Memo to Michael Bay: GI JOE KICKS YOUR ASS!
Bright Lights After Dark Nov 06 09Superheroes 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.) but GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA does everything right. AND it gets a lot less things wrong. One can only hope the Michael Bays, Brett Ratners and McGs pay attention when watching JOE (though its director, Stephen Sommers, certainly has some crap under his belt, such as VAN HELSING). Here's some things they might look for:1) DEADPAN: The key, as with the best John Carpenter films, is the universal Deadpan: Just compare Channing Tatum, first-rate in his second-rateness as the "Most American" Joe" to, say, the comedic everyspazzisms of (Tatum's real life friend) Shia LaBeouf in TRANSFORMERS, and why is Tatum so good? Because he scraps the winks and wails, and underplays! Ditto the amazing Sienna Miller. Full story...
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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.
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 .
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