April, again, and gazing up from the Gutter, my colleagues and I must now tear our eyes from the stars and turn them instead to the vaunted facades of ivory towers. Or to put it another way: time to get reputable up in this biz. His canon is […]
April is switcheroo month at the Cultural Gutter, and this year we are once again turning our eyes upwards from our beloved gutter roots to gaze into the distance for a glimpse of art that is widely considered reputable. What I’ve noticed though, as I adjust my binoculars […]
For this year’s Switcheroo Month, I decided to write about a lesser known film by one of the most reputable directors around—Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Set in then contemporary mid-Twentieth Century Japan, The Bad Sleep Well is the story of Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) seeking […]
I told myself I wouldn’t do this. For the second year in a row, I’ve let Switcheroo Month, the time of year when us Gutterfolk write about reputable art instead of disreputable art, sneak up on me without an idea of what piece of reputable art I’d write […]
1972’s Night of the Lepus is one of the last stalwarts of a grand storytelling tradition, all too rare in our decadent, expertise-skeptical times–a tradition that dares to preface the feature with a dry, informative lecture. No time to thread exposition into character-revealing events and dialogue; we begin […]
If you pay any attention at all to popular Hindi cinema, then probably you will have heard of Sholay, often considered the best-loved Hindi movie of all time.* There is huge respect and affection for this film—for its cast, director, music, and script. Sometimes omitted from discussions of […]