February 2007 | Issue 55
Editorial
Gary Morris
Articles
By Mervyn Nicholson
Beyond the queer readings of Strangers on a Train
By C. Jerry Kutner
"As much as the landscape is a character in It Came From Outer Space, it dominates Antonioni's L'Avventura . . ."
By Tanfer Emin Tunc
"Casablanca provides twenty-first-century Americans with an oasis of hope in a desert of arbitrary cruelty and senseless violence."
By D. J. M. Saunders
That Obscure Agent of Misanthropy?
By Lesley Chow
"The women of To's world are not just endearingly kooky, but often unacceptably bizarre and amoral in their excited reactions to events."
By Gordon Thomas
"It's sort of what we have instead of God"
Movies
By Matthew Kennedy
"Never mind that Hudson was a gay man playing a straight man playing a gay man in love with a man who was really a woman."
By Deirdre Gilfedder
"Hovering between treason and tribute . . ."
By Alan Vanneman
Forget the book, just see the movie
By Alan Vanneman
Hey! How did we win the Cold War, anyway?
By Alan Vanneman
Getting down way down under
By tephane Dunn
"In Hustle, we can appreciate Nola's yearning to be more than a pimp's pussy cash box . . ."
By Megan Ratner
"Who are you? Where do you come from?"
By Dan Callahan
Ted Tetzlaff brings Bobby Driscoll to the voyeur's front window
Stars
By Damien Love
Life with the restless ghost of Orson Welles' last movie
Directors
By Lesley Chow
"People are constantly falling back on their beds — but always in languor, never in passion . . ."
By Tom Sutpen
"Like every other skilled fabulist on earth there would forever be a part of Stroheim that truly believed his own fantasies."
By Bert Cardullo
"The fruitful tree bends."
By Damon Smith
"Just put your sneakers on and go. Go on the journey."
By Damon Smith
"It's hard to be intuitive when you've got 42 crew behind you and they're like, 'Look, they don't know what to do here. They're panicking, look at them!'"
By Peter Rinaldi
"Not only is it personal — it's downright embarrassing."
Columns
By Gordon Thomas
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
By Gary Morris
"I just want to hear 'I love you' instead of 'Take it you tight little snatch!'"
Festivals
By Ben Cho
Asian cinema triumphs in this year's D&T, Tony Rayns's last
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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