How to Kill the Queen of the Night: Tragedy Is No Joke, but It Can Be Deeply Funny
O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us! – Robert Burns, “To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet At Church.” * *[…]
Category: Music & Musicals
La La Land and Dreams of a Musical Renaissance
There is some originality in this orgy of borrowing, with easy references to touch screens, cell phones, and an interracial marriage, but all with a constant backward orientation. La La[…]
Counterculture · Documentaries · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals
Take What You Have Gathered from Coincidence: D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967)
“BOB: Well, you always know who you are. I just don’t know who I’m gonna become.” – Sam Shepard. True Dylan: A One-Act Play as It Really Happened One Afternoon in[…]
Experimental & Underground · Music & Musicals
The World’s First 24-Hour Music Video: Mapping the Cinematic Geography of 24 Hours of Happy
UPDATE May 21, 2014: Six Iranian participants in 24 Hours of Happy were arrested on Tuesday, May 20, and “forced to repent” on national television for that appearance. They posted[…]
Cinco de Mayo Fun! Ninón Sevilla Gets Down in the 1950 Mexican Musical Melodrama Aventurera
Cabaret or whorehouse? If only poor Elena had known the difference! In the late 1940s, Mexico experienced an economic boom that shifted the cultural and artistic energy from country life — the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Easter 2014, Part Deux: Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade, in which Fred and Judy celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ
In part “deux” of Bright Lights’ tribute to Easter, we present that devout duo, Fred and Judy, offering spiritual and musical solace on this day of reflection. Remember how it[…]
Marion Davies and Bing Crosby are Going Hollywood! But only one of them makes it
“Praise the Lord and pass the absinthe!” When Marion Davies first met William Randolph Hearst, she was a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, and a showgirl she remained. She had an uncertain[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
It’s Always Fair Weather? I’m Afraid Not: Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse Say Good-bye to Broadway
What’s black and white and destroys Western Civilization?
CJK’s Blu-ray of the Month: The Beatles HELP! (Richard Lester, 1965)
You might think that everyone knows the Beatles. But you would be wrong. When a couple of weeks ago I asked the clerk at Best Buy if they had the[…]
“Where Are We Now?” A Still Life in Moving Frame
“I wish I was beside her but I’m not there, I’m gone” — from I’m Not There, Bob Dylan
DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals
Opera Goes Blu, and So Should You: An Amateur’s Guide to Mozart’s Operas on Blu-ray
“Passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and as music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music… .”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
The Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films
“While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don’t-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers’ films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what’s not there.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
Fred’s on TV! But You Can’t See Him, Except on YouTube
Read about what you can’t see
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Nothin’ but Legs! Fred and Cyd Go out Kicking in Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“I’m Glad I’m Not Me”: The Many Faces of Bob Dylan in Dont Look Back
“It comes as no surprise that Dylan, who has made a career out of dodging tidy classifications and labels, would be involved with a film that exhibits traits of both schools of cinéma vérité, rendering it as one of the most challenging and important works of the 1960s.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Funny Face! Audrey Hepburn’s Fabulous Fifties Fashion Frolic! Also Starring Fred Astaire
Paris! Gershwin! Been there! Heard that!
Composers · Directors · Music & Musicals · Noir
Clashing Harmonics: The Characteristics of Sound in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil
“Welles familiarizes us with the geography of the town largely through source music. Los Robles is presented as a labyrinth, an inter-place where physical and moral borders are erased.”
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Docurama Bizarra: MELLODRAMA; ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM
A documentary on the weird world of Ohioans keeping dangerous wild animals as pets (it’s legal there), this film couldn’t be more timely in the light of recent events
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Who Took the Folk Out of Music? Everybody, It Seems
“How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Yeah, I’m 56 and She’s 24. What’s Your Point? Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, frequently though not continuously irresistible in Daddy Long Legs
Come on, do the Sluefoot? That I can resist.
