018, she announced she would be writing and directing Kajillionaire, known only at the time as a “heist movie.” But with everything that Miranda July makes, it isn’t that simple.