A new trio of online store additions is ready for its close-up. Among today’s titles are Jack Hill’s “Switchblade Sisters,” Richard Linklater’s “Me and Orson Welles,” and Kathryn Bigelow’s “Blue Steel.”
Director Kathryn Bigelow actually started out as a painter, spending more than a decade in the New York art scene before entering Columbia University’s graduate film program after shooting film backgrounds for a performance art piece. After co-directing “The Loveless” (Willem Dafoe’s first starring role), Bigelow helmed “Near Dark,” a modern western of sorts about a group of vampires who roam the great wide open in a van, searching for victims. Though the film wasn’t a box office smash, it received strong reviews and has since become a highly-regarded cult classic.
For her next picture, Bigelow re-teamed with “Near Dark” writer Eric Red on the script of “Blue Steel.” The film was produced by Edward Pressman, who’d also produced early works by now-revered directors such as Brian De Palma (“Sisters”), Terrence Malick (“Badlands”), and Sam Raimi (“Crimewave”). It stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan Turner, a newly-graduated New York police officer. Curtis made a name for herself during the 70s as the queen of slasher films, but in the 80s she branched out in a number directions, from dramas like “Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story” to comedies like “A Fish Called Wanda” and action films like “Blue Steel,” where her character determinedly fights to overcome a barrage of a personal and professional obstacles while attempting to take down a serial killer who’s engraved her name into the bullets he fires at his victims.