PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Godzilla Minus One

Godzilla Minus One (2023)
Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki

There is a scene just before the big third-act finale where Godzilla Minus One lays out its core thesis through the words of Kenji, a former Naval weapons officer trying to end the monster’s reign of terror on Japan. He states: “Come to think of it, this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats, and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That’s why this time I’d take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.” And that’s the theme of this film, to live in the face of what seems like hopeless obliteration.

PopCult Podcast – The People’s Joker/Ghostlight

This week it’s two new releases about performance & identity. In one, we see a transgender woman’s story of self-realization through a parody of Batman and his world. In the second, a construction worker happens upon a theater putting on Romeo & Juliet that helps he and his family process a recent trauma

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Supersworn: The Victory Academy Part One

This campaign started as a world-building exercise. Click here to see how we got to this point.

What has come before:

The Naxramman Alliance had its attempted invasion of Earth thwarted by the largest coalition of superhumans ever assembled. Even some villains bordering on antiheroes joined the fight to save their planet. Thousands of tons of wreckage litter the globe. Governments are attempting to secure it, some for good and others for ill. Supervillains and their minions are also grabbing up as much as they can.

The death of Silver Sentry signaled the end of The Silver Generation and the transition into the darker Bronze Generation. A battle with Bombardier left the android’s body in pieces. He was laid to rest by his family & friends, with his adopted human daughter taking on the mantle of The Silver Rose in her late father’s honor. Months ago, rumors that Sentry was alive again started to circulate. He was spotted in Hong Kong, Cape Town, and Rome. Other androids, robots, and AI all started to vanish. STRIKE believes Sentry is gathering these beings under something called The Machine Collective. Its purpose is unknown.

Aiden Bell used to be Captain Quantum, a child’s fantasy of a superhero. As a thirteen-year-old, he would blow the right notes on the quantum whistle and swap places with the alien super-being Quantum. Along the way, things went sour, but he’s in his fifties now and claims to have been reformed since then, or at least pretending to be. This rebranding has been so persuasive the city leaders have appointed Bell the headmaster of The Victory Academy. He’s interested in making this a pathway for young superheroes working directly for America’s institutions. The instructors at the Academy are highly suspicious of this move.

Movie Review – Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer (2023)
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Western culture is obsessed with singular individuals. Any brief survey of historical events reveals that while there may be people in positions of leadership or authority, they rarely act alone. The Nazis were not simply Hitler. Many of them passed through the war untarnished and even got cushy jobs working for the United States government, like Werner Von Braun. A general depends upon an army. The U.S. government is not just the President. Oppenheimer was placed in a leadership position at Los Alamos, but the construction and deployment of the atomic bomb cannot be placed at his feet alone. That also doesn’t excuse his involvement, either.

TV Review – Shogun Season One

Shogun Season One (2024)
Written by Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks, Shannon Goss, Nigel Williams, Emily Yoshida, Matt Lambert, Maegan Houang, and Caillin Puente
Directed by Jonathan van Tulleken, Charlotte Brändström, Frederick E.O. Toye, Hiromi Kamata, Takeshi Fukunaga, and Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour

I must confess that of all the Japanese media, the stories surrounding this historical period typically leave me cold. I can acknowledge that there is tremendous quality here, but the philosophy of life is so dramatically alien to me that I have difficulty connecting to it. Unlike the protagonist here, I do not feel the intense etiquette systems. It comes across to me as oppressive and suffocating. But then, I wouldn’t be surprised if a Japanese person who finds this perspective normal looked at how I lived my life and felt that I was in a sort of prison, too. All societies are, to an extent, prisons; they have rules relatively rigid to outsiders. And that’s kind of what this show is exploring.

Movie Review – Black Rain

Black Rain (1989)
Written by Shōhei Imamura and Toshirō Ishido
Directed by Shōhei Imamura

In a bizarre coincidence, two movies titled Black Rain were released in 1989. They both take place in Japan. They opened in theaters one week apart. The other Black Rain we won’t be reviewing is a Michael Douglas-led action picture about the Yakuza directed by Ridley Scott. No one involved in the writing of that film was Japanese. But they both derive their title from the same phenomenon: the black rain that fell after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This substance was nuclear fallout falling like rain from the massive pyrocumulus cloud left in the bomb’s wake. The U.S. picture uses the black rain as a plot point and doesn’t really provide context or give adequate respect to the victims. As is typical in escapist Western cinema, it’s exploitation from top to bottom. Not so with the Japanese film.

Movie Review – Miracle Mile

Miracle Mile (1988)
Written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt

Part of the curse the United States put upon itself by developing and then dropping two atomic bombs on civilian populations in Japan is that they had set a new precedent. In places like Dresden, they employed similar tactics with less, but still devastating weapons. Pre-industrial war had always affected civilian populations, but this was something new. The atomic bomb wasn’t just a tool of destruction; it was mass annihilation. It was genocide contained in a small package. Once you use something like that on another society, the U.S. would inevitably live in paranoia that it would be done to them. They forgot the part that few societies on Earth are as profoundly sociopathic as ours.

PopCult Podcast – Janet Planet/The Beast

This week we’ve got a close-up examination of a complicated mother/daughter relationship and a woman going on a surreal odyssey through her past lives.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Against the Wind Part One

You can purchase Against the Wind here

I recently used Cezar Capacle’s excellent zine of tables Random Realities as part of my solo world-building for another series. I love the versatility and depth of those tools, so I thought I would try out this game system he’s put out, Against the Wind. This solo/co-op fantasy game is set in a wintery world ravaged by strong winds and brutal cold. The artwork leans heavily into classic fairy tale design, and the game complements that vibe. What I found in playing Against the Wind is a robust procedural system for solo play that feels like what an official version of solo Dungeon World might be like.

Solo Tabletop RPG World Building – Finishing Touches

Read our last session where we used Becoming the Villain to develop one of the main antagonists for our campaign.

I am almost ready to start playing this superhero campaign I’ve been world-building, but I wanted to use three more tools from superhero tabletop RPGs as some finishing touches. I decided to use Starforged as the system with some fan-made superhero assets, but these other games provide instruments that help get a sense of how the world operates. I discovered these by reading other blogs and paging through the PDFs on my laptop.