Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Tabu; French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris, 1923-1928
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Category: Reviews
A Fragment of Seeking: Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide
“When Ellen Sands, the land girl who vies for his affections, sees Johnny off, the implication is that she’ll be a soft place for him to land when he comes down from his guilty obsession over Mora; her offer of coffee on his way out is as Ariadne’s gift to Theseus of the thread of consciousness that would lead him out of the minotaur maze.”
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Getting into Curtis Harrington’s Head: Flicker Alley and Drag City Release the Avant-Mainstream Director’s Experimental Shorts
“Being fascinated with the occult, Harrington would surely have recognized that by beginning and ending his life work with the same story he was drawing a mandala around that life, making it as self-contained a thing as one of his films, all of which belong to the “trance” tradition whose introspective mien establish the work as occurring within a given consciousness walled off in some way from the natural world.”
CJK’s Blu-ray of the Month: The Beatles HELP! (Richard Lester, 1965)
You might think that everyone knows the Beatles. But you would be wrong. When a couple of weeks ago I asked the clerk at Best Buy if they had the[…]
A Great Hook! – Rolling Thunder (1977) – Blu-ray Review
“when asked by his rival/buddy about the eight years of hell he endured over some back room beers, Devane says merely, “you learn to love it.” “
Whoopee! released on DVD! (courtesy of the Goldwyn Archive)
The first review I wrote for Bright Lights was of Eddie Cantor’s Whoopee! (I left off the exclamation point) in the early days of the web (May 1998). This 1930 Sam[…]
The 10 Most Devastating Film Noir Endings: Pre-Code to the Present
A film noir doesn’t have to have an unhappy ending … but it helps. Here are 10 film noir endings that pack an emotional wallop. I Am a Fugitive from[…]
Shyamalan’s a Ding-Dong: After Earth (Will Smith is a great dad, please)
We don’t want to see dead people, but we damn sure want them to see us.
Vincente Minnelli’s Descents Into Hell
Vincente Minnelli’s reputation is that of a stylist – someone who did not author his own screenplays, but who directed whatever the studio (usually MGM) assigned to him (usually musicals), and[…]
The Horrible Gatsby, the Bland Gatsby, and the Surprisingly Good Gatsby
After having seen the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby directed by Elliot Nugent and the 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton, I concluded that the novel was unfilmable. After[…]
Cinema du WTF – UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth 2013)
A singular and highly accomplished independent film, Upstream Color is philosophical science fiction in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague, seasoned with a dash of Cronenbergian body horror. Like[…]
Rarities, Ho! TCM Recommendations for May 17-31
Obscure Hollywood gems, from the depths of the TCM May 2013 schedule for your DVD-R-ing pleasure
A Gatsby Pre-View
My fiancée and I were sitting on the couch the other night. I was flipping channels on the TV and watching baseball on my laptop, she was poking around on[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
A Boy and His Atom: The Smallest Movie Ever Made
IBM releases a movie starring actual atoms, on a screen you can’t even see with an ordinary microscope.
To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)
My four-word review of To the Wonder: “more of the same.” Which is not necessarily a bad thing … if you like Malick. To the Wonder continues the autobiographical mode of[…]
Directors · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
The Man Who Shot John Ford — in 3D: Spielberg Retrofits Jurassic Park with Mixed Results
“As cold and insincere as it may be for Spielberg to flush an ‘updated’ version back into theaters as a marketing blitz for the forthcoming 3D sequel, Jurassic Park still[…]
(Not) Love and Death: On Michael Haneke’s Amour
“The film beautifully captures the slow decomposing of its characters by following a parallel process at the level of cinematic composition.”
Kangaroo Court: On Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant
“Indeed, if there is a single distinguishing feature of Beresford’s technique, it is a persistent evenhandedness that refuses to either exalt or vilify. In writing the screenplay for Breaker Morant, he explains, ‘I wasn’t interested in making these men out to be heroes. I wasn’t trying to whitewash the situation. What I was interested in was the moral responsibility in times of war.'”
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Making Love While the Bullets Fly: Plata Quemada (Burnt Money), Representation, and Queer Masculinity
“The queer theorist Leo Bersani has argued for the “self-shattering” qualities of gay sex, but Plata Quemada foregrounds gay desire as a mutually shattering event. The film’s romantic nihilism is at the heart of both its appeal and its essentially troubling nature.”
Perpetual Motion: The Dardenne Brothers’ The Kid with a Bike
“As Cyril’s frenetic movement appears to up the tempo of the film, the directors drastically slow down the pace by using long takes, and as little cutting as possible. It is amid the two contrasting tendencies that Cyril’s story finds the perfect narrative balance.”
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