August 2010 | Issue 69
From the Editor
Articles
They can never really knock you off your feet as long as you're wearing Blahniks
"In our devotion to realism-as-catharsis, we've become so obsessed with psychologizing fictional characters that we forget we are the ones who need humanizing."
"While films about men with dangerous jobs showed them returning home to supportive, contented wives, films that focused on domestic settings showed women caught in oppressive relationships or warped by the narrowness of their emotional lives."
"They rapin' everybody out here." — Antoine Dodson
"In Mad Men, as in modern American politics, the past is a pre-lapsarian paradise to which it is imperative to return, and the fantasy is of those exiled from history itself."
That still finds musicians easier to rob
By Jacob Mikanowski
"Because they assume that memory is fallible and experience inassimilable, they're more like inquests or excavations than diaries or memoirs. Instead of reminiscing, they dig."
"Aldridge's shoot is so striking because it purports to discover glamour in the mind of an unhinged woman: an associative path that has been cut by cinema."
"There remain only intimations of squalor and suffering, of rough beasts stumbling across the landscape without any stability or security in sight."
By Dorian Fox
Wonder Boys is a wonder; The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, not so much
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

By Dan Bentley-Baker
Will the real cult film please stand up?
By Ron Capshaw
"Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously."
Movies
"I'm dealing in rock 'n' roll. I'm, like, I'm not a bona fide human being." — Phil Spector
By Joseph Natoli
"What entertains us may be shaping us."
"She came at me in sections . . . she was bad . . . she was dangerous . . . she was my kind of woman."
"The good news from Bellamy is that Depardieu gives one of his best performances in years."
By Jacob Mikanowski
"Today's Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad."
By Jonathan Simmons
"It is the search for explanation itself and the experience of the alien, disturbing, and frightening that thrills audiences."
"It is a protean film, and changes radically depending on how you approach it."
"While a teen's emotional landscape can indeed defy reason, the filmmakers insist that a teenager's need to attack supersedes any moral dilemma, even if their behavior results in the expulsion of one of their peers."
By Ron Capshaw
"How else is one to approach a historical episode involving humpbacked, sexually frustrated nuns; crippled autocrats; hammer-wielding exorcists; doctors armed with holy water enemas?"
By Jacob Mikanowski
"The doubled Hitchcock mirrors the Hitchcock double, who in turn reflects Hitchcock pretending to play himself."
"Most of the major speaking roles are indeed pwned by people without color, to put it indelicately. But the rest are thankfully brought to life by a rainbow coalition of talent."
The Last Airbender

By Brian Libby
"Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower."
By Vlad Dima
"Ford creates a unique cinematic experience in which the visual, the aural, and even the olfactory mix to produce a powerful synesthetic experience."
Interviews
Pam Grier in Jackie Brown
By Steve Ryfle
In which the author talks about being a lifelong SF movie freak and updating his seminal SF compendium Keep Watching the Skies! for the new millennium
"Being middle-age rock and rollers, just trying to pay the bills, isn't an easy lifestyle."
Stars
By Frank Bren
"The man's a genius!" — Jerry Lewis
Pierre Etaix in Yoyo

Directors
By Philip Leers
"Tashlin's tenure at Warner Bros. did not provide him with a 'cartoon aesthetic' that could be applied, ready-made, to his features; rather, it allowed him to develop a feature filmmaking aesthetic through cartoons."
Columns
Festivals
By Kristen Anderson Wagner
"Even the most obscure titles drew impressive crowds, and the premiere events boasted sold-out houses."
"There is always some madness in love; but, there is always some reason in madness." - Nietzsche
Books
Reviewed by Gary Morris
"Wagner's takedowns are thorough and unforgiving, as they should be."
Reviewed by Ron Capshaw
"Plagued by bad health (he suffered a heart attack at the age of 33), he nevertheless was able to create the impression of animal vitality."
Reviewed by Gary Morris
Do we believe in Swedish sin? Yes, we do. Also, American.
Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, 4th edition, edited by Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, and Robert Porfirio
Reviewed by Matthew Sorrento
"The Encyclopedia, especially in its new revised edition, reflects the vertiginous feeling of noir itself."
Recent Posts

Margaret Lockwood in The Man in GreyOne of the great Gainsborough melodramas, in the longer UK cut, on the always accommodating (if sometimes only temporarily) YouTube. Margaret Lockwood is as "wicked" here as she is in Wicked Lady. Watch it before the copyright police come a-callin'!

