Top Ten of the Decade - 2000-2010

I had a good time this decade! Sin and sensation abounded and alternated with austere sanctimoniousness. My old boss escaped from prison in Brazil, I got divorced, had scandalous affairs, became enlightened, disillusioned, dizzy, co-starred in AA THE MUSICAL, found true love and the glory of chemical psychiatry, watched a crane fall onto my friend's bar, flaming death from the sky, a dog is born, job I worked, ocean I slept and then took a nap in...

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Acid Sight/Sound Symphonies: FANTASIA (1940 - rereleased in 1969), 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968)

T to B: Fantasia, 2001Walt Disney was determined to not just blow minds and thrill art lovers with his 1940 epic animated classical music film FANTASIA, but to bring what critic James Agee referred to as "middlebrow highbrow" culture to an America on the edge of war. It didn't... but yet, when re-released in 1969, it caught on with a new kind of American at the edge of war, the stoned draft dodger. As Wikipedia notes:Fantasia did not make a profit...

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Great Acid Movies #11: NAKED LUNCH (1991)

The year of 1991 was a scary one to be a recently graduated, unemployed alcoholic writer: there was a terrible recession, political turmoil, and worst of all was George Bush Sr's CAMP (California Against Marijuana Production) robbing Northern California of its income and making all hip Americans miserable. At least we had fascist action movies to soothe our angry hearts, and the beat canon staple Naked Lunch being adapted into a movie... wait, what?...

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MAD MEN Substitute: THE CARPETBAGGERS (1964, d. Edward Dmytryk)

While Mad Men is out of season, get your hot angry period piece businessman fix with Edward Dmytryk's adaptation of the Harold Robbins' bodice-ripper, THE CARPETBAGGERS (1964). Age has been kind to this loose adaptation of the Howard Hughes mythos. It keeps all the juicy bedroom camp alive in long, well-structured scenes that should have been studied by Scorsese and DiCaprio before they made the far less virile AVIATOR. While Scorsese's film made...

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Idiot's Delight (1939)

Who are the idiots? There must be some word. I want them all.I want all the idiots."--Riffs' leader if "idiots" was substituted for "warriors" (THE WARRIORS, 1979)And that's just what MGM does here. "Warrior's Delight" would be a much better title, because all the local soldiers at this Alpine border want to do is bomb some stuff, and stranded traveler Burgess Meredith gets all self-righteous about it: "Ten thousand tons of flaming death and none...

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The Brotherhood of Melted Wings: THE DAWN PATROL (1938)

Say a prayer for the dead already / and salute those next to die!" -- Lucy Westerna, reciting an old airman's drinking song (DRACULA, 1931)A bad LSD trip can leave you traumatized for weeks, cut off from a general populace who cannot see beyond their collective fog of assured continuity to understand why you're so pallid. The blinders that obscure the constant threat of death for them are, for you, broken; the rays of the black void shine into your...

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Escape from Heaven: BAD LIEUTENANT: Port of Call New Orleans

Werner Herzog's BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS represents not just a triumph of a great European director over the cop film formula, but a triumph of drugs and the human spirit over the forces who've been playing them against each other for the last 70 years. With PORT OF CALL, Herzog raises the victory sign and lets the freaks know they can lay down their crack pipes and go home. In the face of maniacal Nicolas Cage, no locked-in-concrete...

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Great Acid Cinema #1: DAZED & CONFUSED (1993)

Yeah so what if they don't do acid in it? It's still great acid cinema, as in a good trip, since a joyous awareness of living suffuses it and like any good trip it starts in the late morning and ends at dawn of the following day, leaving our heroes driving into the sunrise cranking "Slow Ride / Take it Easy" to go get rock concert tickets in a neighboring city. Oh yeah, when you're young, sexy, high as hell, and surrounded by the cool, confident...

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