Welcome to the new newsletter Lack of Taste. I write from Sydney, Australia, where I’ve been here my whole life, and you may find me in the Australian versions of The Spectator and Penthouse, or places like Splice Today and Arc Digital. Unlike a lot of newsletters published out of Substack that I come across, I’m basically starting out from scratch. I do not have many followers on Twitter, so we got to start somewhere. Think of it as a small boat, but in a harbor of yachts.
But I prominently came from a small website, now defunct, called Rebeller Media. It was an online property from the Texas-based movie studio Cinestate, which closed down, because of a large scandal surrounding its producers, also affecting the other sites it had acquired like Fangoria and Birth Movies Death. I was a regular contributor there and was saddened by its abrupt closure. I wrote a monthly column about movies that bombed with opening week audiences and various other essays over there.
Broadly speaking, my politics lean centre-right. What does this mean exactly? A belief in individual responsibilities and preserving institutions would suffice, but for this newsletter, that’s not really relevant, since I wouldn’t consider myself an ideologue. Thus, that makes it easier for me to speak about topics in a complex manner that you won’t find anywhere else.
So there’s a Venn Diagram of film lovers and people of my political type that has a tiny overlap and I’m certainly in that segment. But there’s also a much larger segment of people tired of clickbait and mindless polemical writing, that in Lack of Taste, I try to avoid that. Here you will find comprehensive writing and essays from yours truly. If you like that promise and what you’ve seen, please come along.
What’s inside Lack of Taste?
Lack of Taste is a newsletter about movies for people who don’t like movies. That’s not really accurate, so let me clarify. It’s a website written by a guy who loves cinema, made for people who don’t have a lot of time to watch them. You’ll find fearless and personal film commentary that you won’t find at any other platform.
There will be four kinds of pieces you’ll find in Lack of Taste. The first type is the weekly to biweekly Reaction Shots. It can be a review of a movie, an anniversary piece, or simply rank punditry on the latest film news.
The second kind will be a column or so about a certain film that will happen every fortnight. I will continue a monthly column that I regularly wrote for Rebeller called The F Bomb, which takes an in-depth look at movies that were graded F by Cinemascore audiences. There will be another column that takes a look at a spectrum of movies that takes on doom and gloom, called The Cinema of Lost Boys.
The third is the Lack of Taste Film Club. I will invite different people from all walks of life to talk about the movies they like or are in relation to their interests. The first will be Ben Sixsmith, a writer hailing from Poland, who will be exploring Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue.
The fourth entry is a comprehensive diary of all the movies that I’ve watched. Usually, I would log in movies on my Letterboxd, and I still do today. But it’s hard to get traction when most of the popular reviews are saturated by those with limited literacy of the medium and are usually banal one-sentence reviews. So I prefer a more detailed and analytical approach to the films I’ve seen and whether my impressions present them in a manner that it deserves.
Why Start Lack of Taste?
I remember a few years ago, I ask a famous author about what to do when you want to become a writer, after sharing with her an article that I have written. She told me that I shouldn’t bother since you’d rather be privileged to get there. But she told me to write what you’re really knowledgeable about and that is movies. So I took her word, and I was right.
I have an old blog (which I do not have access to) and have another on WordPress that was also called Lack of Taste. Since then, the flow of content has been incredibly sporadic, and it wasn’t until the brief advent of Rebeller that I felt more motivated to write what I want to write.
I decided to make a newsletter because I am bored by the state of movie writing lately. Reviews will fixate on what would forcibly ignite a conversation and shape the culture like identity and representation. Writers are picked up by outlets, usually because of their social media presence. There, you’ll find some takes that wrongly suggest the Joker movie being a manifesto for disenfranchised young men and carry out at a school. Too many websites are fixated on the worthiness of big-budget franchises (not that they aren’t worth a critical damn), while others take on smaller films that are within the festival/arthouse circuit that would be overzealously championed just because they’re not Avengers: End of Warlords. Even worst, the financial incentives to write have become more daunting in the year this piece is published.
One large reason I was fond of writing at Rebeller was that its business model values quality writing to a passionate and closer audience, rather than recycling the news into another article to fit a certain agenda. It will be hard to replicate it, not because the model was abruptly shut off, but because it requires far more resources and funding.
That all said…
It is free to sign up, but if you’re open to paying as little as $5.00 a month, to which you’ll get access to all articles, that would also be great. I’m writing from Sydney, Australia, where movie theatres will begin reopening during the month. I’m certainly looking forward to it, as will some countries when they reopen some of their theatres, as the pandemic continues to stay with us.
And onward we go!