I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Sinatra standard “My Way”, while sitting in the balcony of an art house in Denver, chain-smoking Benson & Hedges ultra-light menthols, staring nearly hypnotized by the sight of sexy Gary Oldman transforming himself into the swaggering embodiment of punk rock, tearing through both cover song and screen. Sid and Nancy (along with Howard Deutch’s Pretty In Pink which also came out in 1986, and Martha Coolidge’s 1983 Valley Girl) was nothing less than a revelation to this teenager with Aqua-netted hair, Doc Martins and ripped fishnets, because it actually portrayed “my people,” spoke to me in my own musical language.

And my feeling of identification probably was not unlike that experienced by a certain segment of the movie-going public 31 years before Alex Cox paid tribute to the junkie romance of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, who witnessed another tale of fucked-up love, possible homicide, and enduring heroin chic. Heartthrob Frank Sinatra would not sing “My Way” in Otto Preminger’s groundbreaking 1955 The Man With The Golden Arm, but he would play the fictional Frankie Machine, another lean and hungry musician of dubious talent weighed down by both a needy blonde and a monkey on his back.

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Olly Blackburn’s sexy thriller Donkey Punch premiered at Sundance earlier this year, and we caught it as part of Fantastic Fest, where it was paired with a “Hipsters Overboard!” Donkey Punch Boat Party on Town Lake in Austin, which sadly did not involve the actually tossing overboard of any hipsters. Austin has tight jean, rakish-angle hat-wearing party rats coming out of the woodwork, and it probably would have been a benefit if some had slipped into the dark water, never to be seen again.

The film is what you would get if you mashed Dead Calm and Open Water 2 together and sprinkled it liberally with heavy doses of ecstasy and trance club music. I know that it probably doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in a review when you reference Open Water 2: Adrift in the second paragraph, but that film should have had a title of its own and not been a sequel, because it’s not a bad Saturday afternoon thriller itself. Plus, it also involves a gaggle of young hipsters who shouldn’t be out on a luxury yacht.

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Mike Jones points to the above teaser for Tripping with Caveh, which he describes as “a nifty series in the making from I‘m a Sex Addict director Caveh Zahedi.” As the teaser explains, Tripping with Caveh did start out conceptually as the first in a series, allegedly inspired by John Lurie’s Fishing With John, but it ultimately became a single 30-minute short film, in which the filmmaker ate chocolate-coverage magic mushrooms with Will Oldham. The film was released in 2004––two years before the similarly-vibed Oldham vehicle Old Joy hit the festival circuit––and is now available for rental via GreenCine.

In addition to the above trailer of sorts, there’s a clip from the film, of Caveh egging Oldham on to eat the mushrooms, on Zahedi’s web site.

Comic-Con begins this week, not with a bang, but a blaze. Sony’s eagerly awaited next installment in the train that is Judd Apatow continues barreling down the track with multiple word of mouth screenings of Pineapple Express this week, including one in San Diego during the massive weekend of the Con. It’s worth trying to get into one just for the Huey Lewis and the News song that rolls over the end credits.

I was lucky enough to see the flick last night, and it was excellent on all counts. It’s over the top, violent, and very funny. And while Danny McBride’s Red character threatens to outfunny both Seth Rogen and James Franco, it’s Franco who brings us back the loveable movie stoner that we’ve missed so much.

People have been smoking pot in movies for decades now, but where Knocked Up just gave us useless layabouts who light up all the time, there’s actually a long line of lovable movie stoners who have handed off the torch to Franco, and he continues their tradition in glorious fashion. Here’s to those who helped pave the road.

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…or, at least, The Most Essential 9:52 in All of Cinema Based on a Text By Bret Easton Ellis. Except for most of American Psycho. Well…maybe the Most Essential 9:52 in All of 80s Cinema Based on a Text By Bret Easton Eliis? Can we agree on that?

In short: Less Than Zero has been uploaded to YouTube in several chunks. Embedding has been disabled by the request of user 80sTeenMovies, but you can watch the first nine minutes and fifty two seconds––from the tacked-on graduation prologue, through Andrew “Clay” McCarthy’s EuroCine flashbacks to the dissolution of his relationships with Jamie “Blair” Gertz and Robert “Julian” Downey Jr, and up through the end of the triumphant “You can’t home home again…to a Ferrari showroom your parents mansion in Beverly Hills” montage set to “Hazy Shade of Winter” by The Bangles––here.

You don’t really need to watch the rest of the film, but if you’re looking for an excuse to kill the rest of the afternoon, you could. Or, you could just watch the above, vaguely-synergistic Bangles video, which includes that wonderful/horrible scene of Gertz and McCarthy making out in his convertible in the middle of Sunset Strip traffic.