Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
Blood Will Tell: The Purge: Election Year (2016)
To be a popular film, which is the intent of the Purge series, is to play into what an audience loves; and in the case of something it is not[…]
Category: SF & Fantasy
Directors · Interviews · SF & Fantasy
Futureworlds: Talking with Yorgos Lanthimos about The Lobster (2015)
The Lobster tries to look at how we are as people – what it means to be single, alone, or involved with someone and all of the constraints that society[…]
“When Does a Difference-Engine Become a Search for Truth?” Cybernetic Platonism in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot (2004)
Sonny says that now that he has completed the mission for which he was created – to kill Dr. Lanning – he does not know what to do with himself,[…]
Jurassic Parks: Stevie and the Dinosaurs
Spielberg, like many film directors, appears to be far more interested in film than life – interested in film, and interested in audiences, and how to move them through film.[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Time and the Image: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes
These things never happen but are always. – Sallust The dead love the most, love the longest. – Malvina von Stille * * * INTRODUCTORY Centuries of thought and imagination,[…]
Historical & Epic · SF & Fantasy
Star Wars: The Force Awakens: An Archetypal Review
Critics and fans love the film, but complain that it is less “mythic” than its predecessors. The myth is still there; it is just harder to see because it is[…]
Synthetic Mythology: George Lucas, Disney, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens
The marriage of Disney and Lucasfilm is a match made in heaven. Disney – the man and the company – spent the better part of a century trying to homogenize[…]
A Good Game of Chess: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015)
“Ava was a rat in a maze, and I gave her one way out. To escape, she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did.” * *[…]
SF & Fantasy · Thrillers & Action
He’s Back: The Paratextual Life of Terminator: Genisys
The movie makes a half-hearted attempt at chastising contemporary society and its dependence on technology, on machines (ironically, Sarah would not have survived without the help of a machine). Everyone[…]
Into the Deep: Reflections on Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013)
The dominant image from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is that of an opaque pool of black liquid, into which sink a variety of men who have fallen victim[…]
Notes on a Stupid Dinosaur Movie: Jurassic World and the Hollywood Blockbuster
Once a film gives up on originality, it immediately descends into nihilism. Whatever sensory pleasures such a film may offer, the underlying assumption is that the entire experience is empty[…]
Slave Runner: Genetic Engineering, Slavery, and Immortality in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982)
In a dehumanised world it is therefore the replicants who are keener to live, love, and be free. This is another important issue that the film raises: who is actually[…]
Plissken on Parade: Escape from New York (1981) Comes to Blu-ray
So even if you aren’t nostalgic for the heady sense of danger and decadence, do yourself a favor and crash the pod down into Carpenter country – an alternate reality[…]
Essays · New Media · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Spike Jonze vs. the Conspiring Escapist: On Her, Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, and Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure
“What Jonze, Coover, and Švankmajer are all playing with in their distinctive, varying shades of dark humor are the dual perspectives of the Spielbergian audience, absorbed in the protagonists’ fantasies,[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
We Are Not Who We Are: Human Sacrifice, Philosophical Horror, and (Maybe) the End of the World
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part,[…]
Happy Birthday, Ray Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013): An Interview with the Titan of Stop-Motion Animation
This interview with Ray Harryhausen first appeared in Bright Lights in November 2007. We reprint it here as a birthday tribute to the seminal animator. * * * “I wrecked Washington, and[…]
Move Over, Godzilla! Killer Bugs, Babes, and Beasts in 1950s Drive-in Cinema
With the latest version of Godzilla opening on May 16, we were reminded of other 1950s drive-in “classics” featuring everything from irradiated giant bugs to women on other planets who look suspiciously[…]
Activist & Political · SF & Fantasy
Battleground Pandora: The War over James Cameron’s Avatar*
Avatar metaphorically attacks all martial, colonial, and expansionist histories, which have occurred at the expense of the world’s indigenous peoples and Earth’s biocomplexity. Both implicitly, through the film’s narrative, and[…]
Post-Sensory Pong: A Future-Shock Analysis of Virginia Postrel’s “Who Needs Raise When you have TV?”
Now anyone who can scrape together a few hundred dollars can load up on enough movie streams and DV-R and giant LCD screens to never leave the house, so who needs a nice house?
Future-Pissed: THE VISITOR (1979), AKIRA (1988), TANK GIRL (1995)
Though last December’s lack of promised Mayan doomsday never panned out, December 2013 is laden with new DVDs and theatrical revivals that allow us to pretend the world ended as far back as 1979. Oh if only… we might all be rolling with Humongous by now, or Bane, or what’s the difference?
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