I’d like to introduce you to one of India’s greatest movie superstars. Active from around 1950 to 1980, Uttam Kumar is still the biggest name in the popular cinema made in Calcutta. The term “matinee idol” doesn’t imply enough scope or staying power to describe his career, and […]
Sometimes I have a terrible suspicion that my favorite Halloween movie is actually Halloween III: Season of the Witch. For a long time, after being forced to downsize my movie collection in a move, Halloween III was the only film in the series I bothered to repurchase. Before […]
I think I probably watched the original Star Wars movies about 30 times when I was a kid. Given that, you’d think I’d have given the Star Wars philosophy some serious thought and in some ways I did, but there were also things that I just accepted without […]
One of the greatest joys in my life is coming across almost ineffable wonder. I take pleasure in the good and the bad, sure, but there are wonders in this world. There is art that transcends our petty categories of “good” and “bad.” Things I find difficult or […]
In Michael O’Shea’s The Transfiguration (2017), Milo is a smart, sensitive teen, but he’s got problems like an Afterschool Special. He’s an orphan, parents taken by separate, traumatizing circumstances, so now he lives alone with his older brother Lewis, their poor city neighborhood restlessly patrolled by gangs. He […]
In the real world, I generally think vigilante justice and conceptually literal revenge are a bad idea. So why does Khoon Bhari Maang, a 1988 Bollywood remake of (and improvement on) the 1983 Australian miniseries Return to Eden, make me abandon my own moral code? Why is it so fun […]
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The Cultural Gutter 