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Avengers: Endgame; or Looking Ahead to 2016, the Liberal Fantasy Redo

This is all to say that Endgame is more interested in fantasy outcomes than solving the problems it gives itself. It promises us a future more bearable than our present[...]

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“Newest Ideas about Brain Power”: Hair Color and Jean Harlow, Hollywood’s Platinum Blonde

INTRODUCTION Jean Harlow (1911-1937), born Harlean Carpenter, rose to screen fame in the early 1930s playing characters with an unaffected, uninhibited, spontaneous sexuality. [See Figure 1.] Dubbed the “Platinum Blonde”[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

Singing in the Rubble: A Musical Map of the Cold War in Pawe? Pawlikowski’s Cold War

Suddenly jazz became a major taboo in Soviet society until Stalin’s death. In Western Europe, by contrast, mainly in Paris, jazz took off after the Nazis’ defeat in the hues[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

She-Gods, Gangsters, and Gunslingers: The “New Woman” in the Early Films of Roger Corman

As part of their liberation from convention, Corman empowers female characters with choices both real and metaphorical. Even a common love triangle can represent female empowerment, with the choice between[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

Donald Trump: Lynchian Monster

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” – The Mystery Man in Lost Highway * * * David Lynch is not a horror director. With the possible exception of Eraserhead, his films[...]

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FOLLOW-UP 6/19/19: The Lillian Gish/Bowling Green State University Controversy

Note: We don’t normally run press releases, but we’ve been close to the issue of Bowling Green State University’s removal of the names of Dorothy and Lillian Gish from the[...]

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Trash and Masochism: The Transcendent Aesthetics of Dungeon of Harrow

“. . . a jewel with facets of disease running all through it.” – Lester Bangs * * * It was once said that the real heroes of 18th-century writer[...]

The post Trash and Masochism: The Transcendent Aesthetics of <em>Dungeon of Harrow</em> appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

Bright Lights Film Journal

The Birth of Night Moves: Alan Sharp on the Edge of America

The movie’s reviews were mixed, and it failed to make a profit in the summer of 1975. . . .  but Night Moves has gone on to be recognised as[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

A Fine Romance: When Love Neither Leaves nor Stays

But goes on being itself * * * True Love in cinema is more than fine acting, well-written scripts, or even directorial tone. Not that IMDb cast and crew should[...]

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Sexual Politics: On Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction

What interests me (and I suspect, Assayas) is not so much the substance of these dinner table debates, which tend to move in predictable repeating circles, as their texture. People[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

David Lynch in Hell: Finding Resolution in Twin Peaks: The Return

The final episode of The Return (and, indeed, Lynch’s entire canon) has nothing to do with the literal things, the tracing of narratives and the understanding of who does what.[...]

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A Woman’s Freedom: Dark Victory vs. Now, Voyager

This comparison shows Dark Victory to be conservative, and Now, Voyager to be liberal, on the question of how women can achieve lasting satisfaction. Of course, in Dark Victory one[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

John Huston and Stephen Crane: The Texts of Red Badge of Courage

Huston, unlike Crane and his readers, had the actual experience of combat before him. What he discovered in Italy validated much of what Crane wrote. Huston, too, would attempt in[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

Adios, Compañeros: Living the Dream of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

“When Words Turn into Guns”: Santa Fe Trail (1940) and Its Times

Martyrdom suits Brown’s purpose, and it is in this extremism that he is ultimately un-American. His cause may be morally right but his attempt to impose it is not; the[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

The Last Black Man in San Francisco: Talking with Production Designer Jona Touchet, Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, and Editor David Marks

We spent a lot of time going through references for the film as well as scouting iconic locations, but what it came down to was devoting ourselves to creating a[...]

The post <em>The Last Black Man in San Francisco:</em> Talking with Production Designer Jona Touchet, Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, and Editor David Marks appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

Metallica’s Kirk Hammett on Introducing Kids to Scary Movies, Why He Likes Lords of Chaos, and the Deal with Women and Horror

 * * * It’s The Day of the Triffids’ fault: when he was a wee lad stuck at home in front of the television with a sprained arm (fault: sister,[...]

The post Metallica’s Kirk Hammett on Introducing Kids to Scary Movies, Why He Likes <em>Lords of Chaos,</em> and the Deal with Women and Horror appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

Bright Lights Film Journal

The Lion King (2019): The Art of De-Animation

These characters speak lines that contain emotion but show none of it themselves, even when they’re the exact same lines as before. And when they’re new, they show no old[...]

