Isn’t It Romantic? Hugh and Drew in Marc Lawrence’s Music and Lyrics
The King of the Backseat Blowjob gets mildly post-ironist on your ass You can do anything if you try. You must always be yourself, and never compromise. And it’s OK[…]
Category: Reviews
Fear of Fishing: Closets and Product Placement in Hawks’ Man’s Favorite Sport?
“The sorrows of narrative immersion are the joys of Brechtian postmodernism …” I love the films of Howard Hawks but I’ve always dismissed Man’s Favorite Sport as unwatchable, mainly because[…]
Being John, Seeing Stanley: John Malkovich in Brian Cook’s Colour Me Kubrick: A True … ish Story
“Plot keywords: drugs, glamour, party, rent boy, sex, bisexual, celebrity, con artist, male model” Say, who’s that old queen in the corner? Why, it’s John Malkovich, having a fairy good[…]
Documentaries · Genres · Movies · Reviews
Treed by the Family: On 51 Birch Street
For boomers, “the idea that Mom and Dad are flawed human beings with complicated histories and real feelings can be hard to accept.” The straight out of a first-grade primer[…]
No Exit: On Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will
“It’s a critique that is one step away from excusing Theo (the ‘woman was asking for it’ defence) …” Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will (Der freie Wille,1 2006) is a[…]
Fashion and Dunst: The Substance of Marie Antoinette
“The Coppola ideal is a young girl trapped in fustiness: she can be an object of voyeurism without a trace of lewdness, and remain spiritually intact even when accessorized.” Sofia[…]
Secrets of the European Union: Chicago’s Tenth Annual EU Film Festival
They saw what you did! Could anyone foresee, when six nations signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, that this economic agreement would evolve into the unprecedented political experiment called[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
More Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, The Nutty Professor, no Gorilla (I think), and no Allen Ginsberg (or Ginzberg)
Since my esteemed Bright Lights After Dark (and Bright Lights Film Journal) co-contributor C. Jerry Kutner posted his last entry in the (now) ongoing Nutty Professor debate out here in[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis vs. Julius Kelp & Buddy Love
In a comment to my previous Jerry Lewis post, Tom Sutpen wrote: Couldn’t agree more . . . except . . . Jerry Lewis has always steadfastly denied any Martin[…]
Queer Quickies: Random Short Reviews from April Shower to Wedding Wars
Note: With so much queer media happening lately — from feature films to reality TV shows to movies-of-the-week — I decided, like Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, to “go[…]
Robert De Niro at Yale Again! The Good Shepherd: Poor Little Lamb!
Hey! How did we win the Cold War, anyway? Yale? Wasps? Homoerotic subtext? Do any of these spell Robert De Niro? I’m guessing no, but Bobby, in his second outing[…]
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Night Train (Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1959) Call it Train of Fools. In Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s masterwork, a crowded night express travels overbooked with the despairing, the lovelorn, the lustful, a handful of priests[…]
One Small Step for a Penguin: George Miller’s Happy Feet
Getting down way down under You may not be aware of this yet — few Americans are — but Robin Williams likes black people. He also likes Latinos. And why[…]
Uneasy Lies the Head: Stephen Frears’ The Queen
“Hovering between treason and tribute . . .” Stephen Frears’ film The Queen starts with this quote from Henry V which announces that a whole Shakespearean drama is about to[…]
Casablanca: The Romance of Propaganda
“Casablanca provides twenty-first-century Americans with an oasis of hope in a desert of arbitrary cruelty and senseless violence.” As we approach the sixty-fifth anniversary of Casablanca (1942), it is clear that[…]
An Immovable Feast? Another Look at Henry King’s The Sun Also Rises
“It’s sort of what we have instead of God” “. . . you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.” — Pauline Kael, Trash,[…]
Artists · Directors · Movies · Reviews
Inherit the Wind: Talking with Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride About The Other Side of the Wind
Life with the restless ghost of Orson Welles’ last movie In 1970, after two decades of European exile broken only by his brief return in 1957-58 to make Touch of[…]
Through the Looking Glass: Thoughts on The Window
Ted Tetzlaff brings Bobby Driscoll to the voyeur’s front window The Window (1949) is the kind of movie probably best experienced as a child of 11 or 12, plagued by[…]
You Only Live Twice? Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale: Bond Rebottled
Forget the book, just see the movie It’s a curious fact that today’s movie franchises are largely based on American comic books and English popular fiction.1 The Harry Potter series,[…]
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