May 1998 | Issue 21
Articles
Gary Morris
The beach movies helped turn the beach into an exaggerated version of the suburban backyard, complete with "swimming pool" in the form of the Pacific Ocean.
Gary Morris
Three of Kurosawa's scathing critiques of Japanese society past and present — in beautiful new video transfers
Movies
Alan Vanneman
Whoopee is a find, a treasure, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Most of all it is a chunk of Flo Ziegfeld's Roaring Twenties Broadway, preserved in glorious, 1930 two-color Technicolor.
Gary Morris
Susan Stern's entertaining documentary takes a jaundiced look at the history and vast influence of the disturbing doll.
Gary Morris
A bittersweet look at the daily lives of the tranny whores of a legendary red-light district of 1960s Singapore — with free make-up tips!
Ray Davis
The only things not taken from Chinatown are a post-plastic-surgery makeup job from The Long Goodbye and that gag from "The Lucy Show" where Lucy meets Orson Welles but doesn't believe it's really him.
Directors
Gary Morris
The homely, jowly face, dictatorial blatherings, and ragged leather chaps masked one of the great makers of modern cinema.
Gary Morris
The master of Euro-erotica is starting to get his due in recent revivals.
Festivals
Gary Morris
The queer community's longstanding obsession with roles and labels may be starting to loosen up.
Gary Morris
For those who prefer anatomy to artistry, or more coarsely, meat to melodrama, we offer this consumer guide.
Gary Morris
Cartoons have always been a rich repository of queer subtext. How else to explain all those too-close buddies and their serious lack of female companionship?
Gary Morris
The queer contribution to experimental film
Books
Gary Morris
America's prisons are woefully overcrowded and so, according to Boze Hadleigh, are its closets.
Gary Morris
In a sea of movie guides, VideoHound has carved out its own cozy niche, becoming in the process a kind of cottage industry for data- and opinion-starved cineastes.
Gary Morris
San Francisco's Cleis Press is starting to corner the market on sheer queer fun
Gary Morris
Da Capo Press is doing an invaluable service for film buffs that deserves a tip of the hat.
Gary Morris
Kudos to Scarecrow for finally wising up and using attractive, well-designed dust jackets on their books. Now if they can only do something about those high prices.
Recent Posts

Bresson gets interrogated by cruel French interviewers, or does he?The YouTube copyright police removed John Cromwell's 1932 feature The Silver Cord from our "petit theatre," but we're back with Robert Bresson, in a fascinating interview for French television in which the interrogators seem as much like Bresson "models" as Mouchette, Fontaine, or that "Francis the Talking Mule" of art cinema, poor Balthasar. Some have called the interviewers "cruel," but is Bresson in fact playing them? Would that surprise us?

Watch on Youtube »

Gordon Thomas, and other BL staff, check out the eye- popping pleasures of Blu-Ray.

» Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair)
» The General (Keaton)
» Sunrise (Murnau)
» 8-1/2 (Fellini)
» Playtime (Tati)
» Winstanley (Brownlow & Mollo)
» Permissive (Shonteff)
» Lola Montes (Ophuls)
» My Childhood, My Ain Folk ... (Bill Douglas)
» In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima)
» Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney)
» Repulsion (Polanski)
» Institute Benjamenta (Brothers Quay)
» Everlasting Moments (Troell)

BL Associate Editor Alan Vanneman and others watch (and review) television shows so you don't have to. Click if you dare.

» 30 Rock
» Batman: The Animated Series
» Broadway Theatre Archive
» Charlie’s Angels
» Cowboy Bebop
» Death of a Salesman
» Dollhouse
» Freaks and Geeks
» Have Gun Will Travel
» Mad Men
» Magnum P.I.
» Monk
» Pamela Anderson Roast
» Renegade
» Sex and the City

I'm sick of movies, Mr. Webmaster. Take me away!

» Archive.org
Gazillions of free books, audio, and video. Grab 'em before the copyright police come knocking!

» Glenn Greenwald
The indomitable civil liberties champion takes exception to American exceptionalism. You will too when you read his blistering analyses.

» Project Gutenberg
See Archive.org.

» Creative Commons
"All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially."

» The Ivy Compton-Burnett home page
A Bright Lights side project created by George Brown devoted to the greatest novelist of the 20th century. There, we said it.

» Raw Vision
The leading online site (and print publication) devoted to those zany untrained artists who channel personality quirks, neuroses, idées fixes, and downright craziness into Art.

» Siklink.com
An endlessly fascinating clearinghouse for "the greatest hand-picked collection of bizarre, strange and unusual websites on the internet today." Highlights include the enchanting "Prison Bitch Name Generator" and "Life Gem" – how to "turn your deceased loved one into a diamond."

» Clark Ashton Smith
The premier fantasy poet and short-story writer (and sculptor and artist) gets a detailed blog that's a model for intelligent fan-ism. Watch out for falling curmudgeons in the forum.

» Classic Arcade Games
Miss Asteroids? Centipede? Frogger? Miss that you missed them? Here's your chance to enjoy the state of the art circa 1980s.

» Jack Vance
Wikipedia's gateway to our favorite writer in and of science fiction and fantasy. A national treasure.

» Electronic Frontier Foundation
"EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations." Go EFF!

» The Canonical List of Weird Band Names: The Peculiar and the Profane
Another Bright Lights side project from the inimitable George Brown. You probably know the Meat Puppets but how about Lyin' Bitch and the Restraining Orders?

» James Purdy
A good introduction to a criminally neglected postwar literary master. Be 21 or be gone for his gorgeous, harrowing works, kids.

» The Radical Ant Farm
This page answers that nagging question: "What's up with the Russian criminal tattoos?" The rest of the site offers further fun.

» Spectro-Pop
Monumental site devoted to '60s pop music – you know, that stuff playing in the background during the orgy.

» The Left Business Observer
Doug Henwood's long-running economics newsletter, called "invaluable" by Noam Chomsky. Need we say more?

» Jane Bowles
Go to Wikipedia and improve this "stub" on the writer Tennessee Williams looked up to and James Purdy called "the eagle-woman of American letters."

» WFMU
The best online radio station for our money. A deep archive and no-music-turned-away policy will keep you rollin' and tumblin' till the apocalypse.

» Henry Green
Must we create a detailed tribute page to this extraordinary British novelist championed by Auden, Updike, and Terry Southern? Or will you do it? Start with Concluding (1948).

» Women of Surrealism
They weren't all "muses" and maids – these women equaled or surpassed their more celebrated male counterparts in vision and technique.

» Ronald Firbank
He called the president of Haiti "a perfect dear" and was known to eat a single pea at dinner. Oh, and he ranks with Joyce and Woolf (see Edmund Wilson) as a groundbreaking literary modernist.

» Essential Vermeer
Everything you need to know about the Dutch master of light and mysterious figures.

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