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Filmography of the Closet: Coming Out through The Little Mermaid

As a child, singing the Ariel aahs was synonymous for me with being or becoming Ariel. More than looking like her, dressing like her, acting like her – all of[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

“Tolstoy and Only Tolstoy. Nothing Comes from Us”: Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1966-67) – Criterion Update

“What do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” – Henry James, from the preface of his novel The Tragic[...]

The post “Tolstoy and Only Tolstoy. Nothing Comes from Us”: Sergei Bondarchuk’s <em>War and Peace</em> (1966-67) – Criterion Update appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

Bright Lights Film Journal

Orpheus Unending, or Beyond and Behind The Fugitive Kind

For a variety of reasons, then, despite its high-gloss finish, the film did not achieve any real commercial success. This is not to say it was an artistic letdown, as[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

The Architecture of Horror: Space, Light, and Atmosphere in Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar

We encounter filmic atmosphere vaguely, imperceptibly, but emotively and reflexively; a movie is a mood. Hereditary and Midsommar creep into our consciousness through subtle shifts in light, sound, and camerawork.[...]

The post The Architecture of Horror: Space, Light, and Atmosphere in Ari Aster’s <em>Hereditary</em> and <em>Midsommar</em> appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

Bright Lights Film Journal

On the Beautiful Pain of Saying Nothing: Desire, Silence, and Visual Inheritance in Pawlikowski’s Cold War and Antonioni’s L’Eclisse

“We’ve avoided saying certain things. Why bring them up now?” – L’Eclisse “Two hearts, four eyes, Crying all day and all night/ Dark eyes, you cry because you can’t be[...]

The post On the Beautiful Pain of Saying Nothing: Desire, Silence, and Visual Inheritance in Pawlikowski’s <em>Cold War</em> and Antonioni’s <em>L’Eclisse</em> appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

Time and Friendship in Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006), or How We Age with Film

The film withholds memory and history from us, always knowing more than us, plot-wise, but inviting and compelling our projection of how we fill the space of our own friendships.[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

The View on Parade: Xavier Dolan, Richard Billingham, and the Limits of Australian Cinema at the 2019 Melbourne International Film Festival (Aug. 6-23)

It seems a good opportunity to talk about film and nationhood, given that so many of this year’s local films – not only A Family but Alice, Buoyancy, and Animals[...]

The post The View on Parade: Xavier Dolan, Richard Billingham, and the Limits of Australian Cinema at the 2019 Melbourne International Film Festival (Aug. 6-23) appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

Lost Letter: HUAC, Immigration, and William Wellman’s My Man and I (1952)

In My Man and I, “it seems that America has fallen into decline and the Stones and Nancy Walkers of America need the redemptive power, the cultural revivification offered by[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

8 Million Ways to Die (1986): An Autopsy of the Great L.A. Noir That Never Was

So what the fuck happened? * * * 8 Million Ways to Die is a mess. Not a glorious mess, or an interesting mess. It’s not a fiasco on the[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

The Wizard of Oz at 80: Archive of a Rust Belt Girl

The Wizard of Oz, the film, turns 80 this year, 2019. To celebrate, we present Amy Kenyon’s striking analysis/memoir, which explores growing up a “rust belt girl” in postwar Detroit[...]

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Bright Lights Film Journal

“This Film Is Blessed by the Gods”: Talking with Mag Hsu, Director of Dear Ex (Netflix, 2018)

Hsu Chih-Yen and I immediately agreed that we wanted to represent a Taipei in July, especially the sun in Taipei. Under this July sun, everything is steaming, all the colours[...]

The post “This Film Is Blessed by the Gods”: Talking with Mag Hsu, Director of <em>Dear Ex</em> (Netflix, 2018) appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

Bright Lights Film Journal

Who Carries the Banner? Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice 50 Years Later

Concepts of sex and marriage have changed monumentally in the last few decades and still today prove endlessly malleable and undefinable. We spend our whole lives attempting to shape our[...]

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Videograms of a Revolution: Surveillance, Self-Regulation, and Techno-Progressivism in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass (2019)

[This review contains spoilers for the films Glass and The Village.]   “There are unknown forces that don’t want us to realise what we are truly capable of. They don’t[...]

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