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Tortured Longing is the new coke
Bright Lights After Dark less than a day agoI can feel the Twilight zeitgeist in the air tonight, perhaps it's because I live across from the cinema and the line around the block is across from me, and I hear them out there, howling.
Antichrist's Cine-Chthonic Relations
Bright Lights After Dark 6 days agoI'm shocked SHOCKED to find the modern masterpiece of 2009, ANTICHRIST, getting such hostile reviews.
The Unknown Paul Wendkos (1925-2009)
Bright Lights After Dark 6 days ago
I just learned, via Peter Nellhaus, of the passing of one of America's most obscure-but-talented directors, Paul Wendkos.
Brothers in Cynicism
Bright Lights After Dark 6 days agoEvery time a new film by the Coen brothers comes out, I dread having to hear from the same old so-and-so's who can't bear to slog through the Coens' peculiar brand of pessimism.
Carl Dreyer says Drive Safely and Save Lives!
Bright Lights After Dark Nov 13 09
They Caught the Ferry (1948) is a short highway safety film – much like the ones we used to watch in Drivers Ed.
Memo to Michael Bay: GI JOE KICKS YOUR ASS!
Bright Lights After Dark Nov 06 09 Superheroes with toy franchise tie-ins get a lot of heat... unless critics had a real lively sense of humor they trashed both TRANSFORMERS (as well as WOLVERINE, TERMINATOR SALVATION, etc.
Bright Lights issue 66 now online
Bright Lights After Dark Nov 01 09Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online.
From the editor
Keep watching the lights.
Have a Blaisdell Halloween!
Bright Lights After Dark Oct 31 09
Paul Blaisdell (July 21, 1927 - July 10, 1983) was a science fiction illustrator (The Ant Men, above), a special effects artisan, and an inspired designer of imaginative costumes and props for a series of low-budget horror, monster, and sci-fi films released by American International Pictures and Allied Artists in the 1950s.
An Athiest's Guide to "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
Bright Lights After Dark Oct 30 09When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer. –Stevie WonderIn 1949 Walt Disney Studios produced the last, and arguably the best, of their “package” films – barely-feature length vignette collections made on reduced budgets during World War II for theatrical distribution – though the dyad of animated novellas included are improved little by their seemingly haphazard juxtaposition.
The Beautiful and the Darned: Avenging TWILIGHT
Bright Lights After Dark Oct 28 09It's massively popular, it's ridiculously mopey, yet it's also brooding, purple and relatively un-headache-inducing.
Disney Imagery in Citizen Kane
Bright Lights After Dark Oct 24 09
Watching the marvelous Blu-ray edition of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), I was struck by how certain shots foreshadowed the imagery of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) released by the same studio, RKO, only four years later: the gothic castle at night with its one glowing window .
The Surreal World of Slavko Vorkapich
Bright Lights After Dark Oct 16 09Like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Serbian–born Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976) was not only a filmmaker, but a respected film theorist, and like those two Soviet giants, Vorkapich’s theories were mainly about editing – the right and wrong ways to cut two shots together, the “kinesthetic” (physical) effects that could be produced in the viewer through montage.
Let the wild rumpus start! Ghidorah Lives!
Bright Lights After Dark Oct 15 09In the most recent edition of BLFJ (65), I wrote about the (inter)relationship that's developed between novels, films, and their screenplay binding agent.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JACK ARNOLD (October 14, 1916 – March 17, 1992)
Bright Lights After Dark Oct 14 09Photo: Director Jack Arnold (right) shows star Grant Williams how to handle a giant prop used in the making of The Incredible Shrinking Man.
The Marienbad Music Video
Bright Lights After Dark Oct 10 09 So many music videos and television commercials have ripped off the imagery of Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad since its 1961 release that it makes perfect sense for someone to have created a music video consisting entirely of shots from the original film.
Set my Polack free!
Bright Lights After Dark Oct 01 09An apt cinematic analogy of the Polanski brouhaha can be found in Charles Laughton's NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, namely the hyper-reactive old salt of the general store, Mrs.
The Vertigo-Narcissus Connection
Bright Lights After Dark Sep 30 09 In celebration of the birthday of director Michael Powell (1905-1990) today, I’d like to share with you this clip from Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 color masterpiece, Black Narcissus, a story of spirituality, sexuality, and madness set in the exotic Himalayas.
Méliès Magnifique
Bright Lights After Dark Sep 25 09 The general line on Georges Méliès (1861-1938) is that his films were rooted in the theatrical. He had been a stage magician before he was a filmmaker, so many commentators have viewed his films as mere extensions of his magic act.
Thoughts on Antichrist
Bright Lights After Dark Sep 21 09I screened Lars Von Trier's new film Antichrist a few nights ago in bed, on my iPod touch (insert slightly guilty shrug), while my wife slept beside me.
Henry Gibson 1935-2009
Bright Lights After Dark Sep 17 09 Henry Gibson was not only a gifted comedian (Laugh-In), but a remarkable character actor with at least three great performances to his credit: Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Nashville and, more recently, as big tipper "Thurston Howell" in Magnolia (above) by Altman disciple, P.
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