The Cultural Gutter

unashamed geekery

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde

A Warning to the faint of heart
And eight year olds

When I was in grade two, my school thought it’d be a great Halloween activity to have a movie screening of old horror films. They showed us the 1931 adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein, the original 1932 The Mummy, and the 1954 3-D classic, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. At age eight I had [...]

Avatar SCHMAvatar, or, Change the Playa Not the Game

crye

The film industry is a magical business. I don’t mean magical in the “Hollywood movie magic” sense, as is typically employed by awards show musical numbers and the California Board of Tourism. I mean that it is an industry with a business model that is not, and by its very nature cannot, be constructed on [...]

I Want My Mummy

teenymum.JPG

This month we’re mixing it up at the Gutter, with the editors writing about something outside their usual domain. This week Chris Szego writes about movies. Well, mostly movies. I’m a total chicken. This means I don’t watch anything that smacks of horror.  In fact, I tend to close my eyes when the music gets [...]

Dragon Emperor looks better than Crystal Skulls

Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, Wu Jing, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang and… Brendan Fraser?  That’s right, it’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.  Who knew the Qin Emperor was a shapeshifter?  (via Kaiju Shakedown)

  • Of Note Elsewhere

    This tumblr collects many bad jokes kids have invented.

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    “It’s easier to tell the same stories everyone else does. There’s no particular shame in it.

    It’s just that it’s lazy, which is just about the worst possible thing a spec fic writer can be.

    Oh, and it’s not true.”

    Kameron Hurley writes about lazy writing, cannibal llamas, female soldiers, and women here. (Thanks, James!)

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    Patton Oswalt’s multi-franchise super-movie described in his Star Wars filibuster from Parks and Recreation, animated.

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    Corrigan Vaughan writes an open letter to “Fans of Geek Things“: “I appreciate that you think I have a nice rack and that some of you even find my friends and I to be pretty. That’s very kind. I’m not, however, super in love with the fact that having a rack at all seems to preclude me from being considered a ‘real’ fan.”

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    The Black Girl Nerds Podcast discusses Black girls and women in the Heavy Metal industry with author and journalist Laina Dawes and Ursula “She-Wolf” Parson from Hear Evil News.

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    The Hollywood Reporter interviews director Takashi Miike about his new film, Shield of Straw: ” In Japan now, films are very safe. When I was young and went to old cinemas, they had a distinctive feel, an adult smell about them. As you got in your seat and the lights went down, there was a feeling of excitement: What if the film is scarier than I thought it’s going to be? You’re taken into that world. Nowadays, you can sit in the theater and know it’s going to be safe. That’s good for business, but not for filmmaking.”

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  • The Book!

    From ETC Press

  • Spilling into Twitter

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