The Cultural Gutter

dumpster diving of the brain

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

The Men of 30AU

“In essence what Fleming was proposing was a team of authorised thieves and looters – mavericks who would operate ahead of the forward troops and who were instructed to do whatever necessary to capture enemy intelligence, equipment or personnel.” James Bond creator, Ian Fleming also created a special unit a commando unit for British Naval [...]

Dystopian Future Round-Up!

This week in Dystopian Future Round-Up: Panopticon Edition: Wired reports on the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s work on recording and storing everything people say; and Google Glass is more than unflattering according to Mark Hurst. (Thanks, @oafbot)

“There are reasons I don’t talk about video game violence much”

Patricia Hernandez talks about the reasons she doesn’t talk about video game violence much. “They’re recollections of things, sometimes games I know for certain go together somehow, amount to a small piece of some puzzle that’s supposed to help me understand where violence and death fit in my life.”

“Protest Style”

HAPS puts PSY’s protest style in context.

Pregnesia!

The ultimate in amnesiac pregnancy romances, Pregnesia! (Thanks, Tars Tarkas!)

Lovers In A Dangerous Time

Recently, I’ve been thinking about danger.  Specifically, the kind of danger that runs through a certain subsection of Romance, often called ‘romantic suspense’.  These are the stories that drop the hero and heroine into physical jeopardy in addition to exposing them to all the emotional risks of falling in love.  When done well, they share [...]

Let There Be Light

John Huston’s rarely seen and controversial documentary about what was called “shell shock,” “psychoneurosis,” and “neuropsychosis” among returning World War II veterans, Let There Be Light, is now available for free online viewing. Read more about the film and its history at Keyframe and view it at the National Film Preservation Foundation. (Thanks, @FOURDK)

RIP, Kaneto Shindo

Director and screenwriter Kaneto Shindo has died. He lived past 100 and made masterpieces including Onibaba, Kuroneko, Children of Hiroshima, Lucky Dragon No. 5 and The Naked Island. He also wrote the screenplays for Seijun Suzuki’s Fighting Elegy, Yasuzo Masumura Irezumi, Kinji Fukasaku’s Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, Seijiro Koyama’s Hachi / Hachiko [...]

“Anxiety and Optimism in Frank Hampton’s Dan Dare”

“In the very first Dan Dare adventure, which began to be serialised weekly in the Christian boy’s comic Eagle in 1950, we were introduced to the ‘ … Inter Planet Space Fleet some years in the future.’ It’s an odd organisation, in that it’s clearly meant to be Earth’s ‘Space Fleet,’ but it’s clearly really [...]

ActionFest 2012 Trailers

Trailers for movies playing at ActionFest 2012: Solomon Kane; Manborg; Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines; The Raid; True Romance; Wu Xia; Dragon Eyes;  Let The Bullets Fly; A Gang Story;  The Lost Bladesman; God Bless America; Goon; The Aggression Scale; The Day;  Headhunters; Transit; Sinners and Saints; Bad Ass; The Wild Bunch  [...]

Warriors of the Unknown

Warriors of the Unknown is an animated series featuring gamers whose characters jump from server to server in pursuit of a mysterious hacker while mixing up game genres. You can sample the first episode here.

RIP, Edward Hardwicke

British actor Edward Hardwicke has died.  He is best known as Dr. John Watson in the 1980s and 1990s BBC Sherlock Holmes series co-starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes.The Guardian has an obituary and here is a video of Hardwicke and Brett interviewed about playing Watson and Holmes.

“Let’s Do This!”

Capt. Robert M. Chamberlain uses Leeroy Jenkins, World of Warcraft icon and internet meme, to analyze the “American way of advising” in Iraq: “The video, which has been viewed more than 10 million times, is analogous to the disparity between the deliberation with which American forces approach counterinsurgency and the blunt ignorance with which they [...]

General Atomics’ Railgun

Not only does defense contractor called, “General Atomics” make a railgun, it fires what looks like Hugo Awards. Let us hope Harlan Ellison never acquires this technology.

Polearm Hero

Think you’re pretty smart? Think you know the Dungeon Master’s Guide pretty well?  Know all the weapons and their damage? Think you can be a Polearm Hero? Take the Dungeons & Dragons Polearm Quiz.

Batwoman: Elegaic

batwoman 80.jpg

In this time of uncertainty and dread, with Batman dying and Dick Grayson taking up the cowl, with dead Robins returning all crazy or replacing Batgirl, with Bruce Wayne taking a global crimefighting initiative Batman Inc. public, there’s one thing I am sure Gotham that has going for it: Batwoman.

Visit Marwencol

Marwencol is documentary about Mark Hogancamp, a man who suffered a traumatic brain injury after being attacked by a group of men. As part of his therapy, he retells his life as a soldier in World War II at 1/6 scale and photographs it. The official site has a trailer and gallery of his photos.

NYAFF 2010

The New York Asian Film Festival is coming up and actors Sammo Hung and Simon Yam will be in attending their films Kung Fu Chefs, Bodyguards and Assassins, Echoes of the Rainbow and Eastern Condors. But even if you can’t make it, it’s worth checking out the films and trailers for the Hong Kong/China and [...]

WWII on Facebook FTW!

OMG WWII on Facebook! FTW!

The History of Black Comic Book Heroes Through the Ages

Dart Adams Presents: Black Like Me: The History of Black Comic Book Heroes Through the Ages, Part One (1900-1968)and Part Two (1969-2008).  (Click it! It’s amazing).

keep looking »
  • Support The Gutter

  • Of Note Elsewhere

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

    ~

    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.”

    ~

    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.

    ~

    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.”

    ~

    The Atlantic profiles Spectral Motion, creators of monsters, “effects, and other mechanical grotesqueries that have since become household nightmares, if not names.”

    ~

    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.”

    ~

  • 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.