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Bright Lights Film Journal
Issue 21 | May 1998

features

Beyond the Beach: AIP's Beach Party Movies — The beach movies helped turn the beach into an exaggerated version of the suburban backyard, complete with "swimming pool" in the form of the Pacific Ocean.

R. W. Fassbinder: Dark Angel — The homely, jowly face, dictatorial blatherings, and ragged leather chaps masked one of the great makers of modern cinema.

Seduction is Universal: Thoughts on Radley Metzger — The master of Euro-erotica is starting to get his due in recent revivals.

film festival coverage

Queers Without Fears: The 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival — The queer community's longstanding obsession with roles and labels may be starting to loosen up.

Penisspotting — For those who prefer anatomy to artistry, or more coarsely, meat to melodrama, we offer this consumer guide.

Queer Cartoons — Cartoons have always been a rich repository of queer subtext. How else to explain all those too-close buddies and their serious lack of female companionship?

Queer Innovators — The queer contribution to experimental film

a classic revisited

What Kind of Cowboy Are You? Eddie Cantor Goes West in Whoopee — Whoopee is a find, a treasure, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Most of all it is a chunk of Flo Ziegfeld's Roaring Twenties Broadway, preserved in glorious, 1930 two-color Technicolor.

reviews

Barbie Nation: Tabula Rasa with Tits — Susan Stern's entertaining documentary takes a jaundiced look at the history and vast influence of the disturbing doll.

Bugis Street — A bittersweet look at the daily lives of the tranny whores of a legendary red-light district of 1960s Singapore — with free make-up tips!

L.A. Confidential — The only things not taken from Chinatown are a post-plastic-surgery makeup job from The Long Goodbye and that gag from "The Lucy Show" where Lucy meets Orson Welles but doesn't believe it's really him.

video reviews

Kurosawa on Video — Three of Kurosawa's scathing critiques of Japanese society past and present — in beautiful new video transfers

book reviews

Sing Out! Gays and Lesbians in the Music World by Boze Hadleigh

VideoHound's Soundtracks, edited by Didier C. Deutsch

VideoHound's Independent Film Guide, by Monica Sullivan

Vamps: An Illustrated History of the Femme Fatale, by Pam Keesey

Billy Wilder, by Bernard F. Dick

William Wyler: A Talent for Trouble, by Jan Herman

September Song: An Intimate Biography of Walter Huston, by John Weld

Marihuana, Motherhood and Madness: Three Screenplays by Dwain Esper, by Bret Wood