This is an updated and revised version of Gordon Thomas’s article first posted in Bright Lights in May 2006, reposted to celebrate Easter. * * * Bigger is better this[…]
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Composers · Historical & Epic · Reviews · Silents
Getting It Right the Second Time: Adapting Ben-Hur for the Screen
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LGBT & Queer · Music & Musicals
Bonjour, Paris! Musical Conventions in Les Chansons d’amour (2007, Christophe Honoré)
Les Chansons d’amour is unusual because of the realism of its characters, setting and story; the film has little dance and no big production numbers, but it is a musical.[…]
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Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Pre-Code
Happy Birthday, Lee Tracy (b. April 14, 1898): “A Manic, Scalding Passion for Success”
“With his impish grin, twinkling eyes, and boyish blond hair, he looks like Tom Sawyer crossed with a Tammany Hall fixer.”
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Chronicler(s) of the End of the End: On Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s Pájaros de Verano (Birds of Passage) (2018)
“The root of oppression is loss of memory.” – Paula Gunn Allen1 * * * The end of the world is a mansion in the middle of the desert. A[…]
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Watch It Again! Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Planes, Trains and Automobiles teaches the other comedies of errors that an error in character is much more significant than an error in judgment. And much more redeemable. * *[…]
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Drama · Historical & Epic · Women in Film
On Pain, Intimacy, and Women Who Want: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, #MeToo, and the Afterglow of Pasolini’s Salò
These women want their words to be heard. They want their will to be known. They want to be able to change their minds. And they want the full mind-body[…]
The Glare of the City: Adapting The Long Goodbye
Altman admitted never finishing the novel and saw no need to remain faithful to it. For that reason, the movie wasn’t well received by Chandler fans. Most didn’t appreciate the[…]
Historical & Epic · Religion & Spirituality
“Tribune, Do You Really Believe All This?” The Somewhat Dispassionate Passion of Sony Affirm’s Risen (2016)
Risen is the product of a sub-industry whose primary source of success is in providing pious pablum for a complacent and undiscriminating Christian market (although, to be fair, this market[…]
Genres · Horror · Producers & Studios
Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton: Looking Back at a B-Movie Master
Producer Val Lewton died on this day (March 14) in 1951, age 46. We honor this visionary talent by reposting this profile of Lewton by frequent BLFJ contributor Mark Vieira,[…]
Literature and Film · Writers & Critics
Script to Screen: Notes on Five Significant Screenplays, the Movies They Were Made Into, and the Process of Adaptation
The most substantial changes in Nightmare Alley are between the novel and the screenplay. For example, in the novel, Stan, who covets Zeena and her act, kills the alcoholic Pete[…]
Roma: A Meditation on (Male) Mobility and (Female) Immobility
Even the languid pace Cuarón uses throughout the film seems to want to elevate the (feminine and domestic) virtue of soul-nurturing stillness over the (masculine) trait of destructive freneticism. Some[…]
Two Truths: Inside No Way Out (A Gift to a True Friend)
That’s why I sing for an America that will never be back but that left us with such vivifying memories. You’re not lost, not past, not buried. You’re active, vital,[…]
Counterculture · Documentaries · Music & Musicals
Marc Bolan and Born to Boogie: The Great Unsung Rock ’n’ Roll Film
A roar grew in the wrestling room of daybreak . . . And now where once stood solid water stood the reptile king, Tyrannosaurus Rex, reborn and bopping. – Marc[…]
Designers · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Queen Anne’s Fishbowl: Discussing The Favourite with Production Designer Fiona Crombie
Queen Anne’s bed was hand built, hand carved and painted. It was 14 feet high with four mattresses and layers of beautiful bedding. The bed is a fairly accurate queen’s[…]
Before Hollywood: Max Ophüls, Curtis Bernhardt, and Robert Siodmak in Exile in Paris
Hollywood was just beyond the horizon for the émigrés. There is no doubt that Curtis Bernhardt, Robert Siodmak, and Max Ophüls thought they would settle down in Paris and become[…]
You Say You Want an Evolution: Sneaker Cinema’s Narrative and Aesthetic Ground Zero
What sneaker cinema is amounts to the sport shoe’s role in adding narrative or stylistic significance to a film’s mise-en-scene, themes, characters, or plot lines. And to be clear: ruby[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Who Becomes a Legend Most? And Why Wasn’t It Betty Garrett?
“The reason I sought out Betty Garrett’s book in the first place was because of something devastating that I read – and didn’t want to be true – in Farley[…]
Drama · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Facing “Ultraviolence”: Blindness as Insight in Bird Box
Given the fact that sex and violence are alleged to be as normalized in our culture as wind blowing through the trees, in Bird Box, Malorie’s shock even appears prudish[…]
The Auteurist Stork: Alfonso Cuarón’s Cinema of Deliverance
Roma is the latest edition in what can be considered Cuarón’s prenatal trilogy, preceded by Children of Men (2006) and Gravity. This is a director obsessed with matters of pregnancy,[…]
“Downsizing” Liberal Hollywood: How the Film’s Christian Message Undermines Arguments for National Health Care
Downsizing is a dystopic satire on American values that has an unsurprising and credible core involving a sick and impoverished underclass. It is credible because the USA is alone among[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
Making Montgomery Clift: An Intimate Exploration of a Hollywood Enigma
As Robert Clift states in the film: “The people in my life who loved Monty lost him twice: in his death, and then again when they couldn’t find him in[…]
Looking for Quiet: The Other Side of Robert Mitchum
Considering Mitchum’s background, it’s forgivable to conflate his cinematic existentialist tough guys with his mythic, often dubious, real-life history. Some things are certain, though: Mitchum lost his father early, crushed[…]
Animation · Animators · Experimental & Underground · Religion & Spirituality
Making Fun: The Satiric Impulse in Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues and Seder-Masochism
In her two longest works of animation – Sita Sings the Blues (2008) and Seder Masochism (2018, currently on the festival circuit) – Nina Paley turns her sharp wit and[…]
