Olson

Subscribe - Bright Wall/Dark Room Subscribe for $29 a year Subscribe now to receive immediate access to each new essay we publish, plus our entire 135+ issue archive. Bright Wall/Dark Room is 100% independent, runs no ads, and strongl...

Real talk (reel talk?):

BWDR recently lost a partnership that covered nearly half our operating budget, so things are suddenly very tough. If what we do has ever meant something to you, or you’ve ever thought about subscribing, now’s the time—it *truly* makes a difference.

A five panel comic about looking for a job

Here's a comic I drew five years ago about looking for a job

It's incredible how it was revealed that the anti-trans push over the past decade was concocted in no small part by a literal PEDOPHILE CONSPIRACY and the reaction of transphobic lawmakers, journalists, academics has been a shrug and a "well, we gotta
carry out the orders from pedophile island"

Imagine your children crying through the night out of fear at the sound of falling bombs. Sama'a, her husband Bahaa, and their two girls have endured things most of us can hardly imagine. Please give what you can to help ease their burden even a little.

chuffed.org/project/157569

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

Every fucking company is like "hey guys you know that thing we make? That we are famous for? Well we're not doing it anymore. Here's a chatbot that'll tell you to drink bleach instead. You're welcome"

MAD MEN season 5 is wall to wall heaters, Jesus Christ. Every episode is good. Incredible little windows into the psyches of all these assholes. The way they’re playing with structure and POV so much more than previous seasons…man!

Riot spent a decade developing a fighting game then laid off around 80 developers less than one month after release:

aftermath.site/2xko-riot-rele...

Ty that's a lovely color scheme on that inspector

Ti Lung’s Brother Ho in A Better Tomorrow in the center of the frame, sitting in profile facing right on the dock, smoking, against the backdrop of the sea at dusk

Chow Yun-fat’s Ah Jong in The Killer sitting down and smoking, seen in profile facing left, against a solid blue sea backdrop - slightly off-center on the right side of the frame

Yolinda Yam’s Sally and Tony Leung’s Ben in Bullet in the Head sitting next to each other on the dock in daylight with the sea as backdrop, seen from behind, dressed in all white

Tony Leung’s Alan in Hard Boiled, seen from behind wearing a flowing pink shirt, sailing in his boat Mad Max, the sea on the horizon at an angle, dissolving into the sky

water-gazers in John Woo movies

cannot possibly convey how actually crazy-making it can feel, after spending 20 years monitoring all these orgs blaming sex workers and the internet for enabling a vast sex trafficking network, to now see Jeffery Epstein’s inbox

New edition of "Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust" Storyboard Book by Yoshiaki Kawajiri (628 pages).
Pre-orders >> www.catsuka.com/shopping/ind...

Human artists, use only one piece to convince people to follow you

Fake "Wizard's Tales" album cover made from a photo of Christopher Lee as Saruman holding a Palentir surrounded by Peter Jackson and a cameraman

Sorry but this struck me as the kind of cheap vinyl LP I'd have found in my dad's collection that no one remembered actually buying

SONATINE

patreon.com/posts/sonatine-147273815

Two men in a large empty room one bound in a seat and one and a desk in Army of Shadows 1969

Frame of the Day

an image of the Palmer household from the final episode of TWIN PEAKS

All the cliche’s about what a home should feel like are true. David Lynch had a tranquil and lovely childhood by all accounts, and while his family bounced around the United States due to his father’s government job, he could rely on the concept of home through the stability of his family. But when he was young he became curious about what it must be like to live in a home that wasn’t stable, and his imagination was alight pondering what secrets would be revealed if he knew what was going on behind the closed doors of his neighbors. He was inquisitive and pulled to that central taboo in his artistic pursuits. While growing up, he loved the paintings of Edward Hopper, because his art contained a dimension beyond the painting through the usage of windows, or secondary action in the background of the painting, that suggested a secret quality, and he loved Francis Bacon because he laid bare everything surreal that a closed door could shield from day-to-day life. Lynch wanted to take us inside of private spaces. Through the intimacy of the home, he showed us people who were experiencing things that were horrible, but inside of that darkness that he gravitated towards, there was also the potential for beauty. He found that in the case of a troubled woman, he could paint a canvas where both of these elements were present at the same time. Perfect, blonde, beautiful All-American Prom Queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), was often disembodied, behind a pane of glass, inside a locket, in a painting and in a dream. In low-angle establishing shots, the foreboding, and haunted Palmer home fills every inch of the frame, from time to time, in so many episodes of Twin Peaks. Lynch rarely started from the outside in when showing us the home, only in the pilot, beside mother Sarah (Grace Zabriskie), frantically dialing everyone she knew to find her daughter, or running up the stairs, past the ceiling fan, and calling out, “Laura”, as an incantation to halt what she already knew

And here we are

The final essay in my TWIN PEAKS series. Episode 18.

Let's return home.

www.patreon.com/posts/147251...

Photo of the band members of Roxy Music from a Japanese magazine.

Look at this pic of Roxy Music:

A rabbit bursting in saying, “A message to all bitches! Please survive!”

Ask and you shall receive

Cover for Tsui Hark's THE BLADE at Criterion

The film to end all films FINALLY coming to Criterion next year. 😭

Manhunter (1986)

Manhunter (1986) 🎬🖤

Directed by Michael Mann

Jean Genet (with scenes from the R. W. Fassbinder film "Querelle", adapted from the Genet novel "Querelle of Brest") - BOTD

Been thinking a lot about Tetsuo Hara's words on AI lately, and this fits right alongside it

La espada del mal [大菩薩峠 (Kihachi Okamoto, 1966)]
DoP: Hiroshi Murai

#BOTD Tatsuya Nakadai

Movie you’ve watched more than six times, hard mode (no Star Wars or Trek, no Pixar, no LOTR, no Disney, no Marvel)...

Happy birthday to Jô Shishido and his immortal cheeks

RIP Tatsuya Nakadai

Yojimbo