Remote in Reach: THE WALL (1982)

Believe it or not, there was a time when I despised all stoners. It was 1980-83 in central Jersey; nothing personal to Eisenhower Middle School -- a few evil schoolmasters aside -- and nothing personal to the stoner kids, who were all nice enough in their brusque monosyllabic working class way. Just too loud, too dumb to know how dumb they sounded; too comfortable in their dirty denim and unkempt hair for my 13 year old's new-kid-on-the-block super...

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Blue Blu Blue Blu Summer Water Heaven Ray

Summer - if you can't beat there, watch blu-ray movies that take place on vacation - i.e. with lots of good ocean footage, underwater caverns, surfing, bikinis. Whassup! Blu-ray can make these images so 3-D vivid that if you put some coconut oil under your nose you're there.  As der ausgezechneiete Hasselhof's Baywatch proved, people feel relaxed looking at the beach on TV. Give them tanned bodies and lolling surfs, forget about the rest. Why...

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Great Acid Cinema: The first 11 minutes of HOLY SMOKE (1999, Jane Campion)

Ah, what to do with Jane Campion? For every step forward, she takes two steps into her navel. Emboldened by her success with THE PIANO (1993), Campion forgot herself and went too deep therein, alienating us new fans with PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996) a film so bogged down in weird costume design and John Malkovich's overacting that it forgot it was supposed to be about a feminist, not a dumb woman who falls for the first artsy dude she meets. Then there...

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Acidemic listed in Film Society of Lincoln Center's Top Film Criticism Sites

Thanks to the Film Doctor For linking to this:IT’S ALIVE!: The Top Film Criticism Sites: An Annotated Blog RollIt's a pretty highbrow list, with the likes of David Bordwell, Richard Brody, and Paul Schrader and all the Ozu that implies, but also some ultra-cool folks I know and admire, like the Self-Styled Siren, Kimberly Lindbergs (Cinebeats) and Greg Ferrara (Unexplained Cinema). Some of these sites I've never heard of and I'm excited. And...

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Grasshoppers are from Mars

As you may have read on Acidemic's sister blog, Divinorum Psychonautics, I'm fascinated by ancient astronaut theory, and light bulbs are going off in my DNA over Hammer's 1967 mind-bender, FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH, because it fits the paranormal theories of our times; it could be true!When a giant metallic capsule is found buried in the earth during an East London tube dig, a moody Brit named Dr. Quatermass (Andrew Keir) tangles with by-the-book...

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Great Acid Cinema: WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

If there's one national myth that still crosses over to all generations, one touchstone tale that every cathode ray tribal fire still hears tell annually, it would be THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), a film so psychedelic and genuinely scary it still throws tripping college kids into nightmare K-holes to this day, only to suck them safely back out like bizarro tornadoes with just a click of the heels and the mantra "I will come down eventually, and maybe...

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A Star-Spangled Salute to America's most Acidemic Cinematic Women

My whole life changed--from nerdy punk to liberated hippy--sophomore year, 1986, when I met Sabrina and Kelly (not their real names), two gorgeous blond, LSD-quaffng, dope smoking, rock star-chasing maniacs who were (me coming from central NJ) the most beautiful and non-stuck-up-about-it girls I'd ever seen. I fell madly in love with both of them, platonically, which was good since they ruined soccer players right and left and a steady stream of...

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