I’ve been thinking about what “disreputable art” means in a time when nerds, fans, and geeks have won a kind of cultural hegemony. It was different when the Cultural Gutter was founded in 2003, before Iron Man (2008) launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Force awakened, and the […]
“I don’t wanna quit, I just wanna be in control of it” – Becky Something, Her Smell (2018) Some movies challenge you. Difficult to watch, grappling with heady or uncomfortable themes or ideas, or just straight-up disorienting as the stupid camera swirls around like you’re on the Gravitron […]
I confess that I’ve never really been the kind of fan who shipped characters or felt inspired to create fan art for a show, but A League of Their Own (Amazon Studios, 2022) is honestly like nothing else I’ve seen on tv and I suddenly found myself, in […]
This week’s Guest Star is Nick Hanover. He writes about the late Austin icon, Flash Jordan. ~~~ Ask anyone who has lived in Austin for any length of time when the city stopped being weird and they’ll give you countless answers. Maybe it was when Red Wassenich lost […]
Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) is a woman at the beginning of the end. Her breakthrough film is being remade, her ingenue role recast. The director (Malcolm McDowell) who groomed her for stardom and groomed her, full stop, is being knighted, the remake that threatens to eclipse her renown […]
Rummaging around for a spooky film for my Gutter submission for October, I decided upon Kohraa, (“The Fog”), a 1964 Hindi adaptation of Rebecca. Rewatching Kohraa and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) back to back, I’m struck by how much more isolated the Indian protagonist is. Kohraa spends most of […]