Bright Lights 44.

From the depths of a bomb shelter somewhere probably not too far from Death Valley, editor Gary Morris introduces the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal. And he suggests you build one, too. A bomb shelter, that is; though another film journal is always welcome: "Your neighbors can help, and then, when the world gets so mad at us they decide to do to us what we do to them, you can have the pleasure of shutting the door on those screaming, SUV-driving, McDonald's-scarfing, gun-toting, got-it-all-but-want-more miscreants who called you 'silly.'"

Gary writes quite a bit in this issue, which means this is a very good issue. He argues, for example, that "Gregory La Cava is probably the greatest classic Hollywood director still in need of rediscovery"; reviews three docs on outsider music, "even less quantifiable" than outsider art: You Really Think You Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story (Morris also points to the Gary Wilson site); Jandek on Cornwood and Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story; admires Craig Baldwin's Spectres of the Spectrum, "a scathing attack on America's postwar bomb culture that remains very much in force today, perhaps even more apocalyptically than in the 1950s"; manages to stomach Takashi Miike's Full Metal Yakuza; and then, always the fun part at the end, offers his roundup of brief reviews.

Peter Tonguette, staff critic at The Film Journal (more at his own site), talks with Curtis Harrington about Orson Welles's unfinished film, The Other Side of the Wind in which John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich play film directors: "So, in the curious way that Orson had been shooting in those days [ca. 1970], he'd shoot one side of a scene and he played the John Huston part off-screen while he was shooting me."

Andrew Grossman: "We need a precise definition of camp.... So let us lengthily contend with one of unintentional camp's shiniest epiphanies, H. G. Lewis' Blood Feast, and then weigh it against Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, its self-parodic, intentionally campy sequel belated by forty long, campily historicizing years."

Daniel McNeil: "My analysis is certainly informed by my desire to ask Black Americans to think about the commodification of bodies that aren't African or African American. I'd also like people of colour in Europe and places such as Canada and Australia, to look toward each other and their historical predecessors as much as their contemporary national governments, companies flogging 'urban chic' and African Americans."

The Women Men Yearn For, with Marlene Dietrich, desperately needs a distributor, pleads Robert Keser.

Robert Castle considers a slew of "Disturbing Movies" whose effect depends on our level of identification with the protagonist.

Cleo Cacoulidis on the Michael Snow retrospective at the 44th Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

Reviews and considerations of movies not yet on DVD:

• Daniel McNeil on AfroPunk.
• Alan Vanneman surveys the ruins of Ziegfeld Follies with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, a pretty major flop for 1946.
• Megan Ratner on Gabriele Salvatores's I'm Not Scared.
• Dorna Khazeni on Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellot's debut, Sexual Dependency.

Reviews and considerations of films on DVD:

• Alan Jacobson argues that Masked and Anonymous is way, way underrated; he also reviews Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle and Fred Wolf's 1971 animated feature, The Point.
• Alan Vanneman compares and contrasts three adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
• Matthew Kennedy on Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street; on Peyton Place, which now "hardly scandalizes, but its sociology is breathtaking"; and on Star!: "How could the star, director, producer, and studio behind The Sound of Music reunite for another musical and go wrong?... [T]hey did - spectacularly."
• Karina M Totah on how Danny Boyle and Co were DJs as well as filmmakers when it came to Trainspotting, "a sensory phenomenon and explosion."

Sort of like Bright Lights.

Posted by dwhudson at May 4, 2004 9:09 AM