Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
“The major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing.”
The gender of work in the work films is a spectrum that includes both the neutered worker of The Bellboy and The Errand Boy and the feminized worker of Cinderfella,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Since my esteemed Bright Lights After Dark (and Bright Lights Film Journal) co-contributor C. Jerry Kutner posted his last entry in the (now) ongoing Nutty Professor debate out here in[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
In a comment to my previous Jerry Lewis post, Tom Sutpen wrote: Couldn’t agree more . . . except . . . Jerry Lewis has always steadfastly denied any Martin[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
“The man’s a genius!” —Jerry Lewis
“Steve understood real people, particularly misfits, like nobody else.It was just the Hollywood brass he loathed.”
In Joker, we see a reversal of Tarantino’s aesthetic, where a patently comic character, a joker with a clown face, is, by degrees, rendered tragic, or as near tragic as[…]
Festivals & Awards · New Media
Francis Ford Coppola introduced the screening of his Robin Williams vehicle Jack. Since this was the Festival of Disruption, Coppola said he wanted to “disrupt” by screening his worst film,[…]
But even though Jesse (Elle Fanning) is “everything” right now, what she has is fragile: the aura of enchantment so prized by fashion is easily lost. Once she stops looking[…]
The new Ghostbusters seems quite pleased with itself, but it leaves the overwhelming impression that nobody involved really believed in it. Despite the original film’s numerous flaws and Bill Murray’s[…]
Directors · Essays · Genres · Horror
In the first two films of the Apartment Trilogy, gender, subjectivity, and horror are intertwined: being embodied and socially constructed as a woman is the horror, and the audience is[…]
Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, by Frederic Lombardi (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013, 370pp, $49.95 from the publisher’s website) Allan Dwan (1885-1981) was one of[…]
Who’d have dreamed that the 1960s were as dumb as the 1990s? And that Shirley MacLaine was the transitional figure between the serious 1950s and the brainless decade that followed?[…]
Bright Lights Film Journal began life as a print publication in 1974, published and edited by Gary Morris. In 1995, the magazine went online exclusively as brightlightsfilm.com. In April 2014,[…]
“What makes The Big Lebowski seem so circuitous is that, in moving from A to B to C, the plot keeps dawdling at points of interest along the way, stopping to admire the scenery before picking up and moving on. That’s essentially what Quintana and Brandt and Da Fino are: local color. It’s a movie about the pleasure of the journey, not the arrival at the destination.”
“Rupert Pupkin is uniquely a product of late capitalism near the close of the twentieth century; his fantasies reflect mass media’s ability to twist the real world into an insubstantial collection of images that mimic reality — the representation of self becomes more than the actual self, and it becomes impossible to tell the difference.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema, Tim Palmer. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Paperback, $28.00. 304pp. ISBN: 978-0819568267 Endemic to any reading of a new work lionizing French cinema is[…]
Hippies and radicals, back of the (cultural) bus
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
“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
