November is Mid-Life Crisis Month on Acidemic!

The sudden darkness and creeping cold makes November (my 'anniversary' month! 12 years! Keep coming back it works if you work it but if you stop working it, it's usually November) the perfect month to curl back up in your nest and prepare the stack of movies... about mid-life crises! I can tell you a thing or too about mid-life crises... in movies!! Mid-Life... crises! (Sing it like Hendrix "Midnight Lightnin'")

Okay, what is a midlife crises? Why, it's a manic high that overtakes you after you've let yourself slide into a low-grade depression for too long. Suddenly, something clicks inside your head, and you're FREE! You jump around and don't give a fuck. There's some classic examples - Kevin Spacey in AMERICAN BEAUTY (below). He's stuck in a rut with a nowhere job and a shrewish wife, but then a combination of good pot, a hot cheerleader, and sudden threat of job loss  come merging together to bust him loose. For Warren Beatty in BULWORTH (above left), it's political compromises and disillusionment that cause him to take a contract out on his own life, and the threat of death triggers the wake-up. Tom Wilkinson in MICHAEL CLAYTON (atop) suddenly shrugs off his evil lawyer ways and becomes a nudist champion of chemically deformed yokels. Dudes be trippin'! 

Coming up: THE SWIMMER!