I mean, DAME Helen Mirren.  (Photo via Associated Press.  Joke via Oscar co-host, Steve Martin.) Very happy for Kat B and The Hurt Locker. Worst Award of the Evening -  The Best Cinematography Award to Avatar.  It should have gone to the great Robert Richardson (Inglourious Basterds), or if not to him, to Christian Berger who was ... read more »

Like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Serbian–born Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976) was not only a filmmaker, but a respected film theorist, and like those two Soviet giants, Vorkapich’s theories were mainly about editing – the right and wrong ways to cut two shots together, the “kinesthetic” (physical) effects that could be produced in the viewer through ... read more »

Photo: Director Jack Arnold (right) shows star Grant Williams how to handle a giant prop used in the making of The Incredible Shrinking Man. If director Jack Arnold were alive today, he would be 93. A former stage actor and also a writer who occasionally co-authored his screenplays, Arnold was an underrated master of genre ... read more »

Every one of Henry Selick’s four feature films to date has dealt with alternate realities. In the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the ghoulish Jack Skellington finds a hole in a tree that leads him, Alice-style, from his own reality, Halloween Town, to the very different alt-reality of Christmas Town. In James and ... read more »

When I learned, via GreenCine Daily, that Johnny Depp might be playing the part of the Mad Hatter in a Tim Burton 3-D version of Alice in Wonderland (financed by the Disney Corp.) my first thought was – Why? Hadn’t Depp already played that part – or a visual simulacrum of it – in Burton’s ... read more »

GOOD – Western Union (Fritz Lang 1941) This is one of Lang’s first color films. He shot it in Arizona’s Painted Desert with special attention to the natural scenery, and the three-strip Technicolor cinematography is quite beautiful to look at it, even today. It must have bowled over audiences in 1941. The surprising thing about ... read more »

The CGI performance-capture version of Angelina Jolie as “Grendel’s Mother” (the only name ever used to refer to her) in Robert Zemeckis’s 3-D Beowulf is just the latest in a line of cartoonishly exaggerated femmes fatales to be found in Zemeckis’s work. The first and most iconic of these is Jessica Rabbit (top) in Who ... read more »

Via ScreenGrab – Naomi Watts will star in the remake of The Birds from Casino Royale director Martin Campbell. Hey, I love Naomi Watts as much as anyone, but you couldn’t find an actress who looks more like Tippi Hedren (The Birds’ original star) if you tried. Will she be playing Hedren’s character, spoiled socialite ... read more »

Several months ago here at Bright Lights After Dark, co-blogger Alan Vanneman was at pains to recall the name of a 3-D Western he saw some 50 years ago in which a character spat tobacco juice into the audience. After much diligent research, we are happy to report an answer to Alan’s question. The following ... read more »

The incredibly beautiful Julie Adams, paramour of The Creature From the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1953), and object of many adolescent fantasies including, obviously, my own. What a pleasure it was to see her last month at the second World 3-D Expo, in Technicolor, 3-D, and deliciously tight bluejeans, strutting her stuff in Budd Boetticher’s ... read more »