Watch on Youtube »

Gordon Thomas, and other BL staff, check out the eye- popping pleasures of Blu-Ray.

» Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair)
» The General (Keaton)
» Sunrise (Murnau)
» 8-1/2 (Fellini)
» Playtime (Tati)
» Winstanley (Brownlow & Mollo)
» Permissive (Shonteff)
» Lola Montes (Ophuls)
» My Childhood, My Ain Folk ... (Bill Douglas)
» In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima)
» Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney)
» Repulsion (Polanski)
» Institute Benjamenta (Brothers Quay)
» Everlasting Moments (Troell)

BL Associate Editor Alan Vanneman and others watch (and review) television shows so you don't have to. Click if you dare.

» 30 Rock
» The American President
» Archer
» Batman: The Animated Series
» The Big Bang Theory
» Broadway Theatre Archive
» Car 54, Where Are You?
» Charlie’s Angels
» Cowboy Bebop
» Death of a Salesman
» Dollhouse
» Freaks and Geeks
» Have Gun Will Travel
» Mad Men
» Magnum P.I.
» Monk
» Pamela Anderson Roast
» PBS
» Renegade
» Sex and the City
» Sports Night
» Star Trek

I'm sick of movies, Mr. Webmaster. Take me away!

» Archive.org
Gazillions of free books, audio, and video. Grab 'em before the copyright police come knocking!

» Glenn Greenwald
The indomitable civil liberties champion takes exception to American exceptionalism. You will too when you read his blistering analyses.

» Project Gutenberg
See Archive.org.

» Creative Commons
"All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially."

» The Ivy Compton-Burnett home page
A Bright Lights side project created by George Brown devoted to the greatest novelist of the 20th century. There, we said it.

» Raw Vision
The leading online site (and print publication) devoted to those zany untrained artists who channel personality quirks, neuroses, idées fixes, and downright craziness into Art.

» Siklink.com
An endlessly fascinating clearinghouse for "the greatest hand-picked collection of bizarre, strange and unusual websites on the internet today." Highlights include the enchanting "Prison Bitch Name Generator" and "Life Gem" – how to "turn your deceased loved one into a diamond."

» Clark Ashton Smith
The premier fantasy poet and short-story writer (and sculptor and artist) gets a detailed blog that's a model for intelligent fan-ism. Watch out for falling curmudgeons in the forum.

» Classic Arcade Games
Miss Asteroids? Centipede? Frogger? Miss that you missed them? Here's your chance to enjoy the state of the art circa 1980s.

» Jack Vance
Wikipedia's gateway to our favorite writer in and of science fiction and fantasy. A national treasure.

» Electronic Frontier Foundation
"EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations." Go EFF!

» The Canonical List of Weird Band Names: The Peculiar and the Profane
Another Bright Lights side project from the inimitable George Brown. You probably know the Meat Puppets but how about Lyin' Bitch and the Restraining Orders?

» James Purdy
A good introduction to a criminally neglected postwar literary master. Be 21 or be gone for his gorgeous, harrowing works, kids.

» The Radical Ant Farm
This page answers that nagging question: "What's up with the Russian criminal tattoos?" The rest of the site offers further fun.

» Spectro-Pop
Monumental site devoted to '60s pop music – you know, that stuff playing in the background during the orgy.

» The Left Business Observer
Doug Henwood's long-running economics newsletter, called "invaluable" by Noam Chomsky. Need we say more?

» Jane Bowles
Go to Wikipedia and improve this "stub" on the writer Tennessee Williams looked up to and James Purdy called "the eagle-woman of American letters."

» WFMU
The best online radio station for our money. A deep archive and no-music-turned-away policy will keep you rollin' and tumblin' till the apocalypse.

» Henry Green
Must we create a detailed tribute page to this extraordinary British novelist championed by Auden, Updike, and Terry Southern? Or will you do it? Start with Concluding (1948).

» Women of Surrealism
They weren't all "muses" and maids – these women equaled or surpassed their more celebrated male counterparts in vision and technique.

» Ronald Firbank
He called the president of Haiti "a perfect dear" and was known to eat a single pea at dinner. Oh, and he ranks with Joyce and Woolf (see Edmund Wilson) as a groundbreaking literary modernist.

» Essential Vermeer
Everything you need to know about the Dutch master of light and mysterious figures.

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@brightlightsfilm - stills, photos, and images from classic and contemporary films from around the world.