PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Beau Is Afraid

Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Written & Directed by Ari Aster

I’ve begun to feel like much of American culture & media is just a falsehood lately. For me, it’s been a combination of sitting back and soaking in the strangeness of social interaction in that culture, embracing my autism, and taking psychedelics. Everything feels chaotic in a very contrived, artificial way. We know that nothing about man-made societies is unintentionally chaotic; there are lots of moving parts behind the scenes. So, who benefits from the chaos? That seems easy to answer: the capital class, the owners, the managerial class. Chaos keeps people disoriented, unable to form bonds, and thus unable to achieve solidarity. Each person comes to feel isolated, terrified and atomized. Individuals are standing in the middle of their own personal hurricanes. This is the entire tone of Ari Aster’s latest picture, Beau Is Afraid.

Patron Pick – Memories of Murder

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.

Memories of Murder (2003)
Written by Bong Joon-ho & Shim Sung-bo
Directed by Bong Joon-ho

The serial killer phenomenon has been around for a long time but only occurred in South Korea for the first time in the mid-1980s. In 1996, Korean playwright Kim Kwang-rim wrote Come to See Me, loosely based on these first killings where 10 women & girls had their lives taken by the same person. Director Bong Joon-ho co-wrote the film adaptation, which touches on the actual events but dramatizes most of its elements. This would be Bong’s more prominent debut after writing & directing the indie feature Barking Dogs Never Bite three years prior. The film would be released in the heart of what film historians now call New Korean Cinema, an explosion of movies from South Korea that exhibited filmmakers with incredible technical skills but also nuanced, complex writing & characterization. While a director like Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave) is known for gorgeously choreographed stylized violence, Bong is a director whose trademark (at least in my opinion) is his blend of horrific story beats and weirdly comforting dark comedy. It’s a delicate balance, but his movies always seem to pull it off.

Movie Review – Christiane F.

Christiane F. (1981)
Written by Herman Weigel
Directed by Uli Edel

“Scared Straight” is a subgenre of exploitation cinema focused on discouraging the youth from engaging in certain activities. A movie like Reefer Madness falls into this category, an ignorant to the point of farce examination of smoking weed. You could even throw something like America’s Most Wanted into this mix too. I can remember the way homosexual men were portrayed on that show was always in the context of being child molesters. Needless to say, scared straight media rarely presents a solid foundation of facts, instead opting for reactionary panic. In America, the book Go Ask Alice was published as the “real diary” of a teenage girl who succumbed to drug addiction. It’s much less well-known now, but when it came out in 1971, it fueled a lot of parents’ and teenagers’ minds with horror movie-level fears about drugs. That isn’t to say movies about the dangers of drugs are all bad. In the same way, not all drugs are harmful to you. I’m highly progressive in my views on drugs and their use, but there is one drug that scares me; maybe I’ve just been successfully brainwashed, or maybe not. The one that I would never touch is heroin.

PopCult Podcast – The Addiction/Memories

New York based director Abel Ferrara left Hollywood and came back to his NYC indie roots in 1995 by directing a very…um, pretentious vampire movie. This was also the same year the creator of Akira got an anime anthology devoted to three of his stories.

My Favorite Crying Scenes

The Kid (1921)
Written & Directed by Charlie Chaplin

We (Americans) easily forget how cruel & brutal life was just a handful of generations ago. When you watch a Chaplin film, you are reminded how crude most cities were at the time, with muddy thoroughfares and people living in hovels. Charlie Chaplin was a director concerned mainly with the socio-economic class he grew up in, the working poor. The Kid captures the importance of family in making your way through life, especially when you are poor. This sequence includes two beautifully performed crying scenes. The first is child actor Jackie Coogan’s heartbreaking tears as he is separated from his father. Then we get a pair of criers when Chaplin’s Little Tramp is reunited with his son. You can imagine the heartstrings being pulled in the audience who first saw this.

Comic Book Review – Twilight

Twilight (1990)
Reprints Twilight #1-3
Written by Howard Chaykin
Illustrated Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez

The late 1980s/early 1990s were a period of experimentation for DC Comics. In the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, creators had a chance to dramatically reimagine classic characters. You have probably heard of books like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns or John Byrne’s Man of Steel. Throughout this period, “more serious” takes were published that made the books, for better or worse, more adult. One of the losses of the post-Crisis period was the non-superhero comics. Before 1985, DC still published comics that fell into the horror, war, western, and science fiction genres. The popularity of these titles had severely diminished from their peak decades earlier, but they still had a few devoted fans. One of those fans was comics creator Howard Chaykin.

The Short Films of Ari Aster Part Three

Part One & Part Two

We end our look at Ari Aster’s short films with some of his best works. We start with Basically, a monologue/character piece starring Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). She appeared briefly in Munchausen, and Aster liked working with her. Basically was part of what would have been a web series that featured residents of Los Angeles talking to the camera about themselves and their lives. One thing the director does so magnificently is allowing his characters to take us through an emotional roller coaster. We might start hating them, then grow to empathize, then be taken back to despising them, and finally feel the pathos again. Brosnahan is a perfect actor for this task, and Shandy Pickles is a complicated & funny character.

The Short Films of Ari Aster Part Two

Part One and Part Three

TDF Really Works…well, they include it in Aster’s filmography on Wikipedia, and it has its own entry on Letterboxd. This feels like something inspired by Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show Great Job. This is another example of Aster’s sense of humor which hasn’t been quite as prominent in his two feature films. Beau Is Afraid looks like it might be going there, though.

The Short Films of Ari Aster Part One

Part Two and Part Three

This week, Ari Aster’s third feature film, Beau Is Afraid, will be released in theaters. I am a big fan of Aster mainly because his aesthetic and sensibilities match with filmmakers I already enjoyed when I saw Hereditary for the first time. The director has openly talked about his admiration for Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson (Songs From the Second Floor, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence). Both directors employ a dark sense of humor in their work, along with framing & blocking that gives scenes a slightly unreal atmosphere. Aster is also hugely influenced by The Coen Brothers, particularly when they blend elements of their Jewish background into their work (A Serious Man, for instance). Albert Brooks (Modern Romance, Defending Your Life) is another Jewish filmmaker who has shaped Aster’s cinematic eye. And then there’s Ingmar Bergman, whose movies Persona, Fanny and Alexander, and more are the source for much of Aster’s interest in exploring suffering.

PopCult Podcast – To Die For/Underground

1995 was a year with some wildly diverse films. For instance, this week we have a Gus Van Sant picture that wants to comment on the media & celebrity. The other is probably the most controversial film you’ve never heard of and is about the collapse of Yugoslavia done as a slapstick comedy.