PopCult Reviews

Comic Book Review – The Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume One

Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume One (2009)
Reprints The Saga of the Swamp Thing #20-27
Written by Alan Moore
Art by Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Dan Day, and Rick Veitch

By 1983, the “cool kids” knew about Alan Moore and Swamp Thing introduced him to the rest of comics fandom. Before being brought to DC Comics, Moore had been working away on U.K. titles and Miracleman, the revival of a British superhero intended to be their version of Shazam. His work on the weekly science fiction anthology 2000AD got the attention of DC editor Len Wein, who hired Moore to take over the title from Wein himself. Swamp Thing had initially debuted as a one-off in the horror anthology House of Secrets #92. Later, the character would be reworked, transplanted to the modern day, and become part of a relatively formulaic ongoing series. Moore’s arrival drastically changed the book’s status.

September 2023 Posting Schedule

Film Series
September 4 thru 29 – Noir Masterworks
Laura, Detour, The Big Sleep, The Killers, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Out of the Past, Stray Dog, The Third Man, Night and the City, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly, and Touch of Evil

Comic Book Reviews
September 2 thru 30
Alan Moore’s The Saga of Swamp Thing Volumes One thru Five

Television Reviews
Sept 3 – Mrs. Davis
Sept 10 – My Brilliant Friend Season One
Sept 17 – The Venture Brothers Season Three
Sept 24 – The Bear Season Two

My Favorites Lists
Sept 9 – My Favorite Coen Brothers Supporting Performances
Sept 23 – My Favorite Films About Moving

Solo Tabletop RPG Reviews & Actual Plays
Sept 8 – Starforged: Nexus of Destiny
Sept 10, 17, 24 – Public Access Solo Playthrough

Podcast Schedule
Sept 3 – The Boogeyman/Please Baby Please
Sept 10 – One Fine Morning/Baby Mama
Sept 17 – TBD
Sept 24 – Theater Camp/Cassandro

Summer 2023 Digest

Features
Patron Pick – Last of Shelia [Matt]
Patron Pick – Philadelphia [Bekah]
Patron Pick – The Social Dilemma [Matt]
Patron Pick – Nine Days [Bekah]
Book Update – July/August 2023
My Favorite Films with a Fireworks Scene
My Favorite Willem Dafoe Performances
My Favorite Films Released in August
My Favorite Films of 1983

Book Update – July/August 2023

The Inconsolables: Stories by Michael Wehunt

I was an instant fan of Michael Wehunt after reading his debut collection, Green Pastures, back in 2016. I’ve been waiting for more, and this year, we finally got his follow-up collection. What I found interesting is that he’s changed a lot since that first book. The two still have common threads, but these felt like a real development of those initial ideas. I would argue Wehunt is taking on a significant influence from Robert Aickman, creating supernatural scenarios where the exact nature of the dreadful presence is never detailed. It might be strange things happening in the window in the apartment across the way, as in “Holoow,” or haunting childhood memories resurfacing, as in “Vampire Fiction.” Wehunt returns to some slightly familiar territory with “The Pine Arch Collection,” which continues his fantastic work translating found footage into horror lit. Wehunt works better with words to evoke powerful images than most horror films. My absolute favorite in this collection was “The Teeth of America,” framed as various excerpts from books and news articles detailing a bizarre event in the Appalachians involving hundreds of white supremacists congregating for a ritual. Once again, Wehunt’s imagery is so strong I don’t want any of this ever adapted to a visual medium because, in my opinion, it would diminish the potent horror of the source material.

Patron Pick – Nine Days

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.

Nine Days (2020)
Written & Directed by Edison Oda

I did not like this movie. From what I see online, it has proven to be a very polarizing film, with few people settling in the middle. I know exactly why I didn’t like it, which concerns some creative choices by the writer/director Edison Oda. I think the film is way too long for what it is trying to say and how it is trying to say it, and I argue the message could have been more poignant if a good half hour was shaved off the runtime. By the time we get to the third act, Oda is just saying a lot of the same things over and over but not building upon them in a manner that excites or interests me. It is thematically similar to another divisive film that came out recently, Alfonso Cuaron’s Bardo. I enjoyed Bardo because I felt the director kept things visually inventive, so I never got bored with the images on the screen. Nine Days is never able to move past the sedate, bland tone it sets at the start.

Movie Review – Pauline at the Beach

Pauline at the Beach (1983)
Written & Directed by Eric Rohmer,

Eric Rohmer was the right age to join his colleagues from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema in becoming a filmmaker. Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, whom he worked alongside as editor of the magazine, became the two most prominent names associated with the French New Wave. He did make movies, but not at the same breakneck pace as the others, and he didn’t receive the same level of acclaim until much later in his career. The filmmaker was very secretive about his private life, including that Eric Rohmer wasn’t his real name but a combination of actor/director Erich von Stroheim and writer Sax Rohmer. Unlike his colleagues, Rohmer outlasted them in terms of career length, finding his most significant acclaim in the 1970s & 80s. It was in the 1980s that he began a thematic series titled “Comedies and Proverbs,” with each film based on common sayings in French culture. One of these was Pauline at the Beach.

Movie Review – Tender Mercies

Tender Mercies (1983)
Written by Horton Foote
Directed by Bruce Beresford

Tender Mercies will break your heart, but that’s a good thing. It’s a film that is incredibly sensitive & thoughtful. It’s the story of an alcoholic, not during the midst of a bender or at their most self-destructive. Instead, this is a drunk who has lost everything that had any value. His career, his money, his wife, his daughter. He can’t get them back, but he can try and build something new. It’s a film whose presentation is simple, much like the quiet life lived in its desolate setting. It asks us how we can keep living when so much tragedy falls into our laps, some of it our fault and some of it happenstance.

TV Review – The Bear Season One

The Bear Season One (FX)
Written by Christopher Storer, Sofya Levitsky-Weitz, Karen Joseph Adcock, Catherine Schetina & Rene Gube
Directed by Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo

I felt obligated to watch this one, but I knew it would be good. I can’t say The Bear was what I expected. I knew it was about a restaurant and starred Jeremy Allen White, but I was under the impression it was set at an upscale restaurant. Definitely not. And the first half of season one didn’t stand out as anything overly special. Ariana & I talked about how much the show used a premise akin to something like Cheers. If this had been made in the 1980s or 90s, it would have been a three-camera comedy-drama, probably with a “will they, won’t they” plot stringing the audience along for multiple seasons. We even have a Carla in the form of Tina, but even that character conflict is resolved relatively quickly, and the show moves on.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Fiasco + Mythic Part Two

Read Part One where I explain what parts of Mythic I’ll be using as well as the character set-up for this game.

The heat beats down on Ginette LaFever as she sits in the pitiful shade of the dugout, shadows but not much cooler than the sun-blazed field she watches her players on. Her eye is on one particular player at the moment, Yu Kim. The girl has only been in Poppleton for about six months, and Ginette doesn’t like her attitude. If you were to ask Ginette to articulate what she didn’t like about Yu, the softball coach would probably stammer and search for the words, likely dropping the phrase, “I’m not racist, but…” The girl just “has a bad vibe” is Ginette’s go-to when she tries to justify the disdain in her own head.

PopCult Podcast – RMN/Past Lives

Two more new releases take the spotlight this week. In one we journey to Transylvania, but there’s no vampires here. Instead, it’s a tense & moody exploration of various ethnic groups at each other’s throat. In our second film, we span 24 years as a Korean woman retains thoughts of her childhood crush while moving on with her life and changing in so many ways.