Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups: 'Mile End Kicks' and More

What I've Been Into:

"Mile End Kicks" (2025). How refreshing: A non-sequel, non-IP, non-horror film with a female lead, set in Canada. Shows to go that maybe there other ways to make a movie, and other movies to make these days.

This is a good one from director Chandler Levack, who brought us the similarly wonderful and whimsical "I Like Movies" in 2022. Like that film, this is a coming-of-age story that centers a creative, nerdy lead character in a story that breaks out of the typical formula.

Barbie Ferreira is Grace Pine, a young woman working to establish herself as a rock critic who moves to Montreal to hone her craft and write a book about Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill LP.

Ferreira is great in the role, making us feel for a sympathize with Grace even as she makes horrendously stupid choices. For one, the move to Montreal may not have been the greatest plan, given that she, unlike her new housemates, doesn't speak French. She also blows off working on the book, which she's been contracted to write. Plus, she crushes on a dude who, she's already been warned, is "the worst guy in Montreal." Oh well, being dumb is what growing up is all about, right?

There's funny stuff throughout, plus a sweet-if-predictable legit romance at the center of the film. Best of all, though, Levack's script makes some sharp observations of what it's like for a young woman to carve out a niche in field that's dominated by geeky bros who consistently leave her out of their conversations, which mainly consist of dumb debates on who's better: The Minutemen or Husker Du, etc. Stupid, yeah, but, even so, it'd nice to be included, and maybe she'd be the one person with an interesting point to make.

Reads:

The Comics Journal looks back at DC's overlooked, recently re-printed 1970s Western Series, Tomahawk.

Beneath issue #128's cover by hot young artist Neal Adams (fresh off familiarizing Green Lantern with wokeness), lay Thorne and Kanigher's introduction of freed slave Healer Randolph to Tomahawk's band of Revolutionary War Army Rangers. The story is a hedged bet in every way. Randolph is the classic, comforting cliché of a Black character who decides to Be the Bigger Person and move directly from the service of one white power structure to another. He aids the Rangers as a medic by combining African "jungle lore" with know-how from the doctor whose emancipation of Randolph is lauded, while his decades of continuing slave ownership go unexamined. Troubling too is Randolph's steadfast refusal ever to bear arms in a war zone — proof perhaps of high morality, but also a bending of the knee to the racial paranoia of a white America in which the Black Panther Party was armed and active. Black superheroes who roughhoused and punished lawbreakers with jail time were acceptable; a Black war hero with a gun fighting kill-or-die battles, even for American independence, evidently was not.