This week (3/6-3/12) at the Film Forum in NYC: Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Bright Lights After Dark Mar 06 09Today starts a Film Forum revival of John Stahl's 1945 "nature noir," LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, as creepy a subtextual indictment of post-code Americana as I've ever seen. Gene Tierney stars as Ellen Berent who makes the mistake of giving her obsessive insane "pre-code" love to post-code American family man dork Cornell Wilde; hi idea of a honeymoon is to drag his hot and willing bride off to some remote lodge in the mountains, not for a week of amorous lovemaking, but rather for tedious and corny sing-a-longs with the extended family. Not one of his relations can understand why she would possibly want to spend some time alone with her new husband, this being a HANDMAID'S TALE-style alternative universe where the edicts of Joseph Breen and the code are no longer even challenged, merely rotely obeyed until everyone falls into a genderless state of perpetual flag waving. Full story...
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Revanche (Criterion Collection)
Bright Lights After Dark 4 days agoAustrian 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 4 days agoAs 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 4 days ago
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.
Anticipating Valentine’s Day
Bright Lights After Dark Feb 10 10
According to today’s Los Angeles Times, filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis thinks the Academy ought to create a special category for “Most Heart-Warming Picture.
Bright Lights #67 is now online
Bright Lights After Dark Feb 03 10February 2010
From the Editor
“Progress is our most important product!”
By Gary Morris
ARTICLES
A German Tragedy, Turned Absurd: Fassbinder’s Satan’s Brew
By Andrew Grossman
“Allowing his acidity unfettered reign, Fassbinder concocts one of the most blistering excoriations of despotism ever committed to film.
Who are Parents? Parents are the ones who are ALWAYS there
Bright Lights After Dark Jan 29 10
I've written a lot about the decline of the "Father" in genre film--from tough WW2 vet to tough but loving 70s hedonist to needy, emasculated single dad of the 21st century, but nothing could have prepared me for the delightful KNOWING (2009) wherein Nicolas Cage plays perhaps the most unbearably clingy single father since, well, Greg Kinnear in the equally awful and contrived GODSEND (2004).
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