Some people like their hardboiled noir fiction in cinematic form. Some people prefer text only please–to enjoy, perhaps the racier metaphors and descriptions in The Maltese Falcon, say, over the screen adaptations. I like both. But what if I told you that you could get noir illustrated in […]
What if James Bond went to Bombay in the late 1970s and wasn’t so much a secret agent as a stylist and interior designer for a particularly aesthetics-oriented villain? The plot of Shaan has very little to do with any of the Bond films that I can remember. […]
At Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, Liselotte Doeswijk has a nice analysis of Maurice Binder’s opening titles for Dr. No. “The mid 1950s was an interesting time for title sequences. The growing popularity of the rivaling medium of television prompted film studio’s to rethink their promotion strategies. […]
“I must be stubborn or blind to the world around me, but I believe that 2019 audiences still enjoy the clandestine arts of megalomania, quippy men in bespoke suits, and wildly inefficient research and design departments. James Bond is the name we know, but there’s also Derek Flint, […]
Angelica Jade Bastién writes about Killing Eve as Bluebeard at Vulture. “Killing Eve is deeply indebted to film noir, a genre whose backbone is the ways people lose their soul in the face of desire — from the stories of lone stylish assassins (Le Samouraï) to femme-fatale-led worlds […]
If you’re thinking “Hey, didn’t Cultural Gutter already do a piece on a wackadoodle Indian film about eyes starring the handsome and heroic Dharmendra?” you’re perfectly correct. But thanks to a career of over 300 films, producers apparently ran out of different words to use in the title […]