(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.”
Actors & Personalities · Books
Book review: Lee Marvin, Point Blank, by Dwayne Epstein
Lee Marvin: Point Blank, by Dwayne Epstein. Tucson, AZ: Schaffner Press, 2013. 303pp. Hardcover. $27.95. With his many iconic films, his record of combat action in the Pacific during WW2,[…]
Bright Lights on Bright Lights!
EDITOR’S NOTE: Our innate modesty and abhorrence of insularity, self-referencing, self-reflexivity, and, well, self-everything would normally prohibit us from publishing this piece. But we were so captivated by this tribute[…]
Happy Birthday, Bette Davis (Apr. 5, 1908-Oct. 6, 1989): A Talent for Hysteria
Note: This tribute to Bette Davis appeared previously in online Bright Lights in 1997. “Millions of moviegoers responded to the challenge of her headstrong, neurotic heroines who, like Frankenstein’s monster,[…]
Book review: Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles, by Mark Shiel
Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles, by Mark Shiel. London: Reaktion, 2012. Hardback: $39.00. 336pp. ISBN: 978-1-86189-902-6 We all think we know Los Angeles. We think we know it because[…]
Book review: Mae Murray, by Michael Ankerich
Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips, by Michael Ankerich. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. Hardcover. $40.00. Not too many remember Mae Murray. Not a one of her[…]
Book review: Rape-Revenge Films, by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2011. Paperback. $45.00 Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study opens with Jean-Luc Godard’s well-traveled maxim that “all you need[…]
Michael Curtiz, Part 2 – Weird Scenes Inside the Wax Museum
The directorial personality of Michael Curtiz remains elusive, but his visual talent is indisputable. Look closely at the lighting and composition of these images from Mystery of the Wax Museum[…]
Michael Curtiz – Auteur Without a Theme?
Hungarian-born filmmaker, Michael Curtiz (pictured with Joan Crawford, above), is considered by many to be one of the quintessential Hollywood directors – he is, after all, the man who[…]
What’s “Natural” about “Naturalist” Cinema? On Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2012)
“Director Arnold heightens the once-“natural” processes of life events such as birth and death by setting them outside, historically as if for the last time, before Western medicine and Victorian domesticity.”
The Women in Prison Film: From Reform to Revolution 1922-1974
“The cheap production values of most WIP films required them to rely on the promise of forbidden spectacles such as sex (‘Love Starved Women!’), violence (‘Rape, riot, and revenge’), and often the pretense of an exposé (“The story of a woman’s prison today’) to attract moviegoers.”
More Than Just Another Day Underground: Anthony Asquith’s First Feature Gets the Deluxe Treatment
“It is a much starker contrast than, say, in Hitchcock’s London films of the same period, where the humorous grace notes of the urban everyday and a happy ending are balanced throughout by a recognition of the inherent instability and all-out terror of the same modernity that produces those grace notes.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
The Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films
“While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don’t-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers’ films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what’s not there.”
Activist & Political · Essays · TV & Streaming
When the World Was Wide(r): A Requiem for PBS: Why are there no nonpartisan attacks on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?
“There was a time when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, ‘formed as an educational, non-commercial, and public interest alternative to the vast wasteland of commercial networks,’ meant something other than drearily underproduced Anglophone mysteries, self-help seminars for pensioners and forced retirees, staged cooking lessons, cheapjack puppet shows, and various and unspeakable retrenchments of the petit bourgeoisie.”
Ozymandias Melancholia: Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love: A Personal History
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed . . . — from Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals
Opera Goes Blu, and So Should You: An Amateur’s Guide to Mozart’s Operas on Blu-ray
“Passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and as music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music… .”
Father of His Country: On Spielberg’s Lincoln
“Spielberg’s post-millennial Lincoln epitomizes the more experienced politician’s awe for Justice (as distinguished from the malleable Law), which is to be sought by whatever means necessary and inevitably involves sacrifice, perhaps of one’s very soul. There’s more than a touch of Faust in this script.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Silents
Looking at Charlie — Limelight: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“I have ideas!” If only that were true!
From La Fille to Dr. Cordelier: Character and Environment in the (Mostly) Early Works of Jean Renoir
“Renoir’s static images contain a great deal of emotional intensity — like that last lyrical shot of the sun setting in La Fille — and the sheer beauty of his two-dimensional compositions generates an emotional in volvement within the viewer (like that in the viewer of a painting) and a sense of emotional treatment of the romantic material within the frame, yet preserves an awareness of the existence of a larger world beyond the borders of the frame.”
Enjoyed Inglourious Basterds? You’re Doing It Wrong!
“Aldo Raine is nothing more than Adolf Hitler wrapped in an American flag.”
Links + BSA
