Acidemic Journal of Film & Media #6 to Go Live this Weds, 9/1/10

It's been a long time coming together, but with a competent new editorial staff helmed by the amazing Meghan Wright (see her co-authored site, Letter to the Preditor here), a brace of Gallic insight and a main topic lurid and true, the sixth issue of the Acidemic Journal of Film and Media will soon be insinuating itself amongst the in-crowd crowded party on the seventh floor of pop-artsy cinematic bizarro theoretical hell.With sexy French theory/cinema...

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You Don't Need a Man, You Need a Champion

... like a hole in the head, to let the air in. That way you don't have to go farther than your own backyard to find God. Forget it, Julia Roberts, it's ELIZABETHTOWN (2005), don't even get me started.The image all across the bus stops of the city this month is Julia, perky as ever, her smoothed face resolute, determined to eat by herself or with a rich, gorgeous male with sparkling eyes, or not at all. She's a one-woman Sex in the City minus sex,...

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The Return of the Great 70s Dad: Nicolas Cage in KICK-ASS

I thought the age of great 70s dads was done, but that was before I saw KICK-ASS (2010), in which a truly cool father (Cage) manages to slide past the doting widower daddy ("mommy's in heaven!") morons of Hollywood to finally do what Batman should have been doing all along: using firearms, gutting mobsters with exotic weaponry, and teaching his 11 year-old daughter to be a pint-sized killing machine.This is the kind of film where you see something...

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THE FOURTH KIND: Take us to your Benzos!

"I'm having a hard time understanding what happened here!" --The Sheriff (Will Patton)One of the common drawbacks of reaching adulthood is the loss of magic; the child's wide aperture for mysteries shrinks as the world is 'figured out.' Elements of life that used to baffle and intrigue are made plain, robbed of their dark aura by cold explanations in the light of middle school health class. The mysteries and horrors that can fill a child with...

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Girls with Dragon Tattoos Gone Wild and more in the new Bright Lights Film Journal #69

The New Bright Lights Film Journal #69 is now online!It's got my intensely personal-theoretical-reactionary analysis of GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009) and how the fall-out of the DIRTY HARRY revenge cycle led to Satanic panic and suburban child molestation ring hysteria in the 1980s as seen in the documentary, WITCH HUNT: The New Lurid: Cinema’s Rape Disavowal FantasyBy Erich Kuersten“They rapin’ everybody out here.” — Antoine DodsonPLUS, as...

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Pilgri-dendum: The Man Who Forgot to Shoot Liberty Valance

Time: The weekend's most precipitous swan dive was executed by Scott Pilgrim. Based on the first of Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular comix, directed by cult-classic auteur Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) and starring Michael Cera, North America's favorite perennial preadolescent, Scott was expected to open in the honorable $15 million range. Those who saw the movie gave it a lustrous A-minus CinemaScore rating. Problem is, few people saw it:...

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The Guns of Ceraberg: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Expendables

 It is perhaps no accident that this weekend finds two potential big box office hits going head to head for the same tweaky gambeboy audience, one is full of old muscle head icons of the 1980s-90s, one has an anemic white kid who looks like he can barely hold a bass, let alone play one in a band but who beats an array of tough ex-lovers of a would-be girlfriend via video game-ish duels.That's just one problem for me with SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE...

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Johnny Two Times, because he said everything ad nauseum

That dumb-looking movie released this week, MIDDLE MEN (2010, above) is clearly--just from the preview which is all I ever want to see--modeled on the now-classic GOODFELLAS (1990), i.e. Rags to riches to rags with a male voiceover spoken in disaffected regular guy English ala "We were just a buncha regular guys, hustlin' to make a buck like everybody else." and "I mean we had 24/7 cocktail jet plane lunches, villas, private pools -- it was all there...

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Vampire Lesbians of '76-'67

Dress your wife like you do the women in the streetsbelieve me, you'll have a vampire too.                                --Vamps of '28 (Whistler's Jug Band)The phrase vampire from the song lyric above refers to the aggressive gold-diggers of the late 20s, far more common in the age of prohibition...

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