PopCult Reviews

TV Review – Deadwood Season One

Deadwood Season One (HBO)
Written by David Milch, Malcolm MacRury, Jody Worth, Elizabeth Sarnoff, John Belluso, George Putnam, Bryan McDonald, Ricky Jay, and Ted Mann
Directed by Walter Hill, Davis Guggenheim, Alan Taylor, Ed Bianchi, Michael Engler, Dan Minihan, and Steve Shill

On one level, Deadwood operates as a white dude character actor showcase. I guarantee you will spend time proclaiming some variation of “It’s that guy from that thing.” I have always been a huge fan of character actors, which is why The Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson are some of my favorite filmmakers. They can find great actors with unique looks and give them fantastic scripts to perform. The exact same could be said of Deadwood, one of the early “children’ of the success of The Sopranos on HBO. Once that series made its big splash, the network invested a lot more money in developing unique dramas with some of the most substantial writing in the industry. David Milch honed his skills on Hill Street Blues & experienced a controversial hit with NYPD Blue. Deadwood would serve as a tribute to his love of the Western genre, populating the television series with actual figures from the historical Deadwood but infusing it all with an air of Shakespearean gravitas.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Welcome to the Habitrails

Welcome to the Habitrails
Written and Designed by AYolland
Can be purchased here

I don’t know if I ever lived in the suburbs. I lived in neighborhoods that resembled what I saw of the suburbs on television, but these were always relatively poor working-class places. They weren’t necessarily the artifice of the suburbs but the strange dark attempt to mimic them. So when I came across Welcome to the Habitrails, it immediately stood out as a theme I could sink my teeth into. I’ve always been a fan of modern existential horror, and there aren’t many ttrpgs in that vein. Because of Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy dominates, making Habitrails seem pretty unique.

Comic Book Review – Hawkworld (1989)

Hawkworld (1989)
Reprints Hawkworld #1-3 (1989)
Written & Illustrated by Tim Truman

From their heights, the privileged in our societies can see the full scale of what they do. The people forced to live at the bottom, the ones who toil the most fruitlessly, for whom every day is a struggle to make it to the next, rarely having the means or the time to take in the state of their world. When they do, it is always a time when those at the top are brought down, when the people have had enough. In the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC Comics wanted to transform their shared universe of superheroes. Books like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen revealed something about the genre; its audience had matured and were interested in stories that explored more than heroes beating up villains. There were moral spaces that had never been explored. Hawkman was a character in need of such a freshening up. Tim Truman, an artist/writer known for pulpy comics, was brought in to reinvent Hawkman, and he did so in dramatic fashion.

Movie Review – The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum (1979)
Written by Volker Schlöndorff
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Franz Seitz

I have not read Herman Hesse’s novel of the same name, so I won’t be able to compare this version of The Tin Drum to its source material. However, the film feels dense & literary, which leads me to believe it is likely not too far removed from the book. This decision makes the picture heavy-handed and obvious as the story progresses. Director Volker Schlöndorff’s career includes many adaptations, including the Dustin Hoffman-led Death of a Salesman and the feature film version of The Handmaid’s Tale. Schlöndorff feels very different from his peers like Herzog, Wenders, and Fassbinder; he is a little more straightforward & direct. However, there’s no mistaking what The Tin Drum is about, and that may not be a great thing as it fails to challenge the audience to think in ways that it could, given a defter touch.

Movie Review – The Marriage of Maria Braun

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978)
Written by Peter Märthesheimer, Pea Fröhlich, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Fassbinder’s films often centered women in the protagonist roles and explored how they were trapped in damned if you do/damned if you don’t scenarios. The Marriage of Maria Braun was one of his largest productions with a budget of less than a million, but it certainly doesn’t show. This epic story goes from the middle of World War II into the 1950s. It also follows Fassbinder’s tendency to draw inspiration from the films of Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life), telling stories of women with dignity who humble themselves to survive in a world designed for the pleasure of men. These women are complex, vulnerable, strong, determined, and broken. They are presented as human beings, something that wasn’t done often with women in much Western media of the recent past.

