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.” “
In Illuminated Memory of Richard Matheson (February 20, 1926 – June 23, 2013)
“Matheson was able to get right to the heart of the matter, to expose the raw nerve at the base of our collective paranoia and atomic anxiety, to realize all inner demons were projections outward, and vice versa…”
The Foul Sty Underneath: The 5 Greatest Small Town Noirs
If film noir is defined by any single image, it is the dark city. Yet a film doesn’t have to take place in the dark city to be noir. Any fallen world[…]
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[…]
Marathon Season: Arrested Development 4
(this is a) breakthrough in the way media is delivered, solidifying the idea that the voice of the fans can revive just about anything, and introducing the full season ‘back-to-back’ marathon as the new ideal form of immersive simulacratic experience.
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[…]
Book review: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, by Glenn Frankel
The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, by Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, USA. 416pp. Hardcover. $28.00. The scene is a rough wooden fort on an East Texas homestead.[…]
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[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries
From Climate Hacker to Hero: An Interview With Tim DeChristopher
Originally published in An environmental idealist stops an illegal oil and gas auction by bidding for parcels he can’t possibly afford. Savaged by an exponentially accelerating climate crisis, a once-proud[…]
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[…]
Unreliable Narrative: Zero Dark Thirty, Torture, and Truth
“If Bigelow is not assembling the story, who is? The darkest implication of this is that Zero Dark Thirty takes no stand on the events of the last decade because the sources on which it relies believe that there is no stand to take. Her sources believe that the existence of war is a value-free fact; so this is what Bigelow believes.”
Activist & Political · Uncategorized · War
Zero Dark Thirty: Simple-Mindedness Dressed Up as Moral Complexity or Artistic Vagueness
“Does it all come down to the injustice of 3,000 people dying on 9/11? But at some level everybody went through that. Yet few of us thereafter felt the need to cast off every other human part of ourselves in order to find ‘justice,’ whatever that means in such contexts.”
The Scandal of Vertigo: It’s Not What You Think
“I found it hard myself to believe that the home-video releases of one of the most highly regarded films ever made could be incomplete, but they are, and I still wouldn’t believe it if the evidence were not indisputable.”
Links + BSA
