PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Airplane!

Airplane! (1980)
Written & Directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, & Jerry Zucker

This is one of those films that had a profound influence on me as a kid, though I only knew it by the edited for television version I recorded on the family VCR. Airplane! is the origins of the modern spoof or parody film where a genre is taken and skewered with a non-stop barrage of jokes. Mel Brooks definitely helped pave the way with pictures like Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, but even those movies still had a coherent plot arc. Airplane! doesn’t care about the plot and sees it only as a delivery device for hilarious comedy. This movie still holds up today because it doesn’t couch its jokes in the contemporary pop culture of its time.

Black Actor Spotlight – August 2020

Woody Strode (b.1914, d. 1994)

It’s not strange to see Black athletes transition into acting when their sports career wraps up. Back when Woody Strode played for the National Football League, he was one of the first Black players, and his move to becoming an award-winning actor was something unprecedented. Strode was born in Los Angeles, his parents both descended from Indigenous Americans and African slaves. While attending UCLA, Strode became a world-class decathlete and majored in history & education. Strode had posed nude for an art exhibition shown at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The inclusion of Black athletes in the art show led to the Nazis shutting down the whole thing.

Movie Review – Nine to Five

Nine to Five (1980)
Written by Colin Higgins and Patricia Resnick
Directed by Colin Higgins

Nine to Five came to Jane Fonda after talking to an old friend who was part of a women’s office workers association called “9to5”. This organization is dedicated to improving the working conditions and ensuring the rights of working women in the United States. They have partnered with local unions to help collective bargaining efforts, establishing themselves by doing this in Boston in the mid-1970s. 9to5 continues their work to this day, expanding their reach nationally and rallying on issues from the pay gap, childcare, sexual harassment, and more. Fonda initially thought of the picture as a drama but decided that it would be too preachy and on the nose, so she opted for a classic Hollywood style farce.

Movie Review – Popeye

Popeye (1980)
Written by Jules Feiffer, Songs by Harry Nilsson
Directed by Robert Altman

The making of Popeye began with a bidding war for the film rights to the Broadway stage adaptation of Little Orphan Annie. When producer Robert Evans found out Paramount had lost the bid to Columbia Pictures, he held an executive meeting about what comic properties they owned that could replace Annie. One person chimed in “Popeye,” and so it was decided they would make a movie musical based on the spinach-eating sailor man. The original concept was to cast Dustin Hoffman as Popeye and Lily Tomlin as Olive Oyl, but that fell through. At one point, even Gilda Radner was considered for Olive. However, when things finally settled and production began, we ended up with a picture that Paramount wasn’t too happy with, but that has become a cult classic.

Movie Review – The Blues Brothers

The Blues Brothers (1980)
Written by Dan Akroyd & John Landis
Directed by John Landis

Saturday Night Live has spawned many film spin-offs and become the launchpad for many comedic actors. It began with The Blues Brothers, the first movie to take characters created on the show and put them in a feature presentation. The Blues Brothers were established in 1978, and over the years, Akyroyd and collaborator Ron Gwynne developed a backstory about the duo growing up in an orphanage and learning blues from the janitor. With the success of Animal House, director John Landis and star John Belushi were in a perfect position to get The Blues Brothers movie made.

Media Moment (07/31/20)

As the pandemic continues to ravage the nation with no signs of slowing down, movie theaters’ future is one of many industries in peril. NBCUniversal apparently saw success with a digital first-run release of Trolls: World Tour earlier in the year and want to pursue that home streaming model. However, AMC, the largest theater chain in the country, stated they would not show Universal films in their theaters if the company went this route. Negotiations have developed a very different distribution model.

July 2020 Digest

Features
My Favorite 1980s Summer Blockbusters
My Favorite 1990s Summer Blockbusters
My Favorite 2000s Summer Blockbusters
My Favorite 2010s Summer Blockbusters
A Brief History of the United States on Film
The Cinema of Misery
Short Film Showcase #5
My Favorite Film & Television Dystopias
My Favorite Unsettling Movies
Game Review – Villagers
Black Actor Spotlight: July
Supervillain Spotlight: Maxwell Lord
Supervillain Spotlight: The Cheetah

My Favorite Film & Television Dystopias

A dystopia is generally defined as an imagined society where suffering is plentiful with people living in either a totalitarian or post-apocalyptic state. As you’ll see from my list, my preference leans on the tyrannical side of things. I tend to think societies won’t collapse in as dramatic a fashion as Mad Max, but rather people will reassemble a twisted skeleton of what is familiar & comfortable. To hold things together, people will accept the glue of authoritarian rule, whether through an individual despot or a faceless corporation. In most of these dark futures, there is not tangible governmental leadership; instead, it operates behind the scenes and is typically a merger of government & private corporations.

TV Review – Flowers Season 2

Flowers Season 2 (Netflix)
Written & Directed by Will Sharpe

Flowers is such a difficult show to explain if you haven’t seen it. While watching the second season, I thought it’s like The Addams Family but grounded and about mental health. The tone and characters are realistically macabre, a tormented family of creative types whose communication has broken down so badly they just simply can’t communicate with each other any longer. Creator Will Sharpe has given us a second beautiful season that goes even more in-depth with the Flowers’ history and works to heal the damage.

Supervillain Spotlight – The Cheetah

Earlier, I looked at Max Lord, one of the villains in the upcoming Wonder Woman 1984. Today, I’ll breakdown the second villain, The Cheetah. Unlike Lord, The Cheetah has always exclusively been a Wonder Woman enemy, but there have been multiple people that worked under that name. In 1985, DC Comics launched Crisis on Infinite Earths, a company-wide event that rebooted the entire timeline and compressed many parallel Earths into one. Before this, there had been two Cheetahs, neither of whom had superpowers and were mainly knock-offs of Batman’s villain Catwoman. With Crisis, these versions were erased to make way for writer-artist George Perez’s overhaul of Wonder Woman and her continuity. This led to a new Cheetah, one who derived her powers from dark mythic gods.