The Cultural Gutter

building a better robot builder

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

Quint’s Speech

It took 3–or maybe 4–stout men, including John Milius, to write Quint’s famous speech in Jaws.

RIP, Dino De Laurentiis

Dino De Laurentiis has died at 91 after a long and incredibly varied career directing and producing movies such as Danger: Diabolik, Barbarella, Death Wish, Serpico, La Strada, Conan the Barbarian, Flash Gordon, Blue Velvet and Army of Darkness. The Guardian has an obituary and overview of his career in clips.

I Can See Forever

It’s like the 1980s are a black hole and the event horizon reaches forever: The A-Team, The Karate Kid, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Tron, Ghostbusters, Conan The Barbarian, Red Dawn, Short Circuit and Wall Street.

The Wolverines, 24 Years Later

John Plotz re-watches Red Dawn and sees a different movie: “Red Dawn did not conjure up the chest-swelling patriotism I felt as a 14-year-old. Instead, it turned out to be disturbing in an entirely unexpected way.”

HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT?

lubitsch_bild_80.jpg

INT. DRISCOLL’S OFFICE – EVENING It’s a big office, and dark, which makes it feel even larger, cavernous. The theme from Dr. Who (Delia Derbyshire’s 1963 version) reverberates in the space, buzzing up your spine like a telegraph signal.

  • Support The Gutter

  • Of Note Elsewhere

    A novelist takes revenge on writers he doesn’t like via wikipedia. Slate has the story. “Qworty’s edits undermine our trust in this great project. Qworty’s edits prove that Wikipedia’s content can be shaped by people settling grudges and acting out of spite and envy. Qworty alone, by his own account, has made 13,000 edits to Wikipedia. And Qworty, as the record will show, is not to be trusted.”

    ~

    Diane Dooley writes about Mars’ need for women and ways to subvert it.

    ~

    “[T]he mainstreaming of Jane Eyre as a vanilla romance, or even as an exploration of a woman’s pure, uncompromising, and uncomplicated (and religious! and feminist!) integrity, says all kinds of things about our inability to speak honestly about violence and sex.” More on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, consent, sex and submission, here. (via K.A. Laity)

    ~

    Comic Book Attic talks about comics about comics, with plenty of pages from Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s The Newsboy Legion for your enjoyment.

    ~

    At Babbler Dabbler, Briana discusses female cyborgs in Ghost In The Shell and in Alien: Resurrection.

    ~

    Commander Chris Hadfield performs David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in space.

    ~

  • The Book!

  • Spilling into Twitter

  • Obsessive?

    Then you might be interested in knowing you can subscribe to our RSS feed, find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter or Tumblr.

    -------

  • Weekly Notifications

  • What We’re Talking About

  • Thanks To

    No Media Kings hosts this site, and Wordpress autoconstructs it.