PopCult Reviews

PopCult Podcast – The Sweet East/The American Society of Magical Negroes

This was a week of films that were not great. One is a Alice in Wonderland picaresque following a hipster down the East Coast. The second is a wildly misguided attempt at racial satire that is woefully hollow.

TV Review – Neon Genesis Evangelion Episodes 13 thru 18

Neon Genesis Evangelion – Episodes 13 thru 18
Written by Hideaki Anno, Mitsuo Iso, Akio Satsukawa, Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Shinji Higuchi
Directed by Tensai Okamura, Masahiko Ōtsuka, Ken Andō, Naoyasu Habu, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Minoru Ōhara

Neon Genesis Evangelion is finally unfolding its mystery with this batch of episodes. Of everything I have watched so far, these were the ones that grabbed me the most. I won’t say I understand every detail of what is going on, but the ideas presented here are both about how the Angels are evolving and what NERV’s true end goal is with the development of Evas. Some very anime-trope-y things are still going on, but they feel toned down in this section of the series. I think that was the right idea because now we’re starting to see who the real villain of this story is, and I don’t think it’s the Angels.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa Part Four

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Read our introduction to Vivian Endicott here.

Vivian will be wearing the Mask of the Guilty. I based this on the fact that she’s literally haunted by her mother, Claire, who died in alone, in poverty of an overdose.

Vivian followed the map she’d found stuffed into the stacks of Ballingrud’s Occult Books. It happened while she was thumbing through a facsimile reprint of Codex Maleficus, the slip of paper fell out.

Comic Book Review – Palestine

Palestine (Fantagraphics)
Written and illustrated by Joe Sacco

Journalist/cartoonist Joe Sacco visited the Palestinian territory during the First Intifada (1987-1993). You may have seen the word, Intifada lately, and, depending on how you had explained it to you, you very possibly got the wrong definition. The Intifada was a period of sustained protest and civil disobedience by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation. 1987 was the twentieth anniversary of the Arab-Israeli War, which saw the occupation seizing even more territory, pushing the indigenous Palestinians into smaller & smaller walled-off spaces. Sacco spent a lot of time visiting the West Bank and Gaza Strip, having conversations with Palestinians of all ages who had all experienced brutality at the hands of the Western occupying force. He recreates these moments in this incredibly moving graphic novel.

TV Review – Northern Exposure Season One

Northern Exposure Season One (CBS)
Written by Joshua Brand, John Falsey, Stuart Stevens, Karen Hall, Jerry Stahl, Sean Clark, David Assael, Steve Wasserman, Jessica Klein, and Charles Rosin
Directed by Joshua Brand, Peter O’Fallon, Steve Cragg, Dan Lerner, David Carson, Sandy Smolan, Max Tash

I was a weird kid, if you haven’t picked up on it. I read TV Guide every week when I had access to it. It was through reading that magazine that I came to learn about the show Northern Exposure and the comparisons to Twin Peaks. I watched that program as a kid, and on rare occasions, I caught an episode of Northern Exposure. What I liked about Twin Peaks was the horror of it, and this show about a small town in Alaska didn’t have any of it. Many decades later, I still hear very positive things about Northern Exposure and decided I should sit down and watch it with more mature eyes.

Movie Review – Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Written and directed by David Lynch

I’ve mentioned on the blog before how I discovered David Lynch as an eight-year-old who was somehow allowed to watch Twin Peaks. For a long time, I knew him as “the guy who made Twin Peaks.” Even in college, as I began to explore his greater body of work, I was like most people; I just didn’t understand the abstractness of it all. What shifted my understanding was reading Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews with the director focusing on his work in chronological order up to Mulholland Drive. Through this text, I came to understand the source of Lynch’s creativity – from deep inside his subconscious and expressed through images without any implied context – and how intuitive his work is. This happened around the same time I was taking Literary Theory & Criticism, which was probably the most influential academic experience I’ve ever had.

Movie Review – Jackie Brown

Jackie Brown (1997)
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Saying a lot has been written about Quentin Tarantino’s films would be an understatement. I think it would be safe to say that Jackie Brown is the film the least written about or regarded with the least awe. It was the filmmaker’s follow-up to Pulp Fiction, and such “next movies” can fail to live up to eager fans’ expectations. Brown is a far more muted picture than we have come to expect from Tarantino. There are a few loud stylistic flourishes, but for the most part, the picture is entirely character-driven. The result is something that still feels very fresh despite being made twenty-five years ago. Other movies will age poorly, but Tarantino’s work always feels like it could have been made today.

Patron Pick – Betty Blue

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 Bekah Lindstrom.

Betty Blue (1986)
Written and directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

Certain movies don’t take long to reveal that they were written by a man who has difficulty seeing women as anything other than to make a man feel good about himself. Betty Blue is such a movie, rife with all the cliches of French cinema. That doesn’t make it a disposable, awful film. It comes across as more comical with how severe and melodramatic it sometimes takes itself. The film is also a great example of a very particular subgenre of cinema called Cinéma du look. The term was coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in 1989 and has been applied to the films of Luc Besson and Leos Carax. It’s style over substance, spectacle over narrative. It’s slick commercial aesthetics with a focus on the alienated in society. It’s also very male-gaze-y.

Movie Review – Chungking Express

Chungking Express (1994)
Written and directed by Wong Kar-wai

The Chungking Mansions is a building located in Kowloon, Hong Kong. It was intended as a residential building but ended up being partitioned into many independent low-budget hotels, shops, and other services. There’s a mix of selling directly to the public and wholesalers from these businesses. Because it has become so unlike its original intent, the Chungking Mansions are often compared to the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City. Wong Kar-wai grew up in the Mansions, and their densely packed environment shaped his sensibilities as a filmmaker. So many people in such a small space meant many stories, relationships, and conflicts.

PopCult Podcast – Problemista/Civil War

This is a wildly divergent A24 double feature. One film is a comedy about the immigrant experience in NYC. The second follow journalists through a war on American soil.