Far from Elementary: Debra Chasnoff’s Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up
“I told him, ‘I’m not gay. My neck was cold.'”
Category: Genres
Activist & Political · Reviews · War
How James Stewart Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: Anthony Mann’s Strategic Air Command
“Chew popcorn to avoid grinding teeth, comrades.”
Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing
“His plan mirrors Johnny’s, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place.
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics
Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah
“In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality – and its alternate currents – is caught with a glance.”
Activist & Political · Reviews
“They Come in Peace”: Andy Fickman’s Race to Witch Mountain
“Only saviors can save polluted planets, yellow cab drivers are losers . . .”
Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America
“Tease was out, honesty was in.”
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men
“I’m shitting bricks, thinking he’s onto me.”
The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual
“We keep returning to this story about pod people because we’re terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era.”
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Lucky 13: The 2009 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Getting out of the ghetto
Activist & Political · Crime · Historical & Epic · Reviews
The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
How a movie exposé of “abuse of power” defends those in power and their institutions
Reviews · Thrillers & Action · War
Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: Film Kills
“Tarantino thus concedes some of his omnipotence to the medium he so deftly manipulates.”
“Do You Find Me Sadistic?” Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds
“This is the World War II film confronting its Jungian shadow, acknowledging its darkest impulses and finally purging them.”
Activist & Political · Drama · Reviews
Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11
“Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being ‘about’ 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Interviews
Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas
“One who knows how to, as they say, ‘read’ the images, can tell everything about me.”
An Atheist’s Guide to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer. – Stevie Wonder * * * In 1949 Walt Disney Studios produced the last, and arguably the best, of their[…]
The Beautiful and the Darned: Avenging TWILIGHT
It’s massively popular, it’s ridiculously mopey, yet it’s also brooding, purple and relatively un-headache-inducing… in short, it’s everything you hate and love about Seattle if you ever tried to move[…]
Music & Musicals · Reviews · TV & Streaming
The Marienbad Music Video
So many music videos and television commercials have ripped off the imagery of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad since its 1961 release that it makes perfect sense for someone[…]
Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Alan Turing, 1912-1954, 2009
Since we’re commemorating dire events today, here’s one from queer history worth noting. From today’s Guardian website: Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government[…]
The Shallow World of District 9
Even within the notoriously cheese-ridden genre of science fiction, few films can rival the alien visitation picture in terms of how much suspicion they arouse. Rare is the film that[…]
Crime · Drama · Noir · Reviews
Women Larger Than Life: Program Notes 2: King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest (1949) / Gerd Oswald’s Crime of Passion (1957)
Note: The humble program note has a long and noble history. Sometimes anonymous, sometimes not, cheered as often as they were reviled, these brief, ephemeral, often illuminating handouts, likely destined for the dustbin the same night they appeared, offer “wisdom in a nutshell,” as one of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s characters aptly put it. This article is the second in Bright Lights’ series of vintage program notes from those heady days of the 1970s when unstoppable auteurists started their own cine clubs and commandeered movie theaters to bring their idea of cine-culture to audiences. Our late friend Roger McNiven continues the series with fascinating write-ups of two more works on the subject of “women larger than life,” in this case Bette Davis in King Vidor’s woefully underrated Beyond the Forest and Barbara Stanwyck in Gerd Oswald’s undeservedly obscure Crime of Passion. This double feature was screened at the legendary Thalia Theatre in New York City on Monday, December 3, 1979. We have added images but not edited the text, deferring to the time and spirit in which it was written.
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