PopCult Podcast – Kicking and Screaming/Fallen Angels

We’re continuing our flashback to 1995 with a very talky film about a bunch of white people (that narrows it down) as well as one of the “lesser” works of a Hong Kong filmmaking master.

Movie Review – The American Friend

The American Friend (1977)
Written & Directed by Wim Wenders

There’s a scene early on in The American Friend where Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is asked by a hatmaker/art forger (director Nicholas Ray) if Ripley wears his Stetson hat when he’s in Germany. Ripley removes the hat, briefly examines it, and responds, “What’s wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?” Wim Wenders’ films, while German, are very much fixated on America. The director finds an incredible amount of inspiration in the mythic idea of America and the way these grand ideas crumble under just the slightest scrutiny. Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is the perfect character to explore that, and Wenders proceeds to repurpose this figure in the same way Robert Altman presented audiences with a radically different Phillip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. This Ripley is not a cool, calm, collected man but a psychologically troubled murderer who manipulates an unsuspecting man into his web.

TV Review – Somebody Somewhere Season One

Somebody Somewhere (HBO)
Written by Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen, and Patricia Breen,
Directed by Jay Duplass and Robert Cohen

“Real America,” they call it. The immense middle vastness of the United States, I suppose. Though it isn’t actually real. What they mean by that idea is exclusionary, shorthand for people “like you” who aren’t welcome here. It’s not entirely that simple, though. It’s a clash of the way of thinking in urban environments versus rural environments, which makes it more complicated because “Real America” is peppered with cities. Rural resentments towards cities are not totally unfounded; they are certainly misguided. These perceptions all come from a place that says there’s a limited amount of life in the world, and things unfamiliar to them threaten that sustained existence. If you step back, you can see that any sense of scarcity on the most basic human level of reality is a joke at this point, with excess wasted every day from sea to shining sea. There is room enough for everyone and plenty to keep them alive. Yet, we keep coming up with ways to ignore that.

My Favorite Mind-Bending Films

Coherence (2013)
Written & Directed by James Ward Bykrit

Not too shabby for a feature directorial debut, though Bykrit had worked alongside Gore Verbinksi on several projects and clearly learned a lot. The premise is perfect for a low-budget flick; eight friends gather for dinner & to watch the elusive Davis’s Comet pass overhead. There’s plenty of history and interpersonal conflict between everyone, which comes out when things get weird. The power goes out, and the neighborhood is pitch black, except for one house with lights still on. A few party guests go over there, and things feel even more off when they return. Eventually, it becomes clear that not everything is what it seems, and some people are lying about their identities. It’s an enjoyable movie that ends on a beautifully dark note.

Read my full review here.

Comic Book Review – Superman: The Exile and Other Stories

Superman: The Exile and Other Stories Omnibus (2018)
Reprints Adventures of Superman #445-460, Superman v2 #23-37, Action Comics #643-646, and Action Comics Annual #2
Written by Jerry Ordway, George Pérez, Roger Stern, Dan Jurgens, Tom Peyer, and Keith Giffen
Art by Jerry Ordway, Mike Mignola, Kerry Gammill, Dan Jurgens, Paris Cullins, Curt Swan, George Pérez, Keith Giffen, Dennis Janke, P. Craig Russell, John Beatty, Brett Breeding, John Statema, Art Thibert, Klaus Janson, Tim Gula, and Andy Kubert

I have reached that age. You know it. The age where a guy with graying hair on his head and beard says things like, “I liked [insert] character here better when I was a kid.” I see this and acknowledge the silliness of it. A character like Superman has never been a static thing, but exists in a never-ending flow state where tweaks are happening to the narrative and mythos with every new issue that comes out. Superman couldn’t fly for his first few appearances, and things like Smallville were rectons. There is no ultimate version of Superman and the one you like is probably the one you first encountered. I was always a Christopher Reeve fan because that was my first Superman and when it came to comics the post-John Byrne era was when I joined in.