Actors & Personalities · Asian · Silents
The Goddess in Her Element: Ruan Lingyu in Shanghai
“This is an actress who shows excitement down to the curl of her fingers, and whose face reveals every kind of mercurial change.”
All time
What is new?
Most Recent
Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:
The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
Actors & Personalities · Asian · Silents
“This is an actress who shows excitement down to the curl of her fingers, and whose face reveals every kind of mercurial change.”
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Photo Essays
“Be aware: there are forces at work here of which we have no knowledge.”
Directors · Genres · Pre-Code · Reviews
“We can’t help but roll our eyes at a woman who would rather wear holes in her shoes looking for a ‘good honest job’ than roll around in money and mink.”
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
“Nude on the Moon’s exploitation is as innocent as the Good Christo-Nudist’s reclaiming of a pre-figleafed (albeit non-recreational) Eden.”
Except whether to laugh or cry
Note: The humble program note has a long and noble history. Sometimes anonymous, sometimes not, cheered as often as they were reviled, these brief, ephemeral, often illuminating handouts, likely destined for the dustbin the same night they appeared, offer “wisdom in a nutshell,” as one of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s characters aptly put it. This article is the second in Bright Lights’ series of vintage program notes from those heady days of the 1970s when unstoppable auteurists started their own cine clubs and commandeered movie theaters to bring their idea of cine-culture to audiences. Our late friend Roger McNiven continues the series with fascinating write-ups of two more works on the subject of “women larger than life,” in this case Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet and The Woman They Almost Lynched, screened at the legendary Thalia Theatre in New York City on Tuesday, December 4, 1979. We have added images but not edited the text, deferring to the time and spirit in which it was written.
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Ouch!
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
“I told Hitchcock, ‘I do miss my horse.'”
Thank God for the Benny Goodman Quartet
“You can depend on Jason.”
“What happens when the gaze is returned?”
One of the world’s largest cinema events is also one of the most ambitious
Actors & Personalities · Exploitation & Erotica · Pre-Code
Hazy thoughts on the transition from real sex to digital hallucinations
Hobson’s Choice (David Lean, 1954) Approaching this film — one of two comedies Lean made in his career, the other being Blithe Spirit (1945) — you expect it to be[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground
“Avant garde filmmaking has been defined almost entirely in opposition to the Hollywood mainstream.”
Kicking off the second pre-code set to come out this year, we’ve got THE CHEAT (1931, another in the “rich ne’er do well offers to ‘help’ married woman” genre. This[…]
This weekend, it being lovely and all, why not go to the movies and see OBSERVE AND REPORT? The film needs money. Writer-director Jody Hill is getting a drubbing apparently,[…]
There’s TWO pre-code sets out for spring: Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 3 and this week comes the Pre-Code Hollywood set from Universal. None of the films quite measure up to the[…]
1. PAUL THOMAS (dir. Bad Housewives, The Masseuse, The New Devil in Mrs. Jones) – A real actor (he played Peter in the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar), Paul[…]
Having recently bid a fond adieu to the post-DVD-release critical interest resurgence for Synecdoche, New York, it seems a ripe enough time for us to forget this dauntingly nebulous film[…]
