As Christine recites her erotic monologues, my heart quickened. The almost deadpan delivery, the disinterest of her ostensible boyfriend, the static shots, the background noise all combine to make her verbal depictions of mysterious sex scenes intense, making you wonder when the other shoe will drop. "Why are you doing this?" "I'm sharing my life." The underlying message is simple and scathingly put: female sexuality is a radical act in the eyes of men. Not conforming to the presumed roles of the men in her life, Christine confounds all three of the men in her orbit. As they each fail to fulfill her--the dull routine one who cannot fathom her sexuality, the mysterious and creepy one who strands her, and…

Takes the cinematic history/language of horny, voyeuristic (typically male) sleuths and repurposes it for female fantasy in a film that I think people are bound to find frustrating based on how much more interested it is in its depiction of a desperate NY woman's sexual imagination being awoken/expanded by taking a job selling tickets at a grimy porno house on 48th street rather than the quasi-thriller subplot it builds with the deliberate purpose of feeling disappointed by.

Gordon alternates between gorgeous documentation of 80s downtown outsider nightlife (including cameos by her friends Cookie Mueller and Nan Goldin) and the filthy, neon-lit locations they really walked every night to a jazzy John Lurie score + a gender-swapped Peeping Tom/Taxi Driver style…

There is little more adverse to the male psyche than a woman aggressively in control of her own sexuality. 

Director Bette Gordon’s “Variety,” about a ticket seller at an adult movie theatre off Times Square, is a grimy odyssey through the filth that used to once run off from 42nd street. 

The film isn’t only an essential piece of feminist cinema, but a chronicle of what it was like to exist as a woman in New York during a moment when the city seemed on the verge of collapsing into a pile of sludge and neon. 

“Variety” comes penned with a script by the legendary postmodernist author Kathy Acker, who could be likened to William S. Burroughs, but with an…

I'm not really even going to try to write a review, instead i am going to flagrantly, relentlessly fangirl so hard cringe folds in on itself. Pretty much as perfect as movies get i am sure??? Like, I knew I was going to LIKE this movie BEFORE I watched it but as soon as I began watching it I knew I was going to love this film with all of my heart forever and ever way after death do us part me and Variety (1983) by Bette Gordon, written by Kathy Acker from a story by Bette Gordon about needing a job and so getting a job taking tickets at some local porn theatre that your bff Nan Goldin turned…

women has been pursued by men for their gratifying needs in and out of cinema. there’s one sequence here when a woman follows an unaware man and to me it’s so hypnotic. to see it from the other end. it’s not done with a malicious intent but it’s the way it clash against how we'd process events like these (in reality & fiction). 

there’s another sequence where a woman walks in a pornography store and have the eyeballs of every men on them. stunned. disgusted. ashamed at the invasion of privacy, as if their objectification and mistreatment and harassment and abuse and the list goes on and it goes on for too long doesn’t take place every second outside. without a…