Love, Death and Caste in Gay Romances ‘Heated Rivalry’ and ‘Cactus Pears’
Canadian series Heated Rivalry and Marathi movie Cactus Pears both center on queer love, but they explore its complexities in different migration and caste locations.
Television
Features, reviews, interviews, and lists about television, covering the latest as well historical topics.
Widow’s Bay Toys Gleefully with Our Worst Fears
Anchoring Widow’s Bay’s diverse horror themes in the characters’ personal anxieties transforms cinematic dread into something terribly relatable.
‘Rivals’ Is a Steamy Ode to a Better World
The winning satirical comedy Rivals is back to show us how much better life could be if we stuck together… and had more sex.
‘The Testaments’ and the Tyranny of Tenderness
In The Handmaid’s Tale, violence had to break in; in The Testaments, a tyrannical tenderness occupies a child’s dollhouse, a child’s mind.
Gen X Suffers Mainstream Culture Constipation
In today’s overstuffed, mainstream culture of recycled “art”, nothing old moves and nothing new gets through. It’s enough to make a Gen-Xer pretty damn cranky.
The Fashionable Shine of Morality in ‘Better Call Saul’
Better Call Saul’s costume design reveals a brilliant parallel between Chuck’s Mylar blanket, Jimmy’s bright metallic outfit, and the silver suits of the Salamancas, inviting the audience to question their own moral stance.
Love Story’s Subjection to the State
For all its couture fashion and bio-pic fluff, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette is radical in how it echoes Laura Kipnis’ polemic, Against Love.
Beef’s Cooked-in Class Anxiety Turns Up the Heat
If Beef Season 1 gave you a tension headache that you refused to placate by turning off the television, Season 2 is even more addictively high-stakes, tightly wound, and explicit in its view.
‘Cheers’, Cosiness and the Illusion of Companionship
Cheers‘ characters float side-by-side as if suspended in a mug of amber-colored beer, going nowhere and befriending no one, least of all one another.
Why Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” Is the Ultimate Screen Song
The lyrics to Steely Dan’s 1972 song “Dirty Work” are not the enigmatic stanzas that make up most of their discography, so why is it still used in films and TV to this day?
‘Drops of God’ Drinks Wine with a Proustian Sensibility
Drops of God chooses to speak the language of luxury through philosophy and meaningful cinematography – with drinks.
Star Trek’s Ultimate, Absolute, Inarguably Final Frontier
In the minds of Star Trek‘s many creators, the “sky” is the limit(less), but been there, done that. So what’s left for our adventurous mythmakers to explore?
