PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Another Year

Another Year (2010)
Written & Directed by Mike Leigh

Tom and Gerrie (yes, that is their names) are a couple nearing retirement. He’s a geological engineer, and she’s a counselor, but both of them have a great passion for nature and working in their garden allotment. Over the course of a single year, we follow them as they spend time with friends and family. We’re introduced to Mary, a receptionist at the health center where Gerri works. Mary is divorced, and her last meaningful relationship turned out to be with a married man. Tom’s childhood friend Ken is overweight and eats & drinks non-stop. Ken complains about how he’s being aged out of his position at work and that he hadn’t stopped to realize he was old now. Tom and Gerrie’s son Joe is in his thirties and still single which becomes a point of conversation during many dinners. There’s no mystery or deep conflict here; this is just life played out over another year.

Movie Review – Four Lions

Four Lions (2010)
Written by Chris Morris, Sam Bain, Jesse Armstrong, & Simon Blackwell
Directed by Chris Morris

Nine years after the events of 9/11, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq raging on, as ISIS was growing in power, four radicalized British Muslims want in on the jihad. They aspire to be suicide bombers but want to do it legit so that they end up as kick-ass martyrs. Two of the men, Omar and Waj, fly to Pakistan to train with al-Qaeda but end up using a rocket launcher the wrong way round and blow up part of the training camp. Meanwhile, Anglo convert to Islam Barry recruits Hassan, a young Arabic rapper who wants to create a “jihad of the mind.” When Omar returns the group devolves into arguments about what exactly to bomb: a mosque and pretend they were Jews, a pharmacy because they sell birth control or some as to be determined target.

Movie Review – Incendies

Incendies (2010)
Written by Denis Villeneuve, Wajdi Mouawad, and Valerie Beaugrand-Champagne
Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Nawal Marwan has died, suddenly and unexpectedly. She was a professor of languages in Quebec, a refugee from the religious wars Lebanon in the 1970s. Her twin children survive her, Jeanne and Simon who are tasked by a notary friend of the family with two envelopes: one for their father and one for their brother. The problem is that they have never known their father, having been told he died in the wars. Additionally, they have no brother that they know of. Jeanne begins the journey, flying to Lebanon and retracing her mother’s steps. Meanwhile, the audience is privy to flashbacks to what happened to Nawal, following her from the days of forbidden love to her eventually involvement against the Nationalist movement in the country. The ultimate truth that is uncovered by Jeanne and Simon will forever shake the foundations of their world and cause them to rethink their entire lives.

Comic Book Review – Justice League International Volume 1

Justice League International Volume 1 (2009)
reprinting Justice League v1 #1-6, Annual 1
Written by Keith Giffen & J.M. DeMatteis
Art by Kevin Maguire and Bill Willingham

In the wake of the Crisis and Legends, a new Justice League must be formed. However, this new team won’t be made up of the classic roster (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, et al.). Instead, anonymous invitations are sent out to a more eclectic group of superheroes: Blue Beetle, Mister Miracle, Black Canary, Doctor Fate, Captain Marvel, Doctor Light, Guy Gardner, with stalwarts Martian Manhunter and Batman rounding out the mix. Their mysterious benefactor Maxwell Lord has designs on the Justice League refraining from being a simply America centric group, instead, he imagines the team going worldwide. The biggest obstacle in getting them there is making sure they don’t kill each other.

Movie Review – If Beale Street Could Talk

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
Written & Directed by Barry Jenkins

Tish is in an incredibly tough spot. Her boyfriend Fonny has been arrested and accused of a rape he didn’t commit. Now Tish has found out she is pregnant with his child. Everything feels impossible as she gathers up the courage to tell she and Fonny’s families. Money is crucial because the family needs every resource they have to pay legal costs to prove Fonny’s innocence, working against a system that was stacked against them before they were born. The film cuts back and forth between the present struggle and the early days of Tish and Fonny’s love story, showing us why they fight so desperately to regain the future that is being stolen from them.

Movie Review – The Master

The Master (2012)
Written & Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is a veteran adrift after the close of World War II, caught up in his trauma, psychoses, and macho posturing to heal himself. He bounces around from job to job until, by sheer chance, ending up onboard a private yacht populated by Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and the followers of his philosophical movement “The Cause.” Lancaster takes a liking to Freddie and brings him into the fold slowly introducing his ideas and practices to the man. Freddie provides “The Master,” as his followers call him, with his moonshine and in turn, Lancaster begins taking Freddie through his process. Skeptics await The Cause on the East Coast, and Lancaster finds himself being swallowed by the movement, less sure of what his aim is anymore. Freddie struggles against his wild, animal nature and the hope that he can be free from the past and forge a better future.

Movie Review – Bandersnatch

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
Written by Charlie Brooker
Directed by David Slade

Stefan Butler is a young man obsessed. It’s 1984, and he is plugging away at adapting the cult novel Bandersnatch, a choose your own adventure style book, into a PC game. He pitches the unfinished version of the game to the new kid on the block game company Tuckersoft. Butler lives at home under the worried gaze of his father while attending therapy sessions with Dr. Haynes. With Dr. Haynes, he talks about and relives the moment in his life that has caused the most trauma, the tragic death of his mother. Bandersnatch was something she left behind and, because of that emotional tie, he has become obsessed with the tome. From there, things get weird as the film is an interactive presentation, much like the book the viewer will choose the paths Stefan goes down, and that’s where the problems begin.

Movie Review – Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine (2010)
Written by Derek Cianfrance & Joey Curtis, and Cami Delavigne
Directed by Derek Cianfrance

The beginning and the ending, happiness becomes misery. Dean and Cynthia have been married for six years, and something has just gone wrong. The love has been sapped out of their lives, but only one of them seems aware of what has happened, and the other is oblivious. Years earlier, Dean and Cynthia meet through chance, and he pursues her while she is shaking off a bad relationship. They find something in each other that they both need, a playful joy about life. In the present day, Dean is trying to keep something alive that is dead. This is a story that closes with a happy beginning and a heartbreaking ending.

My Most Anticipated Films of 2019

Blossoms (dir. Wong Kar-wai)
Wong Kar-wai, the master filmmaker behind so many great films with my favorite being In the Mood For Love, has a new movie due out this year. Blossoms is an adaptation of a short story collection by writer Jin Yucheng, whom the director is working with on the script. The stories alternate between the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the modern Shanghai, emphasizing the changes to this place over the decade. It can be assured that Wong Kar-wai will produce something meditative and meticulous and I can’t wait to see what he gives us.

Movie Review – Real Life

Real Life (1979)
Written Albert Brooks, Monica Johnson, and Harry Shearer
Directed by Albert Brooks

Albert Brooks is making a movie! Inspired by the success of the PBS docu-series “An American Family,” Brooks wants to helm an epic documentary film that follows the most average American family possible throughout one year of their lives. After a series of convoluted tests, a family is chosen: The Yeagers of Phoenix, Arizona. Brooks constantly tells this nuclear family that he will be a fly on the wall, an invisible scribe of their lives and immediately upends that by employing some of the most intrusive cameras ever imagined. As the family doesn’t deliver the drama, Brooks has expected he begins to interfere and create conflict where there is none. All the while the psychologists assigned to monitor the production are growing upset with how Brooks is possibly harming this family as he seeks to create something that isn’t quite real life.