PopCult Reviews

Weekly Links – 28 Feb 2025

It’s the end of another week, which means I’m sharing more links.

The week concluded on a sad note with the passing of Gene Hackman. I hold this actor very close to my heart as one of my earliest film memories is watching Richard Donner’s Superman. I don’t think anyone has played a better Luthor. He’s necessarily comics accurate, but he was a balance of funny and genuinely evil. IndieWire pays tribute to the late actor, and I have plans for a mini-series of some of Hackman’s best work planned for this summer.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Everspark Part Seven

Read the previous part here

Quick Fate Check: Does Cypress hear about the destruction of Slumbering Bay before departing Kingshold? Result: 20, Cypress receives a report from Lugal Apogee that explains the destruction of his homeland in great detail.

The Capybarian shuts himself up in his room at the Ash Tree Inn. Hulde and Demis keep vigil in the tavern, letting their ally have a day to shut himself off from the world. Even Apogee gives Cypress space, sending a messenger to hand orders over to Hulde.

Movie Review – Titus

Titus (1999)
Written by William Shakespeare & Julie Taymor
Directed by Julie Taymor

Titus Andronicus was the first of Shakespeare’s tragedies, written between 1588 and 1593. It feels different than his later work, more concerned with the spectacle of blood & gore that was made popular by his contemporaries. Some critics hold that Shakespeare was parodying popular plays of the time, like the work of Christopher Marlowe, which was immensely bloody. Death was something people in the West had a far closer proximity to in those days, incredibly violent deaths. Disease ran rampant and was not a pretty thing to watch take a person’s life. While war had not become industrialized yet, it was more intimate. To kill with a blade meant smelling the breath of your enemy, feeling their blood on your hands. This was also an era where the mythologizing of the Roman Empire was in full swing, used to justify England’s first moves towards colonizing other lands. When the Victorian Era came about with its censorious bent, Titus was considered uncouth and fell out of favor.

Movie Review – Hamlet (1996)

Hamlet (1996)
Written by William Shakespeare & Kenneth Branagh
Directed by Kenneth Branagh

If there was one Shakespeare play I would choose as my introduction to the writer, it would be Hamlet. I wouldn’t pick it because it is the easiest to read but because it exemplifies those literary elements that make Shakespeare’s work resonate across cultures and eras. Kenneth Branagh made this production based on the text presented in the First Folio, which is considered the most official version. That said, the director also allowed himself to play with the images. Flashbacks are employed throughout in a manner that couldn’t have been possible on stage. The result is what I believe to be THE film adaptation of Hamlet.

PopCult Podcast – Vox Lux/The Brutalist

It’s a Brady Corbet double feature starting with a young girl who makes a deal with the Devil after a school shooting. She becomes a pop star whose life never seems to settle. Then, a Holocaust survivor comes to America where his architectural skills clash with the local tastes.

Movie Review – Romeo + Juliet

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Written by William Shakespeare & Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann
Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Romeo + Juliet exists as the confluence of two things. The first was the Shakespeare boom of the 1990s when films based on or inspired by his work had a moment in popular culture. At the same time, Australian director Baz Luhrmann received heaps of praise for his directorial debut, Strictly Ballroom. Luhrman’s approach to the text was that he saw Shakespeare as a writer for the masses, and thus, if the Bard made a contemporary feature film, it would be bold & loud. Luhrmann reasoned the popular entertainment of the day were things like bear-baiting and prostitution; Shakespeare would have played things in a way that kept the crowds happy.

Movie Review – Richard III

Richard III (1995)
Written by William Shakespeare & Ian McKellan and Richard Loncraine
Directed by Richard Loncraine

Shakespeare was no stranger to putting despicable people at the center of his narratives. The point was often to explore them in more complexity than a one-dimensional story might provide. He didn’t excuse evil but wanted to understand how these minds operated. How else can we prevent future evil if we don’t understand the roots of the present one? Richard III is a profoundly evil figure who revels in the suffering he causes others, yet he doesn’t exist in a vacuum. He is the byproduct of a cruel system that inevitably makes people like him.

Comic Book Review – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The IDW Collection Volume One

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The IDW Collection Volume One (2015)
Reprints Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2011) #1-12, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo, and Splinter Micro-Series one-shots
Written by Kevin Eastman & Tom Waltz (with Bobby Curnow, Brian Lynch, Erik Burnham
Art by Kevin Eastman, Dan Duncan, Mateus Santoluco, Franco Urru, Andy Kuhn, Valerio Schiti, Sophie Campbell, Charles Paul Wilson III

Since their debut in 1985, there haven’t been many instances where there wasn’t a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being published. Since 2011, the Turtles’ adventures have been published by IDW. They are the 5th largest comics publisher in the States, having made their way with many licensed books, and currently publish a handful of Star Wars comics outside the Marvel banner. The Turtles have been one of their biggest successes, with a major reboot happening over the last year that has expanded them into a whole line of ongoing books. We’re returning to where it all started with this volume of the first year’s worth of issues.

Weekly Links – 21 Feb 2025

It’s another Weekly Links with things related to media, but also just important things to share. One of those is that all of us need to be getting off the Google teet if at all possible. That’s hard for me because I’ve been on Gmail since 2005. Here is an article sharing some AI-free, encrypted alternatives to Google Docs which I will be trying out to see if they work for me.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Everspark Part Six

Read the previous part here.

(I realized I had forgotten about the overarching Spark of Qazid Icebreath’s journey across the sea. So, I went back and made Spark checks for each failure in the previous session. I closed the Spark, meaning Qazid emerges from the waters and decimates Cypress’s hometown of Slumbering Bay.)

The waters beyond Slumbering Bay churned, turning from sapphire to an ice-rimed gray. Then, with a sound like glaciers colliding, Qazid Icebreath rose from the depths. The beast’s massive form, a mountain of jagged frost and barnacle-crusted scales, shed seawater in torrents as it emerged. Its icy mist breath rolled over the docks, freezing fishing boats in place and coating the wooden piers in ice sheets.