Bright Lights Film Journal :: February 2010

February 2010 | Issue 67

From the Editor

"Progress is our most important product!"

Gary Morris

Articles

A German Tragedy, Turned Absurd: Fassbinder's Satan's Brew

By Andrew Grossman

"Allowing his acidity unfettered reign, Fassbinder concocts one of the most blistering excoriations of despotism ever committed to film."

Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I Spit on Your Grave and Only Angels Have Wings

By Erich Kuersten

"Peer pressure is either a boon or a bitch with the power to destroy the world, or save it."

The Homing Eye: Comparing James Wolcott and Judith Williamson

By Lesley Chow

"Where Williamson is highly critical of films that encourage us to consume lifestyles, Wolcott's writing appears to be an appreciation of surfaces — in fact, his whole style can be read as an analysis of '50s textures and design elements."

Serious Joke: The Coen Brothers' Emergence as Jewish Humorists

By Lee Weston Sabo

"The films of the Coen brothers seem to take place in a postmodern Chelm, displaced chronologically and geographically."

Val Lewton's Symbolic Statuary: A Photo Essay

By C. Jerry Kutner

"It was once the figurehead of a slave ship. That's where our people come from. From the misery and pain of slavery." ~ I Walked with a Zombie

Jean Renoir's Toni: Unreal and True

By D. J. M. Saunders

And staying forever young

Tina Fey's 30 Rock: At Last! A Cult TV Sitcom for the Tragically Self-Involved

By Alan Vanneman

You'll come for the irony, you'll stay for the tits.

The New French New Wave? Sex and Horror in the Modern Arthouse

By Nicholas Green

"The explicit nature of this wave of filmmaking can be interpreted as a riposte to modern cultural sensibilities."

Rating Movies: Or, Seeing Stars

By Robert Castle

"I want my favorites to get the high ratings — my judgments are being challenged by anonymous forces whom I cannot confront."

Watching Kubrick in Reverse: The Docu-Shorts Flying Padre (1951) and Day of the Fight (1951)

By Brian Michael Goss

Kubrick in embryo

Monster Queen: The Transgressive Body of Divine in Pink Flamingos

By Lindsay Hallam

"Divine is as unstoppable as nature, destined to repeatedly transgress, destroy, and create."

Don't It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue? What Really Separates Ben and Matt

By Violet Glaze

Hand me those contacts!

Bright Lights, Big Cine: Interview with Bright Lights Editor Gary Morris

By Matthew Sorrento

On Bright Lights, online film writing, and the collection he recently edited, Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran

Movies

Old Cameron's Avatar: America's Favorite Asshole Makes Another Kick-ass Thriller

By Alan Vanneman

Vampires? Yeah, we've got that. Oh, and Michelangelo too

The Greenest Green World: James Cameron's Avatar

By Lee Weston Sabo

"Cameron is Hollywood's dream boy: a superficial auteur with impeccable brand recognition."

Fred Astaire, Two Steps Forward and One Step Back: Fred and Vera-Ellen, Not Quite Walking on Air in The Belle of New York

By Alan Vanneman

Can quantity trump quality? Not so much

Inimitable Charm: Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox

By Lee Weston Sabo

"Anderson, like Dahl, seems to have told a story to appeal to a child's inner adult."

Pinned on Both Sides: No Escape for Paul Muni's Fugitive

By Matthew Sorrento

"The film suggests the denial of the common worker, whose service to industry is only as worthy as his social status."

When Thelonious Met Pannonica: Hannah Rothschild's The Jazz Baroness

By Alan Vanneman

"The Jazz Baroness goes beyond the barrel of stereotypes the screeching monkeys of society use against the intricate gusts of life swirling about us." Really!

Licence to Kill (1989): The Last James Bond Movie

By Jay Rothermel

Don't worry or question; just consume — oh, and kill

The Power of Pulp: Madness, Mayhem, and Relevance from Dr. Mabuse to Miss Mend

By Gordon Thomas

"The shadow of Mabuse falls over the 1926 Soviet adventure serial Miss Mend, too, but without the angst and gloom of Lang's Der Spieler."

Hollywood's Nightmare, Not Ours: On The Mist, Story (1980) and Film (2007)

By Jay Rothermel

Director Frank Barabont hijacks — and sinks — Stephen King's powerful allegory of political oppression

"We're Engaged to Be Engaged": The Paranormal Activity of Trauma and Relationship

By Brian Grady

"The camera has a motor, you just turn it on and walk away" ~ Andy Warhol

The Scent of a Woman: Perfect Misogyny in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

By Heather Addison

"The Grenouille of the film experiences an emotional epiphany that does not bring him humanity, but at least makes him yearn for its possibilities."

Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad: John Hillcoat's The Road

By David L. Pike

"Hillcoat and his crew have taken the book's hints and modeled their scavenging pair on contemporary images of homeless people, who already, as Hillcoat aptly puts it, are 'living that apocalyptic world of day-to-day survival on the streets with no money and no food.'"

Looking Back on Silence and Condoleezza: The Weirdness of W

By Lesley Chow

The result is satire that doesn't breathe."

Deciphering the Indecipherable: Procedure as Art in Fincher's Zodiac

By Mike Miley

"With Zodiac, obsession becomes the point of origin, the catalyst for artistic creation."

Stars

The Prisoner of Kicks: Mary Astor

By Dan Callahan

"I always say, keep a diary and some day it'll keep you."~ Mae West

A Lady's a Lady: The Versatile Elegance of Mary Astor

By Imogen Sara Smith

"What is it, love trouble or money trouble? I've seen them all, I've seen all the troubles in the world, and they boil down to just those two. You're broke, or you're lonely. Or both."

David Niven: "P. G. Wodehouse with Tears"

By Christopher Sandford

"What you got was what you saw, a man with a soldier's training speaking ever so nicely and trying not to stretch himself beyond his abilities as an actor." ~ David Niven

Confessions of a Hollywood Tough Guy: An Interview with Rod Steiger

By Santiago Rubín de Celis

"The only thing that is absolutely important for me is quality."

Rudolph Valentino: Dream Lover

By Dan Callahan

"Valentino said there's nothing like tile for a tango!" ~ Norma Desmond to Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Directors

Writing (and Filming) the Memories: An Interview with Guillermo Arriaga on The Burning Plain

By Matthew Sorrento

"Arriaga's use of eroticism and semi-incest between respective children of the two illicit lovers is more than a pastiche; it's an organic outgrowth from an idea."

"Myself as Queen": A Profile and Interview with Anna Biller

By Jason Klorfein

"My interest in creating visual worlds is what led me to both painting and film."

Drawing from Life: Talking with Director George Hickenlooper

By Steve Johnson

On Art, Identity, Families, Fragmentation, Medication . . . and Fulfillment

Columns

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Blood, Monsoon Wedding, The Exiles, The General, Sunrise, 8-1/2, Death in the Garden

By Gordon Thomas

An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

Books

Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey, by Simon Louvish.

Reviewed by Alan Vanneman

Thank Heaven: A Memoir, by Leslie Caron.

Reviewed by Matthew Kennedy

The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, by David Thomson.

Reviewed by Alan Vanneman

Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies, by Dominique Manon and James Ursini. Hammer Glamour, by Marcus Hearn.

Reviewed by Erich Kuersten

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