Bright Lights New Issue

The latest issue of Bright Lights Film Journal is up on the Internet. It has a long article on one of the unfinished films of Orson Welles, The Other Side Of The Wind. As is often the case with interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Bogdanovich talks mostly about Peter Bogdanovich, but if you are remotely interested in Welles, and my DVD collection and book shelves would suggest that I am, then you should print it off and take a long leisurely read of it wherever you are most comfortable.

There's also a strange article on film titles that's pretty good once you get past the initial paragraphs, and a yet another article on Casablanca because there's no such thing as too much Casablanca:

Although there are more obvious examples of World War II propaganda films than Casablanca, no other film so intricately reflects the historical moment it was produced — the early days of World War II — and the psychological needs of yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s audiences. Not only does it capture the United States’ perception of itself in the 1940s — cynical yet altruistic, independent yet worldly, idealistic yet naïve — but it also provides twenty-first century Americans with an oasis of hope in a desert of arbitrary cruelty and senseless violence. Like Rick, we too can believe that despite our unyielding surface, we are moral within — capable of personal sacrifice in the name of freedom and democracy. For in Casablanca, there will always be a place where good triumphs over evil, and despite the "fight for love and glory," romance survives in a world gone mad.

There's plenty of other stuff too, so check it out. There's even a look at Casino Royale in time, I guess for the DVD release. It falls in to the quick overview category of Bond reviewing that I've noticed that Bond films seem to attract. Not content with merely reviewing the film, which here is relegated to a handful of sentences (eg. 'Daniel Craig makes a serviceable Bond, supposedly "more human."'), the reviewer instead places the various Bond incarnations in historical context and looks at the reviewers own reactions to those different incarnations. Not so much a history of Bond films as history related through Bond films as if, reasurringly, Bond is always there to help us out of world crisis after world crisis in spirit if not in body, or, at the very least, help us ignore theses crises with fantasies of shiny gadgets and superhuman spies. I guess that there's just something about Bond that makes us want to justify why we like him so much.