How About This For a Double Feature?
Now playing at the local Arthouse — Can’t you just see it on the marquee?
Have Yourself a Merry Little Bright Lights Holiday: A Gift Guide
We recently heard, and verified, the shocking news that some of Bright Lights’ contributors actually have lives and activities outside their work on the once-humming BL assembly line. Apparently some[…]
The Savvy Tivo: Exotic Pre-codes for 12/12-12/20
In darker shadowy lairs, Myrna Loy meets with her devoted astrologer, Swami Yogadaci (the ever villainous C. Henry Gordon) to figure out how and when the constellations want her to assassinate her former sorority snubbers. Loy’s the villain, ostensibly, but you’ll be rooting for her all the way (unless you’ve never felt the sting of a snubbing yourself).
DVD & Blu-ray · Pre-Code · Reviews
Criterion goes Pre-Code: DESIGN FOR LIVING (1933)
Unseen for years thanks to its “dangerously progressive” attitudes towards sexual relationships outside wedlock, tomorrow, Tuesday 12/6/12! Criterion has released it in the stand-alone glory it deserves, replete with extras and an essay by the great Kim Morgan.
TCM Must-tapes this week 11/28 – 12/4: MARY (2005), William Powell, and a day of Warren William!
William is one of the great re-discovered icons of the pre-code era, exhumed by TCM like a King Tut of badass Satanic bravado and good humor, a cross between the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.
Book review: Death Wish, by Christopher Sorrentino
Death Wish by Christopher Sorrentino. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010. Paperback. $13.95. 98 pp. Among the movies I consider guilty pleasures, Death Wish has an appeal that has survived its inherent deficiencies[…]
Book review: The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, ed. by Sanford Schwartz
The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, ed. by Sanford Schwartz. New York: Library of America, 2011. Hardcover, 750pp, $40.00.. As perhaps the most well-known name in film criticism,[…]
X Me Deadly: A Visual Essay
“The thumb isn’t good enough for you. You have to use your whole body.” Naked underneath her trenchcoat, frightened hitchhiker Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) gets private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) to[…]
This week’s TCM pre-code musts: BOMBSHELL, ONE WAY PASSAGE, CITY STREETS
Murders are talked over via close-ups of cat statues, and a very dirty fella named Blackie gets offed by Guy Kibee (as you’ve never seen him before!).
Actors & Personalities · TV & Streaming
How to Play a Superhero: Lynda Carter, Popular Culture Feminism, and the Search for Wonder Woman
After three decades of searching in vain for another Wonder Woman, it’s time to reiterate the importance of Lynda Carter’s iconic portrayal and its meaning to popular culture feminism.Pop[ular] culture n. Culture based on popular taste rather than that of an educated elite, usually commercialized and made widely available by the mass media. Feminism n. Advocacy of the rights of women (based on the theory of equality of the sexes). — Oxford English Dictionary
La Pianiste: Michael Haneke’s Aesthetic of Disavowal
“At no point are Erika’s fantasies visualized, and so the spectator’s reference points are the same as Erika’s — the extremes of hardcore pornography and the austerity of bourgeois Vienna.”
Pseudo-Innocence and Encased Fantasies: Inside the Unconscious of the National Rifle Association
“I like this exhibit . . . it’s very familiar.”
On Dangerous Ground: Some Noteworthy “Moving Camera Movies” of 2010
Whether neo-noir or horror, underexposed or ignored, several films of 2010 employed devilishly motivated moving camera to disturbing effect.
Between the Idea and the Reality the Shadow Falls
So please mind the gap
The Perverse Privilege of Degradation: American Politics in the Age of Assimilation
A Final Statement of the Obvious
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Ernie Kovacs: An American Secret
“Ernie’s contract is reported to contain a clause forbidding him ever to consult a psychiatrist. The network is afraid if he ever became normal he’d be ruined.” — Dorothy Kilgallen
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
When We Dream, Do We Accumulate Capital? On Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010)
“Nolan is making evident, both through form and narrative, his criticism of the sweeping radicalization of cinematic work that has privileged the technological wonder of the movies over formulations of innovative and complex narratives that deal with human existence.”
Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (2010)
“There are truths that can only be revealed on condition of having been discovered.”– Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies (2003)
Actors & Personalities · Directors
Meet the Devil: Remembering John Huston
“Huston once described his job to John Milius like this: ‘You will confer with generals, you will dine at the table with kings, and you will sleep with titled women. All of this you will do while being dead broke. That’s what being a director is.’ Should we even feign surprise that when it came time to make The Bible he cast himself as the voice of the Almighty?
Religious Allegory and Cultural Discomfort in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky: And Why Larry Crowne Is One of the Best Films of 2011
“You can laugh while Rome is burning, but believe you me, Poppy, it is burning, and if you don’t wake up, then you will be burnt to a cinder . . . I mean, look around you. What do you see? Do you see a policy of bringing happiness to people?” — Scott in Happy-Go-Lucky
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