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'Supergirl' doesn't allow Supergirl to be Supergirl

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures. For decades’ worth of comics, Superman, aka Kal-El, aka the Last Son of Krypton, has had galaxy-spanning adventurers. Yet, outside of a few extra-terrestrial threats, the films very rarely depict anything happening beyond our own world. Instead, Superman is portrayed as someone who had been born on another planet but so successfully assimilated into ours that even he…

'Project Hail Mary' is like all good science fiction

Image: Amazon MGM Studios. Ryland Grace awakens to find himself bound within several layers of plastic and bombarded with agonizingly simple questions from a robot testing how much brain function he lost during a medically induced coma that lasted maybe weeks, months, or even years. We watch as Grace (Ryan Gosling) stumbles and mumbles about like a baby slowly learning to use their legs and mouth…

'Hamnet': grief, like art, is worthless without the process

Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures. Author’s Note: ‘Hamnet’ opened last week in my area. Includes spoilers shown in movies trailers and in a 400-year-old play. Sad to say but art has always been a product. Ever since the advent of the “professional artist,” art itself has been a commodity to be bought and sold. Even much of what history records as humanity’s greatest artistic…

Pop Mythology's 10 (ish) Best Films of 2025

This was not an easy list to make. Not because it was difficult to find ten great films released in the United States in 2025, nor because there were more great films released in that time than in other years, although more so the latter than the former. This list was difficult because when it came down to deciding which films would be on the list compared to those which would be either excluded…

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'Avatar: Fire and Ash' is too much movie

Image: 20th Century Studios. In support of his latest 400-million-dollar blockbuster, filmmaker James Cameron told The Hollywood Reporter that his entire career has focused on answering cinema’s “toughest, most fulfilling artistic problem,” in a way that will also, “appeal to a mass audience.” Over forty years this approach has led to Cameron pioneering or refining cinematic technology, from…

'Bugonia,' sunk cost fallacy, and humanity's many flaws

Image: Focus Features & CJ ENM. Sunk Cost Fallacy is the feeling that you need to remain loyal to something because you’ve already sunk so much time, money, or other resources into it. It’s the reason why investors continue throwing money at failing businesses or people remain in long-term relationships that only hurt them. It’s why viewers watched ten seasons of The Walking Dead despite it being…

'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' and the future we could have had

Image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. A common ethos is that science is not inherently good or bad. Science just is. It’s the scientists, or those who pay the scientists (my addition), that decide whether science is good or bad. The last several decades have born this out as, even if scientific development has been an overall positive for the vast majority of humanity, for every way in…

Ep. 16 – Reviving the podcast after personal collapse | This is the End

*Episode Description*: (This podcast was formerly titled THIS IS THE END: POP CULTURE & COLLAPSE.) Well, it’s been… a while. In this, the first new episode in over two years, I share a bit of the personal story behind why this podcast has been dormant for so long and how it relates to what I call “personal collapse.” But just as with societal collapse, personal collapses don’t necessarily have to…

'Superman': a hero in a time of villains

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures. Interpretation is a fascinating thing. From religion and mythology to art and entertainment, and, in our modern time, science and fact, how one chooses to interpret an event, item, or idea speaks volumes about that person, their values, and their view of the world. On some occasions interpretation is a completely innocuous thing, like debating on the color of a dress…

'F1 the Movie' goes nowhere with speed and spectacle

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures, Apple Original Films. I’ve never cared about auto racing. Sure, there was a brief time in the 90’s when racing reached the larger cultural zeitgeist and I tried watching Nascar, Formula 1, and off-road races on ESPN before deciding they weren’t for me. Every race would start with a burst of speed and adrenaline until, inevitably, settling into the tedium of hours of…

'Thunderbolts*': redemption is possible.

Image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Let’s face it, the MCU has been in a dark place for the last few years. While far from the dire situation that sensationalized, “MCU is Dead,” articles and video essays portray, the studio has struggled to recapture the immense critical and commercial success of the 2010’s. Granted, such a downturn was inevitable as twenty films of world building and…

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'Mickey 17' shows us who is expendable

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures. We see them every day. People we pass on the street. People sitting at a restaurant or wandering through the grocery store. People occupying the other seats on an airplane, a train, or a movie theater. Sometimes our interactions are pleasant: a smile, an opened door, a random compliment; sometimes they’re less pleasant: watching a video aloud on their phone, cutting…

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'Captain America: Brave New World' is anything but brave

Image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. There have been many issues with the Post-Endgame MCU output. Constant re-writes and reshoots, rushed or faulty visual effects, repetitive and formulaic scripts, lackluster television shows, projects that seem created solely to introduce a character for later or to have something in theaters, and, perhaps most detrimental, a lack of coherent vision in…

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Pop Mythology's 10 Best Films of 2024

Last year didn’t exactly go as well as many of us wanted. Instead of righting previous mistakes far too many people decided to ignore the reality of those mistakes (along with the resulting chaos, destruction, and promise of even more chaos and destruction) thus assuring that this year, 2025, will go exactly as poorly as many of predict, if not so much worse. Fortunately, the year in cinema was…

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'Gladiator' was a roar. 'Gladiator II' is an echo.

Image: Paramount Pictures. Author’s Note: The following contains spoilers for the events of Gladiator. So if you haven’t seen that film, stop reading, and go watch it. What characters do in that film echoes in eternity. I don’t remember the exact day, but I remember the exact circumstance of the first time I watched Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. It was one of only two films I saw in the theater…

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'Joker: Folie à Deux': truth isn't truth

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures. Author’s Note: this review spoils the ending of 2019’s Joker. If you still haven’t seen that film, don’t read this review. Also, if you haven’t seen that film, don’t see this one. This film picks up months into the aftermath of the previous. For all things, context is important. There is no reason for this story to continue. Joker should have been a one-off, a fluke,…

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'Alien: Romulus' - it took forty years, but 'Alien' finally has a true sequel

Image: 20th Century Studios. Despite having seen almost every film in the series, the Alien franchise is one that I’ve never felt a particular fondness toward. In fact, given the brutality of the subject matter and the tendency of characters to not survive long enough to make it to a second let alone third or fourth film, it’s mildly baffling that audiences feel such nostalgia toward the series.…

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