Category: Bon Mots

Cinema du WTF – UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth 2013)

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A singular and highly accomplished independent film, Upstream Color is philosophical science fiction in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague, seasoned with a dash of Cronenbergian body horror.  Like the SF films that emerged from the nouvelle vague – Chris Marker’s  La Jetée, Alain Resnais’s  Je t’aime je t’aime, Godard’s Alphaville, Bertrand Tavernier’s Death [...]

From Climate Hacker to Hero: An Interview With Tim DeChristopher

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Originally published in An environmental idealist stops an illegal oil and gas auction by bidding for parcels he can’t possibly afford. Savaged by an exponentially accelerating climate crisis, a once-proud nation rewards him…by throwing him into a hole. Along the vertiginous fall, he tumbles through a dystopia that denies his rights, then creates a case [...]

A Gatsby Pre-View

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My fiancée and I were sitting on the couch the other night. I was flipping channels on the TV and watching baseball on my laptop, she was poking around on her phone. The trailer for the new Gatsby film came on. Baz Lurhmann, 3D, glitz and glamour, and musical numbers. We stopped what we were [...]

Bright Lights hits 80!

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Jeez, we’re old. See for yourself by clicking on our exciting new issue, which stretches from the 1840s to the 2013 Istanbul International Film Festival. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com Among the rogue’s gallery you’ll meet James Young Deer, the first silent-era Native American producer/director. Or was he? Then there’s the unholy trio of Breaking Bad, Girls, and Mad [...]

To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

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My four-word review of To the Wonder: “more of the same.” Which is not necessarily a bad thing … if you like Malick. To the Wonder continues the autobiographical mode of The Tree of Life. That one was mainly about Malick’s Texas boyhood. This one’s about his marriage. The story is simple to the point of [...]

Bright Lights on Bright Lights!

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Our innate modesty and abhorrence of insularity, self-referencing, self-reflexivity, and, well, self-everything would normally prohibit us from publishing this piece. But we were so captivated by this tribute by one Bright Lights writer (Norm Ball) to another (Andrew Grossman) that we decided to be loosen up and go ahead and publish it. We [...]

Bright Lights #79 (February 2013) live

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From the Editor Editorial: “God Bless Us, Everyone?” Gary Morris FEATURES The Women in Prison Film: From Reform to Revolution 1922-1974 Oren Shai “The cheap production values of most WIP films required them to rely on the promise of forbidden spectacles such as sex (‘Love Starved Women!’), violence (‘Rape, riot, and revenge’), and often the [...]

Michael Curtiz, Part 2 – Weird Scenes Inside the Wax Museum

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The directorial personality of Michael Curtiz remains elusive, but his visual talent is indisputable. Look closely at the lighting and composition of these images from Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). If Curtiz had directed no other films than Mystery of the Wax Museum and Dr. X (1932) – both of which were photographed in [...]

Michael Curtiz – Auteur Without a Theme?

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Hungarian-born filmmaker, Michael Curtiz (pictured with Joan Crawford, above), is considered by many to be one of the quintessential Hollywood directors – he is, after all, the man who directed Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and The Adventures of Robin Hood. Yet in auteurist circles he is given short shrift.  Andrew Sarris, for example, calls Casablanca [...]

Small Stakes, Small World: Technology and Skyfall

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The James Bond series is ostensibly about a jet-setting spy drinking martinis with beautiful women and saving the world. Skyfall, the newest entry in the 007 franchise, is certainly glamorous and sleek, but moviegoers leave having seen a different kind of Bond film. The stakes Bond faces are far less global, and the antagonist is [...]

Father of His Country: Spielberg’s Lincoln

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Great drama often depends on the playwright’s ability to select (or invent) a fateful day or two in his hero’s life that symbolically sums him up and enables him to enact his very essence as a human being. Sophocles clearly “got it” (he may have even invented it), giving us just one day in Oedipus’s [...]

New Bright Lights #78 (November 2012) now live

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Issue 78 / November 2012 From the Editor: “Danger, Reader, Danger!”   At Bright Lights, we don’t normally deal in cautionary tales; we’re usually too busy sampling one or more of the seven deadly sins (we’re enjoying “sloth” this week). But even the most sybaritic among us needs an occasional break, and during a recent [...]

WALTZES FROM VIENNA (Alfred Hitchcock 1934)

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Notwithstanding the absence of spy plots, murders, or homicidal maniacs, WALTZES FROM VIENNA is very much a film by Alfred Hitchcock. It was co-scripted by his wife, Alma Reville. It displays the same kind of parent-child issues that we find in many of Hitchcock’s more *serious* films. Superficially, WALTZES is a film of its time, a [...]

Kickstarter for A FULLER LIFE

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There are only 35 days left for the Kickstarter fund for Samantha Fuller’s film A Fuller Life, a pseudo-documentary about her father, film director Samuel Fuller, whose 100th birthday came and went this month without so much as a Samtennial parade down his beloved Park Row. Promoting Kickstarter funds via blogs and social media is [...]

Homage to Tony Scott

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The footage is from “Boy and Bicycle” (1965), a short film by Ridley Scott. The actor is Tony Scott (1944-2012), Sir Ridley’s director brother. Whoever put together this  homage scored it with Carl Orff’s “Schulwerk: Musica Poetica,” a favorite piece of Tony’s that was used in the score of True Romance, his most personal film.  (The same [...]

Bright Lights #77 (August) now live

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August 2012 | Issue 77 From the Editor Editorial: “Breaking News!” Gary Morris   FEATURES Random Acts of Sensible Violence: Genre, Hong Kong Censorship, and the Brief Ascent of “Category III” Andrew Grossman A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle Looking at Charlie – The Year at Keystone, Part 2: An Occasional Series on [...]

Films I Saw in Andrew Sarris’ Class

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Sadly, we report the death of the influential writer, teacher, and film critic, Andrew Sarris (31 October 1928 — 20 June 2012). Sarris will be remembered for bringing the auteur theory to American film criticism, the idea that a film’s director is primarily responsible for a film’s artistic worth (if it has any) the way [...]

Podcast Pleasures

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There are all kinds, types, brands, bits and pieces of chit-chatter to plug one’s ear into should one wish to plumb the misty myths and mysteries of movies and all things filmlike. I thought it’d be fun discussing a couple which delight me personally as a person. The first, a Blogtalk Radio original, Movie Geeks [...]

Bridesmaids Revisited

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Last summer, in the midst of the The Hangover 2’s disappointingly massive success, another comedy came along, which went on to become something of a triumph of box office girlpower, the femalecentric comedy Bridesmaids. Written by Saturday Night Live’s great nuclear reactor of comedic bizarrerie Kristen Wiig, and Annie Mumulo, it also starred Kristen Wiig [...]

Dispatch from Cannes 2012 #3: David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS

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by RONALD BERGAN Here we go again. Only a few days ago we had Walter Salles’ lumbering, rigidly faithful film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Now we have David Cronenberg’s equally lumbering, rigidly faithful film version of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. I wish both Salles and Cronenberg had heeded Ezra Pound’s modernistic injunction in [...]

Dispatch from Cannes 2012 #2: Walter Salles’s ON THE ROAD

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by RONALD BERGAN Among the great might-have-beens of cinema are Greta Garbo as Dorian Gray, Ingmar Bergman directing Barbra Streisand in The Merry Widow, Orson Welles’s The Heart of Darkness, Sergei Eisenstein’s An American Tragedy, and the young Marlon Brando as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. It has been a long and winding road [...]