Bright Lights Film Journal

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    • Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:

      A Film Divided Against Itself: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)

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      Books: Best Actress: The History of Oscar-Winning Women by Stephen Tapert

Books · Comics · Franchises & Series

0

Book Review: Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, ed. by Matt Yockey

  • October 10, 2017

Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. $29.95, 364pp. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. In August this year, Netflix released The Defenders, the[…]

Books · Directors

0

Book Review: Fucking Innocent: The Early Films of Wes Anderson, by John Andrew Fredrick

  • October 8, 2017

Fucking Innocent: The Early Films of Wes Anderson, by John Andrew Fredrick. $15.95, 288 pp. Rare Bird Books, 2017. The first thing to note about John Andrew Fredrick’s book is[…]

Kingsman: Secret Service

Franchises & Series · Thrillers & Action

2

Watch It Again! Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)

  • October 4, 2017

The scriptwriters and fortune tellers have so cluttered the rest of the film with wild and haphazard injections of in jokes and outlandish gags … that it becomes repetitious and tedious.[…]

Festivals & Awards

0

Can I Hit It? Highlights of the 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival

  • October 1, 2017

“Once you have a hammer, doesn’t everything look like a nail? In Hong Sang-soo’s films, everyone’s a nail.” * * * The most anticipated films on the festival circuit this[…]

Experimental & Underground · Horror · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Romance

4

Cosmic Melodrama: Darren Aronofsky’s mother!

  • September 26, 2017

Whatever else it is, mother! is ultimately a woman’s anxious nightmare about what it feels like to put your heart and soul into creating something only for people to take[…]

white privilege

Activist & Political · Crime

1

White Privilege? It’s in the Fine Print (Django Unchained, American Hustle, 99 Homes)

  • September 22, 2017

The stories of Dr. King Schultz, Irving Rosenfeld, and Nick Carver contain a critique of American society deeper than just “white guys always get the benefit of the doubt.” These[…]

Horror · Philosophy · Romance

0

Lonely, but Not Alone: Death as a Collective Experience in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story

  • September 18, 2017

Regardless of whether it is worth doing or not, people will continue to rely on memory as a way to create legacy and heritage. People will always leave things behind,[…]

Studio portrait of Florence Lawrence by Frank C. Bangs, 1908. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Actors & Personalities · Film Technology & History · Silents

3

Florence Lawrence and the Truth Behind “We Nail a Lie” (Famous Ads, 1910)

  • September 12, 2017

Ever since the ad appeared, there have been unanswered questions: who or what was behind the rumors of Florence Lawrence’s death? Did these rumors start because the fans of her[…]

Historical & Epic · LGBT & Queer

0

Before Wilde: Cinematic Portrayals – and the Lack Thereof – of Medieval and Early Modern Queer Historical Figures

  • September 4, 2017

There are two major threads here. In one, the queer figure from history becomes a way to explore the consequences of existing in a society that wars against the individual’s[…]

Bobby Bumps, Surf Rider

Animation · Silents

0

Happy 100th, Bobby Bumps, Surf Rider!

  • August 28, 2017

While it’s always difficult to make such a claim with assurance – for decades Disney’s 1937 Goofy feature Hawaiian Holiday was confidently thought to hold that honor – Bobby Bumps[…]

Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors

0

Jerry Lewis: b. Joseph Levitch, Newark, New Jersey, 1926-2017, res. Hollywood

  • August 20, 2017

“The major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing.”

Beach

Exploitation & Erotica · Franchises & Series · Producers & Studios

2

Surf’s Up! Beyond the Beach: AIP’s Beach Party Movies

  • August 17, 2017

With summer starting to fade, what better way to while away the hours than by revisiting the beach, as imagined by exploitation studio American International Pictures in the early 1960s?[…]

Dunkirk

Historical & Epic · War

1

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk: Too Cute!

  • August 8, 2017

A particular issue is the degree to which the film departs from “fact.” Significant departures from the historical record, if they become frequent enough, are sufficient to sabotage any “historical[…]

Historical & Epic · War

0

Machines and Forms of War in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk

  • August 3, 2017

Though some have criticized Nolan’s rigidity and near mathematical precision in tackling a historical event (no doubt provoked by the director’s admittedly frustrating tendency to wax philosophic on his own[…]

War of the Planet of the Apes

Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy

2

Silence is golden, so it would seem: On War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)

  • July 23, 2017

Is it rude to point out that male chimps don’t hug their sons? That’s because they don’t know they have sons! They aren’t “faithful” to their “wives,” which they don’t[…]

Screenshot: Ingrid Bergman in Autumn Sonata

Actors & Personalities · Documentaries

1

Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words Gets Up Close and Personal

  • July 19, 2017

Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words makes clear that her life was messy and episodic, but she earned great love from her directors, co-stars, and family. Don’t wait for Mommie[…]

Comedy · Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy

1

Watch It Again! Batman: The Movie (1966)

  • July 11, 2017

The recent passing of Adam West – who made Batman his own despite the many higher-profile claimants to the cape – reminds us of the feature film based on the witty TV[…]

Drama · Memoir · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film

1

 On the Trail and Off the Grid: The Gender of Wild in Wild and Into the Wild

  • July 3, 2017

Both protagonists undertake a kind of “work of the self,” whereby they simultaneously come to terms with trauma – in one case, paternal betrayal, in the other, maternal abandonment by[…]

Wonder Woman

Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film

0

Fight Makes Right: Unearned Feminism in Wonder Woman

  • June 28, 2017

Unshackled by the Snyder malaise – and ignoring the slow motion he made a fad with 300, which Jenkins curiously revisits with consistency verging on the fetishistic – Gadot roars.[…]

Tarzan

Activist & Political · African American · Historical & Epic · SF & Fantasy

0

The Legend of Tarzan: A Rich White Man’s Burden, or, Donald in the Jungle

  • June 25, 2017

Several questions suggest themselves. What ideological framework is revealed by the forwarding of a contemporary story in which the white man has lost his mojo and needs to struggle to[…]

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