Since everyone else seems to be talking about it…
…and I mean *everybody*… Jonathan Rosenbaum posted a rather damning blog entry on his website regarding QT’s “IB” that was subsequently picked up and scoffed at by a smattering of[…]
Category: Movies
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[…]
Cosmic Karma in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
Check out the latest issue of Film Comment, containing an excellent, though regrettably short, piece by Richard Combs praising the formal achievement of Roger Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre[…]
Everybody Love the Sad Donkey
In 1976, producer Dino de Laurentiis was asked why he had the audacity to remake King Kong. He replied, “Everybody love the big monkey.” Dino had a point. There are[…]
“True Glamour Never Fades”: Michael Sucsy’s Grey Gardens (HBO)
“Two roads diverged in yellow woods,and pondering one, I took the other,and that made all the difference.”
No Transcendence: Cannes Film Festival 2009
“It’s becoming more and more rare that a fresh, original film gets into the Cannes competition.”
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974): The Ultimate NYC Film
“What is this New York-ness?”
The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009): Inflating Pelham
“To be a star, or thought of as a star, was not enough.”
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.
Little Stabs of Queer Happiness (and Horror): Random Short Reviews of the Worthy and the Worthless in Recent and Old School Cinema
“A seemingly average person continually surprises and unsettles us by doing something strange and following it up with something even more spectacularly strange.”
Quickies: Random Short Reviews from The Country Teacher to Osessione to Underbelly
“As soon as my health is in jeopardy, everybody shows up to lick my ass!”
Atom Egoyan’s Adoration: A Return to Form(s)?
“In classic Egoyan style, the humor is always also terrifying. . .”
Jesus Fucking Christ: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist
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.
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Bardelys the Magnificent, Monte Cristo, Cleopatra, In the Realm of the Senses, Au Bonheur des Dames, Daisies, The Saragossa Manuscript
Bardelys the Magnificent (King Vidor, 1926); Monte Cristo (Emmett J. Flynn, 1922) Just as they deepened our appreciation of Rudolf Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, Flicker Alley, with this magnificent release[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
Dark Harvest: Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc.
“It’s not a tomato, it’s the idea of a tomato.”
Sleep Stalking: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Four Nights with Anna
“Just like you wanted, grandma. I’m seeing a woman.”
A Couple of Bagheads
Saw a couple baghead movies over the weekend and am still sleeping with the lights on. What’s so scary about a bag over a head? Who knows, but it works.[…]
Fellini, Michael Jackson, and La Voce della Luna (1990)
In America, the 1960s were the golden age of the foreign film. Film directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais were considered “superstars,” and[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Ed Wood Blogathon: Screwy Details in THE NIGHT OF THE GHOULS
It’s a shame that Ed Wood’s last non-skin film, NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (1959), had to go unseen all through the prime time of Wade Williams’ TV horror package. It[…]
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