PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – My Own Private Idaho

My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Written & Directed by Gus Van Sant

A person’s inner life can be such a vast, complex landscape. The way we process experiences & emotions may have some universality, but ultimately, the way you feel inside going through these things is something no one else can ever truly know. For the character of Mikey in My Own Private Idaho, almost his whole life is made up of this intimate inner world due to his chronic narcolepsy. He can never quite get anywhere or finish a conversation before passing out. Gus Van Sant tells his story from this character’s perspective, which means the audience sees the narrative in fragments. We’re in one place, then another, only to return to where we started. Did we really go anywhere at all? Or was this just the lovely dream of a lonely person with a very uncertain future ahead of them? Maybe it’s all these things. Perhaps the dream world is just as real as the tangible one for someone like Mikey.

Movie Review – Maurice

Maurice (1987)
Written by Kit Hesketh-Harvey and James Ivory
Directed by James Ivory

The English boys’ boarding school culture has long been an environment where homosexuality has been experimented with. It makes sense adolescent young men feel a surge of hormones and spend lots of time building intense friendships with each other. While not as prominent in the United States, we can look at the arena of high school sports as a similar venue. I’m never surprised when I learn a player on a football team develops feelings for a teammate. However, as much as these conditions are fertile for young men to come out as homosexual, they are more often than not met with toxic masculine brutality if they do. It’s one of the frustrating contradictions at the heart of male bonding in the West. Male camaraderie is supposed to be one of the most important things, yet it must never be romantic.

Movie Review – Paris Is Burning

Paris Is Burning (1990)
Directed by Jennie Livingston

Exclusion is a standard tool used by the institutions that make up the United States. The ones who get excluded are typically BIPOC, LGBTQ, economically destitute, and/or disabled in some fashion. By pushing these people to the fringes of society, often by reactionaries who ultimately gain nothing through the act of exclusion, they are forced to create subcultures. These subcultures respond to being told they are not beautiful or have value. The marginalized simply redefine the terms of what beauty & value can be.

TV Review – Succession Season Four

Succession Season Four (HBO)
Written by Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, Susan Soon He Stanton, Lucy Prebble, Jon Brown, Ted Cohen, Georgia Pritchett, Will Arbery, and Will Tracy
Directed by Mark Mylod, Becky Martin, Lorene Scafaria, Andrij Parekh, Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

***Lots of spoilers***

In Michael Parenti’s 1993 book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, the author goes through each stakeholder in bringing the day’s news to the average American. The most powerful in this hierarchy are the owners of the media conglomerates that own the United States’ newspapers & television stations. While written in the late 1980s and updated in the early 1990s, Parenti does not touch on the coming power of the internet, but we can understand that it, too, is folded into the realm of control of the monied classes. The world as we perceive it, taught in American schools and raised on American media, is a fabrication. The ideology behind these things is not a conspiracy where world leaders sit plotting around a table in a secret headquarters kind.

PopCult Podcast – BlackBerry/Ham on Rye

A couple of quirky offbeat films make up our pair for this episode. One tells the story of the rise & fall of the most popular cellphone before the iPhone came along. The second is surreal, dreamlike, unsettling odyssey through suburbia.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Anamnesis

Anamnesis (Blinking Birch Games)
Written & Designed by Samantha Leigh

Purchase a copy of this game here.

If it wasn’t for Samantha Leigh, I don’t think I would be doing solo tabletop rpg reviews on this blog. Through their TikTok posts, I discovered that itch.io was the place to go for indie RPGs, especially solo ones. Now I have a massive list of games I want to play and review, and I can’t say that would have happened without their infectious enthusiasm about games. So, it felt natural to eventually review their game Anamnesis. It looked plain from the outside, with no bold, colorful stylized art, mainly text with a simple cover. Yet, within this game is a powerful creative tool.

Comic Book Review – Batman by Grant Morrison Omnibus Volume One

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Batman Omnibus by Grant Morrison Volume One (2009)
Reprints Batman #655-658, 663-683 with material from 52 #30,47 and DC Universe #0
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Andy Kubert, J.H. Williams III, Tony Daniel, Joe Bennett, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Ryan Benjamin, and John Van Fleet

Batman has had a wildly varied history over his 80 years as a comic book character. The popular conception of Batman as The Dark Knight started in the 1970s and was continued by Tim Burton’s 1989 film. That wasn’t always the way. The most notable example of a different sort of Batman is the high-camp television version of the 1960s, but even before then, the title had a much sillier bent in the 1950s as science fiction stories were more popular. Grant Morrison is a writer who always seeks to encompass the totality of a character when he’s writing a comic, finding a way to make all the ideas fit even if some seem absurd. They understand that comics are inherently silly and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. During their run, Morrison managed to reinvent Batman, adding one particular element that has stuck around for fifteen years and counting: Batman’s son.

Movie Review – Pink Flamingos

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Pink Flamingos (1972)
Written & Directed by John Waters

Well, Pride month is here, which means corporations & municipalities all around America will temporarily use rainbow avatars on social media and paint homeless deterrence rainbow colors to celebrate. Unless they are one of several states actively legislating against LGBTQ people, where Pride celebrations have either been banned by city leadership or heavily threatened with violence by reactionaries state & federal leaders feel no desire to do anything about. So I decided that I wanted to watch a bunch of queer cinema I’ve heard about for years as a way to see & write about these films and maybe provide solidarity for some readers out there.

June 2023 Posting Schedule

Film Series

June 2nd thru 23rd – Queer Cinema

Pink Flamingos, Paris is Burning, Maurice, My Own Private Idaho, But I’m a Cheerleader, The Watermelon Woman, Beau Travail, Happy Together, Mysterious Skin, Bad Education

June 26th thru 30th – The Adventures of Indiana Jones

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

TV Review – Yellowjackets Season One

Yellowjackets Season One (Showtime)
Written by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco, Sarah L. Thompson, Liz Phang, Ameni Rozsa, Chantelle M. Wells, Katherine Kearns, Cameron Brent Johnson
Directed by Karyn Kusama, Jamie Travis, Eva Sørhaug, Deepa Mehta, Billie Woodruff, Ariel Kleiman, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, and Eduardo Sánchez

Yellowjackets was a show I knew of, a piece of background noise in the seemingly infinite media landfill of our age. What I knew about it before watching the first season is that it was about people getting stuck out in the wilderness. I also knew who some of the actresses in the series were, but beyond that, I couldn’t have told you much. It’s not too odd to know a decent amount about things I don’t watch simply through cultural osmosis. Nevertheless, something about what I had seen of Yellowjackets kept me interested enough to finally sit down and watch the first season. I was met with something I liked but didn’t love, an interesting mix of Desperate Housewives and Lost that intrigues me enough to be up for the second season.