Robert Castle has been contributing to Bright Lights Film Journal since 2000. His book The Interpretive Odyssey of Stanley Kubrick, is available on Kindle. In 2006, his first books were published: The End of Travel, a memoir (Ravenna Books); Odd Pursuits, a collection of 16 stories (Wild Child Publishing); and A Sardine on Vacation, fiction based on the feature columns appearing in Unlikely Stories (Spuyten Duyvil). His new novel, The Hidden Life (Atmosphere Press), is available at Amazon. 
Celebrity Culture · Comedy · Hollywood · Road Movies
Road to Morocco made the National Film Registry by going to the Mojave Desert in California and using rear screen projection. It didn’t need to go to a “real” casbah.[…]
The film is intent on the present, an element of the fifties go-getter types and the emergence of the organization man. The stress on “man” comes during post-World War II[…]
Drama · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
In this new reading of 2001, the monolith is used as a touchstone for considering a dozen tangents into iconoclastic cinema, the human and simian response to enigma, and the[…]
Future events in political campaigns came to be much worse than the events of late 1987 proved to be. One might be inclined to scoff at Gary Hart’s response given[…]
Counterculture · Dialogue · Drama · Romance
The subsequent dialogue between the two films developed after much negotiation and cajoling. They were inclined to be hostile to the other. I tried to inform them about their common[…]
Absurdism · Drama · Essays · Media · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
“Where’s the TV Guide?” – last line of the film * * * Introduction Truman Burbank exits the only world he knows. We – the television audience in the film,[…]
Brigadoon is a quasi-origin story that is closely associated with the way stories transform the reality of the recent past. Communities, societies, and nations survive by means of having sacrificial[…]
Celebrity Culture · Crime · Digital · Drama · Societal Trends
The Bling Ring’s impossible challenge for us is to reject the moralizing. We feel superior to the teenagers because of the celebrity issue. The four girls and boy represent our[…]
Comedy · Historical & Epic · Native Americans · Revisionism · Westerns
Buffalo Bill and the Indians joins a select group of films whose popular failure nonetheless represented an aesthetic success: Patty Hearst (1987) and The King of Comedy (1983), come to[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Drama · French Cinema · Mystery · Psychology
The question becomes: is it worth trying to be free? Is the struggle fruitless? Why can’t we escape our servitude to the past, to society, to others? * * *[…]
Drama · Horror · Women in Film
The movie is, literally, a projection of our mental landscape. We passively sit back (like Jeffries in Rear Window) and the world appears as we live and make it. We[…]
We can further associate the filmmaker, the man with whom we’ve placed our narrative trust, with the “psycho” of both the title and our typical image of one, the latter[…]
Horror · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
It’s your thing, do what you wanna do, I can’t tell you who to sock it to. – Isley Brothers What in the thing is thingly? What is the thing[…]
Celebrity Culture · Drama · Essays
While Rupert isn’t interested in a crisscross murder, he certainly wants Jerry to spot him a segment on Jerry’s show. This is more than a favor..And he appears to go[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
Suddenly, Gort doesn’t seem so powerful. We’re told of his strength and given a few meager examples. We have to take Klaatu’s word for it. The universe/world policeman is a[…]
Peckinpah’s ethics and form are evinced best in his sixth film, Straw Dogs, where we also discover the key to his aesthetic of violence. David Sumner takes a sabbatical to Yorkshire,[…]
“Are we trapped like Truman? Is this why we want him to leave his world? Then what will we do? Turn off the set? Leave our society with its endless[…]
“The beauty of Being There‘s satire lies in the strategy of depicting both television and its effects in a single man whose personality absorbs friend and foe, combines idiocy and[…]
“Where many people watch a film for a true or faithful rendition of an historical event, I needed confirmation that the thing I was viewing was . . . made up!”
“Both films suggest Europe has run aground spiritually, as they both depict the Catholic Church and its representatives to be as bloodthirsty as the conquistadors.”
