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
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
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[…]
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[…]
“Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.” — Vladimir Nabokov
Activist & Political · Reviews
“It’s not a tomato, it’s the idea of a tomato.”
“Just like you wanted, grandma. I’m seeing a woman.”
“Noir films with non-urban settings exploded the idea that escape into a safer or healthier world was possible, showing how temptation and violence can attack anyone, anywhere.”
“What is this New York-ness?”
“To be a star, or thought of as a star, was not enough.”
Crime · Drama · Noir · Reviews
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.
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
“I hope he knew how much the world loved him.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
“Not frustration of a desire of the subject, but frustration by an object in which his desire is alienated and which the more it is elaborated, the more profound the alienation from his jouissance becomes for the subject.”
“A seemingly average person continually surprises and unsettles us by doing something strange and following it up with something even more spectacularly strange.”
“It’s just a little less Disney”
Drama · Essays · Uncategorized
“It’s almost as if The Misfit himself were behind the camera.”
“In classic Egoyan style, the humor is always also terrifying. . .”
The scandal-plagued release of Lars von Trier’s latest film inspired Jack Stevenson, American expat in Copenhagen, to take a deeper look at the film in a Danish context.
Essays · Film Technology & History · Music & Musicals
But don’t forget DVD opera
