Since we're commemorating dire events today, here's one from queer history worth noting. From today's Guardian website:Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.Describing Turing's treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair", Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a huge debt. He was proud, he said, to offer an official apology. "We're sorry, you deserved so much better," Brown writes in a statement posted on the No 10 website. Full story...
I 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.
I'm shocked SHOCKED to find the modern masterpiece of 2009, ANTICHRIST, getting such hostile reviews.
I just learned, via Peter Nellhaus, of the passing of one of America's most obscure-but-talented directors, Paul Wendkos.
Every 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.
They Caught the Ferry (1948) is a short highway safety film – much like the ones we used to watch in Drivers Ed.
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.
Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online.
From the editor
Keep watching the lights.
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.
When 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.
It's massively popular, it's ridiculously mopey, yet it's also brooding, purple and relatively un-headache-inducing.
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