PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Life is Sweet

Life Is Sweet (1990)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh could be seen as a director who makes funny little movies about British working-class people’s lives. That is true to an extent. However, there’s so much more happening under the surface of these films, which is Leigh pointing out to us how complex & nuanced lives we see as surface-level can be. Our lives are more complicated than someone like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. We experience life more fully than them, as we are still in contact with what makes us part of the natural world: the struggle for survival. Being working-class in the West is very complex, as you’ve been afforded some distractions & escapes that people in the developing world can only dream of. Yet, you still experience regular anxiety over housing/bills/food/etc. Life is often complicated by our perspective and class position.

April 2024 Posting Schedule

Film Series

[Mike Leigh: Selected Works] – April 1st thru 11th]
High Hopes, The Life is Sweet, Naked, Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, All of Nothing, Vera Drake, Happy-Go-Lucky

[Neo-Noir: Rethinking the Darkness] April 15th thru 29th
The Conformist, The French Connection, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Chungking Express, Jackie Brown, Mulholland Drive, Collateral

Movie Review – High Hopes

High Hopes (1988)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

To see Mike Leigh’s name credited as the maker behind a movie is to signify something. It means you will be treated to some of the best conversations between very human, grounded characters you’ve ever heard. The story will be focused on the working class, with an even-handed mix of misery and mirth. The whole thing will be very British but not in the nationalistic sense; in the communal sense, British people living quiet lives with moments of drama in them. High Hopes was not Leigh’s first picture. Previously, he directed Bleak Moments (1971) with his second feature, Meantime, but he did not come to theaters until 1983. Because Leigh’s preferred method of working is to allow the actors to improvise dialogue during rehearsal sessions, the filmmaker had trouble getting financial backing. But with High Hopes, Leigh’s career finally kicked off in full, leading to a string of fantastic movies that continue to come out today.

TV Review – Neon Genesis Evangelion Episodes 7 thru 12

Neon Genesis Evangelion – Episodes 7-12
Written by Hideaki Anno, Yōji Enokido, Akio Satsukawa, and Seiji Mizushima
Directed by Keiichi Sugiyama, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Tsuyoshi Kaga, Hiroyuki Ishidō, and Tetsuya Watanabe

Here are my thoughts on the first six episodes of Evangelion

My feelings on this next batch of six episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are far more positive than the first six. The first six were not terrible, but these are diving just a bit more beneath the surface of the back story, and some characters are introduced that add some much-needed conflict & new personalities to the series.

PopCult Podcast – Motorama, The Dark Backward, and Late-Stage Capitalist American Grotesque

While watching this week’s movies, we think we might have stumbled upon a genre of film hidden right in front of our eyes the whole time. Motorama and The Dark Backward becoming a jumping off point for bigger conversation.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Ironsworn: The City of Eternal Night Part Five

Read Part Four here

Oracle: Reveal Warning

Uram returns to Carver’s lair to find things in chaos. Carver is ranting about Elysia Velasir, an information broker for the Society, who is withholding the date of the heist from him. Only the most elite members of the Society are getting access to when & where the citywide chaos will begin. Early on, the leadership of the Larcenists’ Society realized they were an organization of highly untrustworthy people, so the most vital information was secreted away. Carver believes he deserves to be in the know, so he wants to steal it from Velasir’s office.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Starforged: Wrath of the Vok Act Two

Read Act One here

There is no known origin point for the Vok (translated to the common tongue: Voidforged). The earliest mention of them in the United Planetary Archives is from ancient Sulvu writings. A tribe of Sulvu in the pre-Nevaa period made cave paintings of a shape in the sky that historians now believe was a Vok scout ship. There was no subsequent encounter with the Vok until after the Sulvu became an FTL-level civilization, and those were minor skirmishes. For millennia, no one knew the extent of the Vok, how they were organized, or their ultimate goals.

Patreon Pick – Gaza mon amour

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.

Gaza mon amour (2020)
Written and directed by Tarzan Nasser and Arab Nasser

The popular image of something and reality are often oceans apart, especially when we in the West conceptualize something. At the time of this writing, Gaza is something beyond decency, brutally ravaged by a genocide that just keeps going in broad daylight. That doesn’t mean life has always been like this for the Palestinians. They have had a persistent resiliency, even while walled off and treated in the most subhuman manner. The human spirit is a tough thing to extinguish. It isn’t impossible, but it can happen. Gaza mon amour is a film about the persistence of the heart in the latter years of a person’s life and how the desire for love lives on.

Movie Review – Moolaadé

Moolaadé (2004)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

This was Ousmane Sembène’s final film. He passed away in Dakar in 2007 at the age of 84. For this last picture, the filmmaker focused his energy on a critique of his own culture. Female genital mutilation or circumcision is a common practice in several African countries. It’s traditionally performed with an iron sheet or knife. An elder will remove part or all of the female genitals with no anesthesia and then suture the wound with a needle or plant thorn. As much as 15% of girls forced to endure the procedure die from excessive blood loss or the infections that follow. Sembène wants to intensely critique his culture and highlight how some traditions must stop.

Movie Review – Camp de Thiaroye

Camp de Thiaroye (1988)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembene and Thierno Faty Sow

Few things are accepted as fundamental as a person being paid for their labor. However, it was not that long ago that slavery was an open practice in the West and its colonized territories. Don’t get me wrong. Slavery isn’t gone. The specific Transatlantic slave trade was dissolved, yes, but slavery persists to this day. Prison labor is a form of slavery. Debt of all kinds is used to keep people under the boot. Human trafficking is a rampant problem that sees no end in sight. The Thiaroye massacre should come as no surprise then, yet still, it outrages the decent among us.