Bright Lights. 45.

Because they're quarterlies on more or less the same schedule, right about the same time you're being deluged by a new issue of Senses of Cinema, along comes our favorite "popular-academic hybrid," Bright Lights Film Journal. This quarter, we can only be glad for the few weeks of summer left to catch up with it all, and what's more, editor Gary Morris promises this issue of BL is the "biggest, brightest issue yet, a veritable happy face of movie maunderings."

In the "articles antechamber," we find...

• Two on Welles from Robert Castle, one on Citizen Kane and David Thomson's placing of the film at the center of America in the 20th century, and the other on F for Fake. Still contemplating America, Castle also watches Full Metal Jacket.

• Two on Dogville: TL Putterman sees the film as a "kind of modern religious parable" while Justin Clark asserts that Lars von Trier's politics are just plain lazy.
• Richard Armstrong: "[W]riting recently about British social realism, I was struck by how many good and interesting British films have focused, to one extent or another, on the grieving process."
• A Zubatov and Yaniv Eyny turn in a longish piece on Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
• Scott Thill on Hidalgo: "What matters in the end is who manufactures the myth. Disney knows this is the real issue at stake."
• John R Martin considers Hellboy. Besides quirky heroes, Guillermo Del Toro "shares with [Howard] Hawks an unashamed fondness for the conventions of B-movies and the ability to invest them with elegance and wit."
• Alan Vanneman (who also reviews Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Mean Girls): "There's no getting around it: Yolanda and the Thief is one of Fred Astaire's worst pictures."

In the "features foyer"...

• A Jay Adler finds two types of (pro) war films, plus "one minor hybrid of the two," and then looks at the structure and conventions of the anti-war film via five examples.
• Alan Vanneman again, this time with the "first in an occasional series of articles on the life and work of Charlie Chaplin."
• Anecdotes enliven Mark A Viera's catalog of 50s-era movie monsters.
• The introduction to Dror Poleg's Tarantino piece is stuck somewhere in the middle.

Docs: Megan Ratner on The Corporation and Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train and Omar Odeh on Super Size Me.

Interviews: Tony Macklin with the very vivacious Stella Stevens and Gary Morris with PopcornQ founder Jenni Olson; the subject at hand her latest project, The Queer Movie Poster Book.

One of the liveliest features of each issue of BL is the roundup Gary Morris calls "Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror)."

And then, "the vale of video":

• Scott Thill on lots of Agatha Christie.
• The prolific Alan Vanneman goes against the grain on Freaks and Geeks.
• The just-as-prolific Gary Morris on Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, Kurosawa's Stray Dog, Robert Aldrich's The Grissom Gang and the Survival Research Laboratories' compilation, Ten Years of Robotic Mayhem.

Posted by dwhudson at August 1, 2004 2:03 PM