Totaled Recall: THE HANGOVER (2009) and WHO IS HARRY NILLSSON? (2010)

Full of triumph, tribulation, amusing comic turns, and a manageable portion of tiresome dick humor, THE HANGOVER is a fine way to end mid-life crisis month, i.e. November. It's all about memory and manliness and lack thereof, and if it took me awhile to see it, well, I confess I used to have problems with Bradley Cooper - the beady eyes, the cocky glassiness, the way he didn't deserve Jennifer Garner in ALIAS - but all is forgiven. Now I love the...

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High Strangeness: LANA TURNER'S HOLY MOUNTAIN and Rose Hobart takes a trip

2012 note - Frost apparently remixed both films together to form Lana Turner overdive, which I herewith present, leaving the text as is.-----A follow-up to Helsinki Productions' awesome LANA TURNER'S INLAND EMPIRE. This one was just posted a few days ago, and finds Lana continuing to lose her mind as she seems to connect with some cat spirit that may or may not be an old Egyptian star goddess... Just roll with it! Spot the connections to Dario! These Lana epics remind me of one of my own psychedelic remixes, DRUNKARDS OF BORNEO. Ever see it? I'm...

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Lyon in Winters

Where I come from, home for the holidays means dying lawns, cloudy suburban skies, foil-covered crock pots brought unwillingly from the car to the front door; chattering hellos from perfumed relatives; ceilings slick with condensation from ever-baking turkeys and boiling rutabagas; football and the voice of Sam Elliott extolling guts, glory, Ram, from the living room; a barrage of women nattering from the kitchen. It's a time to go to school reunions...

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Gone Draper Don: THE SWIMMER (1968)

"He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools."-- The Swimmer, John Cheever Of all the great white male midlife crisis epics, outside of TV's MAD MEN, who can beat the Burt Lancaster-starred adaptation of John Cheever's short story, THE SWIMMER? The recent Time Magazine cover lauding Jonathan Franzen as the literary canon's next great white hope sent a shock through the up and coming, young, brilliant and angry writing...

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X is for Xanax, that's good enough for X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963)

 Nat: Mister Birnam, this is the mornin'...Don: That's when you need it most, in the morning. Haven't you learned that yet? At night this stuff's just a drink... but in the morning it's medicine! --LOST WEEKEND (1945) Science has proven our sensory organs and neurons capable of far more than the limited strata and spectra of processed information we know as collective reality. Like radios tuned to one station our whole lives, we may want...

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Mid-Life Crisis Superstar: Humbert, Lo, and the Bait-Switch Cycle

I'll be a guest on Film Geeks tribute to Kubrick podcast this Dec. 5: here's an excerpt from my 2009 Bright Lights Film Journal article:"All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives"  Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA:  It's hard to believe now in our jaded world but in the late 1960s/1970s, even first-class artist filmmakers such as Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) and Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange) and Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) earned X ratings,...

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Dino De Laurentiis: Warrior, Poet, Profit. (1919-2010)

There was something so refreshing about the man, a kind of larger-than-life dreamer quality. As my friend Sean Kelly noted, a De Laurentiis movie was such an event and yet so tragic, as they always start out super grand and big budget, and all the $$ is on screen, and then, about an hour or 40 minutes in, the budget is all used up, and things get cheap... by the big climax you can practically see the repo men in the background, hauling away the icebergs...

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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,...

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Weird Acid Films #45: THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

Shot at a castle in Hungary over two months on a mix of money provided by Pepsi (to slyly fund a bottling plant they were setting up there) and author William Peter Blatty's EXORCIST profits, THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980) is a dark mix of anti-war/ masculinity deconstruction craziness (based on Blatty's 1968 novel, Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane) that could only have come out in the late 1960s-early 1970s, but didn't. Released at the dawn of the...

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