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Bright Lights After Dark
blog.brightlightsfilm.com
11
Welcome to the companion blog for Bright Lights Film Journal, a popular-academic hybrid of movie analysis, history, commentary, and bitchery looking at classic and commercial, independent, exploitation, erotic, and international film from a wide range of vantage points from the aesthetic to the political. Visit our website at www.brightlightsfilm.com.
#120055 in All , #48 in General Movies

Bridesmaids Revisited

Last summer, in the midst of the The Hangover 2’s disappointingly massive success, another comedy came along, which went on to become something of a triumph of box office girlpower, the femalecentric...

23 h ago

Dispatch from Cannes 2012 #3: David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS

by RONALD BERGAN Here we go again. Only a few days ago we had Walter Salles’ lumbering, rigidly faithful film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Now we have David Cronenberg’...

1 day ago

Dispatch from Cannes 2012 #2: Walter Salles’s ON THE ROAD

by RONALD BERGAN Among the great might-have-beens of cinema are Greta Garbo as Dorian Gray, Ingmar Bergman directing Barbra Streisand in The Merry Widow, Orson Welles’s The Heart of Darkness, S...

5 days ago

Sergio Leone Meets Robert De Niro Meets F. Scott Fitzgerald: Once Upon a Time in America

I was delighted to hear of the premiere at this year’s Cannes film festival of a 269-minute restored version of Sergio Leone’s final masterwork, Once Upon a Time in America (1984). I love this ...

22 may 12

Dispatch from Cannes 2012 #1: Moonrise Kingdom and Rust and Bone

by RONALD BERGAN It is traditional in Cannes to open with a relatively mainstream film that would soon be shown at a multiplex near you. It is a ritual that I can’t see the point of. I’m ...

18 may 12

Roots of ALIEN: A pre-pre-PROMETHEU S Triple Feature

If youre excited about the promos for the Ridley Scott science fiction movie coming out this summer, Prometheus... it might be a good time to visit some of the films that have been mentioned over the...

17 may 12

New issue, #76, now live

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: Of Devils and Runaway Trains, Anthony Mann and Jean-Claude Van Damme Gary Morris FEATURES Tragic Cinema: The Death of Subjectivities in JCVD Amir Khan Postlude to a Kiss: W...

15 may 12

Autogyros and Zeppelins: How Cinematic They Fly

Who wouldnt love to go to L.A. from NYC via zeppelin? So what if it takes a week? Open air rear observation compartments! Farmers looking up, amazed, waving, scratching their heads in disbelief... ri...

05 apr 12

Fun and Hunger Games. And Other Reality Shows.

For a science fiction film francise to become truly successful, it helps not to be too original. The most successful of these franchises are based on ideas that have been floating around pop culture...

19 mar 12

VistaVision Makes Sense now: TO CATCH A THIEF (1955) on Blu-Ray

istaVision, its also what Hitch shot VERTIGO on... and now both those films too make more sense, VERTIGO especially always seemed too traveloguey for a supposed top ten of all time classic. Now, if i...

17 mar 12

FridayLight NetfixStreamFest: The Corman-Price Poe Cycle

Prices florid hamminess fills in the sparse patches of Cormans sometimes spare mise en scene, and the sparseness conversely gives Price lots of room to floridly ham. Add Les Baxters crazy scores, som...

02 mar 12

Sex, Drugs, German Terrorism: 6 Hidden Gems of Netflix Streaming

Homicidal gang debs, tripping youth, murderous charismatic hippie cult leaders,German lesbian junkie spies, sexy German terrorists: 6 Rare, Strange, awesome films (all on Netflix Streaming) from or a...

18 feb 12

Bright Lights #75 now live

From the Editor Editorial: Welcome to the Love-In Gary Morris FEATURES On the Road to the Ninth Circle of Hell: Easy Rider Merges Lanes with Dante’s Inferno and Faust J. D. Markel How Easy Ride...

