All Bout Money...
Bright Lights After Dark Jun 30 09Shot on video and doomed with drab titles, STATE PROPERTY 1 (2002) & STATE PROPERTY 2 (2005) are actually very interesting little works in the BATTLE OF ALGIERS vein of faux-verite. With their focus on overlapping dialogue and street economics instead of the usual pumped up meaningless sex and violence (though there is that too) and a canonical knowledge of the genre (beyond mere Scarface remake quoting) they bring to mind Howard Hawks and the nouvelle vauge, I kids thee not. These little gems are worth dusting off as evidence of a semi-invisible African American new wave that reputable film journals ignore outright, just on the basis of the trashy company it keeps. Full story...
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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.
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