Nine out of ten bloggers agree – the dreams in Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION are not particularly dream-like, at least, not much more so than the action sequences in your average James Bond film. Whether that makes INCEPTION a bad movie is another issue.  Nolan essentially uses the dream invasion scenario as a MacGuffin – an excuse to ... 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 »

La Belle Captive (1983) is an erotic noir mystery by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad. It is also quite tongue-in-cheek. The following three images which appear in succession in the film capture something of the movie’s fetishistic flavor. If the last shot reminds you of the orgy sequence in Kubrick’s Eyes ... read more »

The amount of discussion generated by Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds demonstrates, if nothing else, that whether you like the film, hate it, or harbor mixed feelings about it, what Tarantino has created is some kind of movie. Unless you have been living in the proverbial cave – and I don’t mean Plato’s – you should ... read more »

In film noir, the anima (a female projection of the male unconscious) often takes the form of a femme fatale, a figure that lures the male protagonist to his doom. But as Bright Lights correspondent Eugenia points out, “There is another type of femme who figures there—a guardian angel type.” Just as the femme fatale ... read more »

Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira – actress, comedienne, artist, and horror hostess – was one of the most interesting and extraordinary persons I have ever met. MAILA KNEW EVERYBODY The first thing she asked me was, “Are you a genius?” adding, “I only associate with geniuses.” Taken aback, I realized that if I wanted to keep ... read more »