14 feb 12

Scatological Cinema, or Why “The Help” Stinks

Only white Hollywood would make a mainstream movie where toilets and shit are used as significant tropes to tell a story of black-white relations, as if the topic is right up black folks alley.

02 feb 12

It’s a bourgeois town: the feel-good Oscar Nominees for 2011

Theres nothing wrong with these films per se, they stir deep emotions; they move us, en masse; they spark enraptured conversation on the drive home from the mall-tiplex, are superb examples of crafts...

24 jan 12

How About This For a Double Feature?

Now playing at the local Arthouse – Can’t you just see it on the marquee?

16 dec 11

Have Yourself a Merry Little Bright Lights Holiday: A Gift Guide

We recently heard, and verified, the shocking news that some of Bright Lights’ contributors actually have lives and activities outside their work on the once-humming BL assembly line. Apparentl...

14 dec 11

The Savvy Tivo: Exotic Pre-codes for 12/12-12/20

In darker shadowy lairs, Myrna Loy meets with her devoted astrologer, Swami Yogadaci (the ever villainous C. Henry Gordon) to figure out how and when the constellations want her to assassinate her fo...

14 dec 11

Criterion goes Pre-Code: DESIGN FOR LIVING (1933)

Unseen for years thanks to its "dangerously progressive" attitudes towards sexual relationships outside wedlock, tomorrow, Tuesday 12/6/12! Criterion has released it in the stand-alone glory ...

06 dec 11

TCM Must-tapes this week 11/28 – 12/4: MARY (2005), William Powell, and a day of Warren William!

William is one of the great re-discovered icons of the pre-code era, exhumed by TCM like a King Tut of badass Satanic bravado and good humor, a cross between the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and Ba...

28 nov 11

X Me Deadly: A Visual Essay

“The thumb isn’t good enough for you. You have to use your whole body.” Naked underneath her trenchcoat, frightened hitchhiker Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) gets private eye M...

22 nov 11

Bright Lights #74 (November 2011) live

November 2011 | Issue 74 From the Editor “#Occupy Bright Lights?” Gary Morris FEATURES Religious Allegory and Cultural Discomfort in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky: And Why Larry ...

21 nov 11

This week’s TCM pre-code musts: BOMBSHELL, ONE WAY PASSAGE, CITY STREETS

Murders are talked over via close-ups of cat statues, and a very dirty fella named Blackie gets offed by Guy Kibee (as youve never seen him before!).

07 nov 11

Halloween Film Guide to: Kali Chthonian Feminine Subtext

For the Halloween devouring Other in you: Heres a small sampling of films for inciting you or your other to an orgy of castration and Kali-esque bloodletting...

31 oct 11

FANTASIA (1940) – The Varieties of Religious Experience

Walt Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia, may seem at first like a random collection of animated shorts whose only common factor is that each was inspired by a well-known piece of classical music. ...

26 oct 11

Docurama Bizarra: MELLODRAMA; ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

A documentary on the weird world of Ohioans keeping dangerous wild animals as pets (its legal there), this film couldnt be more timely in the light of recent events

19 oct 11

Wham! Bam! Islam!

[Editors note: Wham! Bam! Islam! plays on PBS on Thursday, Oct. 13 as part of its estimable Independent Lens series. Check local listings for time.] In July 2010, Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa presented a lectu...

13 oct 11

New York Film Festival 2011: First Highlights

Surely it’s a good sign that the Lincoln Center Film Society seems to be shaking things up a bit with this year’s festival. In part because of the new venues at the Elinor Bunin Monroe Fi...

12 oct 11

TCM Musts: 12:15 AM EST tonight – THE GLASS KEY (1942)

  It’s not ‘rare’ by TCM standards, but its not easily available on DVD, so hey – you should maybe DV-R this if you haven’t already and then keep it on there foreve...

12 oct 11

Tonight! TCM at 8 PM: THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE — The TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME of 1933!

I wrote the description below back in 2009 (full review here) based on a rare screening years before at the Film Forum pre-code festival. It used to be so very rare, but tonight on TCM that all chan...

14 sep 11

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