PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – The Big Heat

The Big Heat (1953)
Written by Sydney Boehm
Directed by Fritz Lang

What is the Law? Who does it exist to protect? It’s becoming more evident to me, maybe to you too, that the Law as an institution in the States (as that is where I grew up) does not exist to protect me. If I benefit from it, that is an unintended benefit. The Law is in place to protect & serve the wealthy ownership class. The main prerogative of the police as an institution is to protect the rich & their property. If that means cracking the skulls of the plebs, they don’t shed a tear over that. The noir genre is full of characters who find themselves on the receiving end of these systems, and over the years, one subgenre has emerged: the rogue cop. It probably didn’t start here, but The Big Heat was likely one of the significant sparks to see this subgenre grow in popularity. It’s a very reactionary response to social injustice, continuing the fixation on hyper-individualist solutions.

PopCult Podcast – The Blue Caftan/Rotting in the Sun

A beautiful & intensely intimate Moroccan drama & an intensely funny satirical Chilean comedy make up our two picks for this week.

Patron Pick – Gran Turismo

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 Matt Harris.

Gran Turismo (2023)
Written by Jason Hall, Alex Tse, and Zach Baylin
Directed by Neill Blomkamp

2023 feels like an apocalyptic year for Hollywood. The labor strikes, which the studio execs refuse to approach in good faith, stretch into the future. Rumblings of AI-generated films & television abound. The content coming out often feels like it was already written by AI anyway. The mainstream has never been such a void of humanity, and that’s saying a lot. The brand movie and video game adaptations have been hot commodities as trends shift in a disturbing direction. These two horrible new late-stage capitalism genres come together in the mire that is Gran Turismo. “Based on a true story” but clearly embellished and overly dramatized, which doesn’t help the picture to become more compelling. Not since Black Adam have I felt such a sinking sense of doom watching a movie that this medium I love so much is being strangled in the States, everything that made it worth engaging with melting away (thank god for world cinema!).

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Lisergia

Lisergia
Designed & Written by Cezar Capacle

You can purchase this game here

When someone hears about a tabletop rpg, they typically think of character/class-based systems where adventures are had, treasure of some sort is discovered, and a story is told. You would be right in almost every circumstance except this one. Lisergia goes in a direction I’ve never seen a ttrpg go before. In some ways, you could argue it’s not a ttrpg but a freewriting tool. I would push back that this limits what a ttrpg can be, and I think it’s much broader than people contemplate. One of my favorite things with ttrpgs, whether I play solo or with a group, is the spontaneous emergence of ideas. I’ve always loved David Lynch’s take on this: thoughts emerging from a massive pool, and we are just receivers. Lisergia is a game that plays to that idea.

Patron Pick – Fences

Fences (2016)
Written by August Wilson
Directed by Denzel Washington

There is no argument against the acting in this film. It is solid from top to bottom, with Viola Davis stealing the show from a strong Denzel Washington. The emotions feel real, lived in, and presented with authenticity. The film adheres rigidly close to the original stage play to the point that the deceased August Wilson has sole screenwriting credit. That may not be the best direction for a film based on the play rather than a recorded performance of the stage play. Director Washington does a decent job giving filmic qualities to the material, but not enough. The world feels constricted because we never leave the house while so much time passes. Additionally, some themes about masculinity and fatherhood feel muddled, and the ultimate message is troubling.

Comic Book Review – The Saga of The Swamp Thing Volume Four

The Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume Four (2010)
Reprints The Saga of the Swamp Thing #43-45, Swamp Thing #46-50
Written by Alan Moore
Art by Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, Stan Woch, Rick Veitch, Alfredo Alcala, Ron Randall, and Tom Mandrake

This collection from Moore’s Swamp Thing run sealed the deal for me. I haven’t ever read better moments of horror in a comic book than some of the sequences in these issues. Moore knows how to take surreal imagery and turn it into dread-inducing moments where reality bends & warps. In that distortion, we are treated to a story that blends horror with epic dark fantasy. It’s fascinating to see how Moore set a standard for the occult corner of the DC Universe that has held strong four decades later.

Movie Review – Night and the City

Night and the City (1950)
Written by Austin Dempster, William E. Watts, and Jo Eisinger
Directed by Jules Dassin

For years, American film industry censorship worked to soften the edge of noir films. There would always be a good cop, or crime would always punished severely. This caused the stories to lose their bite present in the source material, where writers wrestled with big existential questions and faced the cruelty of life in the modern era. The United Kingdom, while not exempt from moralizing about films, allowed for a more nuanced version of noir to be presented on the screen. At the time of its release, Night and the City was noted for being a film without sympathetic characters (save for maybe one woman). Some critics of the time saw the film as “trashy” and “pointless” in reaction. I take a different stance; this movie points out how desperately people live in the struggle for survival exacerbated by capitalism.

TV Review – The Venture Brothers Season Three

The Venture Brothers Season Three (Adult Swim)
Written by Jackson Publick & Doc Hammer
Directed by Jackson Publick

Season One of The Venture Brothers was rough, though very inspired. Season Two focused on tightening things up and connecting the elements introduced into this unique world. I remember the episodes from these seasons with much detail. I owned them both on DVD in the mid/late-2000s and watched them on repeat with my then-roommate Eddie. Season three came along as I was starting graduate school and dealing with some new stresses in life, so I watched it, but there were a lot of distractions. It was also the last Venture Brothers season I watched in its entirety, so everything after this will be new territory for me. Season three felt a little new as well, with sudden flashes of memories that I had seen these stories before.

Movie Review – The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)
Written by Graham Greene
Directed by Carol Reed

The film noir was an international hit. In our last review, we saw how Akira Kurosawa interpreted the genre in Japan. This time around, we look at a British application of noir. After watching this movie, I had a question: are Cold War/spy films a subgenre of film noir? There is undoubtedly some shared DNA. Look at a book/film like John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which has all the tropes of a film noir, most importantly, a doomed protagonist who faces the consequences of his past actions despite trying to do better. Over time, the spy novel/movie became its own thing, but it was born out of the noir.

Movie Review – Stray Dog

Stray Dog (1949)
Written by Akira Kurosawa & Ryūzō Kikushima
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

When we think about Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, we typically think of samurai films, his earlier work like Rashomon & the Yojimbo films, or his later epics like Ran or Throne of Blood. But Kurosawa was a far more diverse filmmaker than that. He directed four noir movies in the post-war era of Japan, and Stray Dog served as the way forward for the genre in Japan. Watching Stray Dog today, you can see its influence spread beyond Japan. Noir from China and South Korea show their roots in this earlier picture, its unique mixture of comedy and crime stories. Where American noir was restrained by the morals of the Hays Code, particularly that crime can’t pay and the police cannot be mocked, Japanese cinema had no such restraints. As a result, Stray Dog feels ahead of its time compared to the noir of the States in the 1940s.