A monthly online magazine devoted to literature, film & television.
Featuring short fiction, flash fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, film reviews, art, and comics.
Read our 2024 Pop Culture Spectacular!
art by Kolleen Carney-Hoepfner (original Drunk Monkeys logo by Severin Piehl)
BOOKSTORE
featuring works from our Writer of the month, editors, and writers, along with Staff Recommendations
LITERATURE
FILM
Gabe celebrates that there’s always something to watch—even a hidden gem of a film here and there—in this month’s Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo.
I keep a folder on my phone called "continuity error🤍." This brief compendium of movie discontinuity began with a scene that's been mystifying me since I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower at home for the first time, when I discovered one of the most perplexing "continuity errors" I've ever seen
Maybe I can understand why it's not everyone's cup of tea ~ it's insane. Pure fuckin crazy. But god, it was one of the greatest cinematic surprises of my life & I drank it UP.
But while a label may not always be necessary, they are SO VALUABLE. Besides Quinni (Heartbreak High), Billy Cranston is the only character I've seen actually acknowledge his own autism & it feel real, & authentic, & relatable (unlike *hacking cough* The Good Doctor et al).
I’m not a die-hard Kevin Smith fan by any means, but when I had the opportunity to go on a cruise where not only Jay and Silent Bob themselves (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith) would appear, but a whole cast of View Askewniverse actors, comedians, and musical acts, I caved to the peer pressure and purchased my cruise ticket a month before the inaugural cruise left the Miami port.
To be sure, there’s a lot about the script for Delirious that I love. The soap opera characters and situations in particular are clever subversions of the genre, and anyone watching this movie on some level at least understands how soaps work. The movie takes your understanding and runs with it to some surprising and often surreal places. The movie operates on soap opera logic, but also works with dream logic, and it’s easy to see why Gable is more often than not way in over his head.
One night after watching Dr. Phibes, I woke from a horrid nightmare, grisly death scenes flashing through my mind. Timidly—I knew I was too old for this—I knocked on my parent’s bedroom door and begged to sleep with them.
The black-and-white framing device of Asteroid City (2023) provides the narrative of the play with context, specifically context surrounding artists, especially queer artists, and their anxieties embedded within their art.
Returning to The Last Unicorn with my three-year-old daughter this year, I found that my love of it has not dimmed; my relationship to its symbolism and characters has evolved.
Call me Molly Shannon as Mary Catherine Gallagher. You may as well, Father. I'm that high school student with thick-framed glasses and an insatiable need for love and stardom.
ESSAYS
Gabe celebrates that there’s always something to watch—even a hidden gem of a film here and there—in this month’s Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo.
I keep a folder on my phone called "continuity error🤍." This brief compendium of movie discontinuity began with a scene that's been mystifying me since I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower at home for the first time, when I discovered one of the most perplexing "continuity errors" I've ever seen
Maybe I can understand why it's not everyone's cup of tea ~ it's insane. Pure fuckin crazy. But god, it was one of the greatest cinematic surprises of my life & I drank it UP.
But while a label may not always be necessary, they are SO VALUABLE. Besides Quinni (Heartbreak High), Billy Cranston is the only character I've seen actually acknowledge his own autism & it feel real, & authentic, & relatable (unlike *hacking cough* The Good Doctor et al).
I’m not a die-hard Kevin Smith fan by any means, but when I had the opportunity to go on a cruise where not only Jay and Silent Bob themselves (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith) would appear, but a whole cast of View Askewniverse actors, comedians, and musical acts, I caved to the peer pressure and purchased my cruise ticket a month before the inaugural cruise left the Miami port.
To be sure, there’s a lot about the script for Delirious that I love. The soap opera characters and situations in particular are clever subversions of the genre, and anyone watching this movie on some level at least understands how soaps work. The movie takes your understanding and runs with it to some surprising and often surreal places. The movie operates on soap opera logic, but also works with dream logic, and it’s easy to see why Gable is more often than not way in over his head.
One night after watching Dr. Phibes, I woke from a horrid nightmare, grisly death scenes flashing through my mind. Timidly—I knew I was too old for this—I knocked on my parent’s bedroom door and begged to sleep with them.
The black-and-white framing device of Asteroid City (2023) provides the narrative of the play with context, specifically context surrounding artists, especially queer artists, and their anxieties embedded within their art.
Returning to The Last Unicorn with my three-year-old daughter this year, I found that my love of it has not dimmed; my relationship to its symbolism and characters has evolved.
Call me Molly Shannon as Mary Catherine Gallagher. You may as well, Father. I'm that high school student with thick-framed glasses and an insatiable need for love and stardom.
ART
TELEVISION
And one night, every star in the universe aligned and there she was: Veronica Mars. Angry. Curious. Funny. Underestimated. I wanted to be her.
While having Mal and Inara act antagonistically towards each other helps keep viewers invested, it loses much of its merit when one realizes the writers didn’t properly utilize everything about their own characterizations.
For months, I painstakingly watched whole episodes of House, M.D. on TikTok, posted by an innocuous user who surely pirated it from somewhere.
For the 104 episodes before “Mindy Lahiri Is a White Man”, Mindy is established as a strong independent doctor who just happens to be a single mom. “…White Man” comes late in Season 5, just after some other mind-bending episodes. With only a dozen episodes after it, many shows would have been jumping the shark. As the episode starts loading, I realize that we are nearing the end of the run. And I’m already thinking about what show I will stream-binge next in the background.
Babylon Berlin is set in Berlin when it was the center of the world for brassy jazz, exquisite drinking, all night dancing, artistic expression, and breathtaking sex. All of it happening as the worst imaginable nightmares are waiting for them right around the corner.
This is the fifth episode of the entire show, though if I had seen it out of order my only clue that it wasn’t one of Nicholas Colasanto’s last episodes would be Diane’s clothes and the lack of Frasier. How immediately cohesive this show was from its origin: George Wendt is greeted with a rambunctious “Norm!”, Diane’s trill of “Norman” quick behind. Sam wiggles in overture at Diane, who flits him away, only for her to lose her balance in the flit and land on her face.
First. A dream. It worked in the 80s. Dallas is one of the most iconic series of all time. No one questioned The Dream. Pam Ewing, known for hitting the sauce, passed out, nightmared that she flattened Bobby with his Mercedes, woke up, found him singing in the shower.
The season four finale plays out over two devastating storylines. In one thread, Jimmy (refuses to) grapple with the death of his brother Chuck. This exploration of grief leads Jimmy to officially adopt the moniker Saul Goodman. Until this point, we have only known the main protagonist as the charming fuckup Jimmy McGill.
“Connor's Wedding” (S4 E3) starts off exactly as it sounds: the gang gears up for their elder half-brother's wedding to the (incredible!) Willa, who none of them respect. Connor has essentially purchased his bride to be; she was a call girl when they started “dating”, and the previous episode centered around his being in his feels, as Willa had run away from their rehearsal dinner.
While I watched the show, I made sure to keep track of everything Skyler did. I was curious, what could she have done that made her so hated?