Vivienne

I think the key point in any aspiring cultural critic's life is to find something they enjoy, something that is either incredibly obscure and janky or incredibly loathed by the larger populace, and understand it's the thing they like. It's the only way that they'll actually be able to understand and express their opinions as their own. Without a moment like that you just get someone trying to rationalize crowd behavior. If I want to know the crowd's opinion I won't read a review; I'll check the fuckin sales charts.

People who review things as a means of projecting taste are wasting everyone's time, both theirs in trying to formulate these reviews and everyone else's for trying to read them.

Roger Ebert, the movie critic's critic, worked with boobsploitation film director Russ Meyer early in his career. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls has some story choices that hit different in the current era, but it was never something that aspired to a level beyond 'cult hit', if that's even something that a project could aim for.