February 2006 | Issue 51
Editorial
Articles
By Robert von Dassanowsky
Vienna's Forgotten Influences and New Austrian Film
By Alan Vanneman
"Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?"
By Robert Keser
"He won't be gay when I get through with him!"
By Tom Sutpen
Cinema's supreme pictorialist meets "the cop on the beat"
By Robert Castle
"In a single bold stroke, Ruiz films the novel according to the play of images, feelings, scents, and tastes that Marcel experiences."
By Alan Vanneman
Even a big ape can enjoy a sunset, can't he?
Movies
By Robert Castle
"Why not sock the audiences early with the 'fuck her in the ass' line?"
By Jayson Harsin
This time "liberal" is a dirty word
By A. Jay Adler
"A whole load of 'Aw' with not a lot of 'shucks,' updated only by a little cunnilingus."
By Matthew Kennedy
Ang Lee expertly limns the catastrophes of the closet
By Ian Johnston
The bad news is . . . there's not much good news
By Ian Johnston
The Belgian humanists' most Bressonian film to date
By Alan Vanneman
Linda Cardellini dies and goes to Hell
By Alan Vanneman
A few really cute boys take their shirts off, but that's about it
By Alan Vanneman
All in the family, unfortunately
By Gordon Thomas
Faith meets flamboyance in DeMille's Jesus epic, beautifully restored
By Lesley Chow
"There's always been an acute mystery attached to the body . . ."
By Tom Sutpen
"The great legal scholar Lenny Bruce once observed that in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls . . ."
By Matthew Kennedy
"Her English accent wanders around her mouth like a playful ice cube."
Stars
By Dan Callahan
"I was never young, and if you were never young, how can you ever feel old?"
By Alan Vanneman
The last of the great silent clowns now on DVD
Directors
By Lesley Chow
"Who doesn't want to be rescued by their narrator?"
By Scott Thill
"The more you're able to project your own world upon the work, the more power it has."
Columns
By Gary Morris
"Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine for all the chicks?"
Festivals
By Gary Morris
Out of the closets and onto the screens
Recent Posts

The Yes MenAn excerpt with the wildly gymnastic "big-mouth" comic Joe E. Brown, from the film whose name inspired this magazine.

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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