Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) – Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka gives Missi Pyle, James Fox, David Kelly, Freddie Highmore, et al. the guided tour. One man’s cliché is another man’s archetype. Tim Burton’s version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, like most of Burton’s work, is filled with clever ideas, but they are ... 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 »

The Alices in flight, those beautiful women alone in their cars on the run – Sylvia Kristel in Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls, and Inger Stevens in “The Hitch-Hiker” episode of The Twilight Zone – recall the most iconic of such women, Janet Leigh as Marion Crane on the ... read more »

While personally I view Sarah Palin as more Barbie-Doll-Puppet than Angela-Lansbury-style Puppetmaster (Puppetmistress?), I enjoyed reading colleague Erich Kuersten’s post on Cinema’s Sexy-Evil Palin-Types, and would like to add one more – albeit from televison. I’m talking about whatever-happened-to-her Jane Badler who starred as Diana, Alien Overlord of Earth, in the1983-84 sci-fi TV series, V. ... read more »

It is an Ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three.`By thy long beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me? If I were a cartoonist, i.e., if I could actually draw, I’d love to publish a political cartoon depicting Navy man John McCain as Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.” And who would I depict as ... read more »

Shakespeare’s King Lear is a classic incarnation of the wildman archetype (previously discussed by Erich Kuersten here and here). Lear’s problem, leading to tragedy, is not only his age – and what seems to be encroaching senility or dementia – but the fact that throughout the height of his power no one apparently ever dared ... read more »

At any given moment in Hollywood history, certain actors will fill a certain niche. One such niche is the cute little French girl or gamine. During the 1940s, that niche was occupied by Simone Simon. During the ‘50s, it was filled by Leslie Caron. From approximately 2001 (Amélie) through 2006 (The Da Vinci Code), America’s ... read more »

We’ve had the Night of the Iguana, the Day of the Locust and since around 1989, we’ve had the years of the disaffected sheep. Now I’d say 2007 Oscar Night heralds the Age of the Wildman. We’ve got two movies up for big awards that seem of wed together already by primal masculine force: NO ... 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 »

John Ford taught us to regard every Western as an allegorical comment on America. And most of them are in some way. But Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is so abstract, primal, and fundamentally ambiguous that it lends itself to any number of readings. Which is maybe why cinebloggers can’t stop writing about ... read more »