The Code and its Perfect Specimens
Bright Lights After Dark Apr 09 09There's TWO Pre-code sets out for spring, the Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 3 and now this, Pre-Code Hollywood set from Universal (showing Paramount stuff, which I generally love so no complaints there)Started with the last disc first, since it had THE MURDER OF THE VANITIES (1934) one of the last--and therefore most decadent--films to come out before the code.SEARCH FOR BEAUTY is decked out in quazi-eugenic overtones, with Buster Crabbe a sort of good-natured exercise ubermensch who gets roped into endorsing Robert Armstrong's sleazy "fitness" magazine. It's all innocent cheesecake (with pics of men and women who are "perfect specimens") but apparently that's too decadent for Buster and he uses his American sincerity and love of health to subdue the agents of vice and lethargy, with a vengeance! You can't fault a movie for being a Nazi parable if it came out before the Nazis themselves, but no one's looking to find fault. Full story...
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Profondamente Italiano: Mid-August Lunch (Pranzo di Ferragosto)
Bright Lights After Dark 4 days ago
If you want an idea of real Roman life, look no further than Mid-August Lunch. Gianni (Gianni Di Gregorio, who directed, scripted and stars) and his 93-year-old mother Valeria share a large, dark, rambling flat in the Trastevere neighborhood.
Peter Graves – The Night of the Hunter
Bright Lights After Dark 5 days ago
In a film career that spanned more than half a century, the late Peter Graves (1926-2010) was a dependable leading man, often at his best in non-leading roles, who worked memorably with Billy Wilder (Stalag 17), John Ford (The Long Gray Line), Roger Corman (It Conquered the World), Otto Preminger (The Court Martial of Billy [.
Poster Comparison No. 8 – The Holy Man and the Cataclysm
Bright Lights After Dark Mar 11 10I like these two movie posters, one for Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), the other for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), and I suspect their similarity is anything but coincidental.
Revanche (Criterion Collection)
Bright Lights After Dark Mar 09 10Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann likes to capture rooms and the lives within. His camera remains stable or abruptly shifts, as if just discovering the element central to the layout.
Oscars II: On The Hurt Locker
Bright Lights After Dark Mar 08 10As a tonic to all the hoopla surrounding The Hurt Locker and its Oscar win as Best Picture, we’re reprinting BL writer Jay Rothermel’s provocative review of the film, originally published on August 14, 2009 on the blog Marxist Update.
Oscars I: That Damn Helen Mirren!
Bright Lights After Dark Mar 08 10
I mean, DAME Helen Mirren. (Photo via Associated Press. Joke via Oscar co-host, Steve Martin.)
Very happy for Kat B and The Hurt Locker.
Broken glass, like silent tears
Bright Lights After Dark Mar 04 10Maybe it’s just a sad afternoon, but this film had me weeping within 3 minutes… perhaps a new record, great synthesis of music and image, though the end of the guy’s nose looks like it’s in another dimension.
Charge of the White Elephant
Bright Lights After Dark Feb 24 10What Jacksin's doin' with line and cullah goes beyond abstrackshin.
Victory (Maurice Tourneur, 1919)
Bright Lights After Dark Feb 21 10
More than 20 years before Jacques Tourneur took us to an exotic tropical isle in 1943’s I Walked With a Zombie, his father, producer/director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), blazed a similar trail with his 1919 production of Victory.
Not Enraptured by Performance Capture?
Bright Lights After Dark Feb 18 10
There was a front-page (!) piece in the L.A. Times today, whining – for lack of a better word – about how “unlike the great majority of best picture nominees, the ‘Avatar’ actors have not nabbed a single major critic’s award, or guild prize.
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