It's massively popular, it's ridiculously mopey, yet it's also brooding, purple and relatively un-headache-inducing... in short, it's everything you hate and love about Seattle if you ever tried to move there. TWILIGHT captures the "real" version of the icy self-importance that suffuses the locals, as opposed to the foggy eccentricites of, say, TWIN PEAKS...it celebrates alienation, emotional distance and the ability to suppress darker instincts... and youth oriented product positioning! I haven't read the TWILIGHT books but that doesn't mean I can't comment on the movie... plus, that Kristen Stewart is a little flannel-wearing hottie with a brain ("Earlier this month, Stewart was made to clarify some comments that she made about fans of the vampire romance, after calling them “f**king psychotic” in an interview. Full story...
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.
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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