Nathan Rabin's Bad Ideas

When I worked at a Blockbuster Video on the north side of Chicago as a high school student, we had a new-release wall and sections devoted to drama, comedy, action, thrillers, adventure, documentaries, and foreign films. But we also had two sub-sections that fascinated me because they were so sleazy and sensationalistic in a way that deviated from the corporate conformity that defined the McDonald’s of the home video world. They were Wild Action and Super Action.

When I worked at a Blockbuster Video on the north side of Chicago as a high school student, we had a new-release wall and sections devoted to drama, comedy, action, thrillers, adventure, documentaries, and foreign films. But we also had two sub-sections that fascinated me because they were so sleazy and sensationalistic in a way that deviated from the c…

Stuart Gordon’s underrated 2001 body horror sleeper Dagon found the fright master once again finding inspiration in the dread-filled horror of H.P. Lovecraft. The film opens with protagonist Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden) on a boat, having a nightmare about a mermaid with razor-sharp teeth. A storm of great fury interrupts the pleasant holiday Paul has been en…

It’s poetically apt that I introduced the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl in an article about Cameron Crowe’s 2006 flop Elizabethtown because the Almost Famous director isn’t just a filmmaker who made a movie with one of the purest MPDGs in film history: he’s something closer to a Manic Pixie Dream auteur. Elizabethtown was anything but a one-off for Crowe. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an archetype that he’s returned to throughout his career.

Movie Reviews, Stephen King, Autism in Entertainment, Joy of Positvity and Weird-Ass Side Quests

One of the reasons I coined the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl, beyond, of course, my eagerness to write a novel lampooning it two decades and a fuck-ton of failure later, was to shame filmmakers out of creating quirky, ferociously non-conformist chatterbox female characters devoid of agency who exist to help sad men rediscover their lost lust for life.

As a child whose sense of humor was shaped in no small part by the meta-textual tomfoolery of Looney Tunes, I didn't initially appreciate Wile E. Coyote the way I should have. I was more of a Bugs Bunny guy. Bugs was a leading man and a leading lady. He was an American icon and a drag icon. He was a star. He was a smartass. He could do anything. He contained multitudes. I was equally enamored of Daffy Duck. He earned his moniker by being nuttier than a squirrel’s diet and crazier than a shithouse rat.

In my piece on the little-loved, half-remembered 2009 crime drama Dolan’s Cadillac, I write about how star Wes Bentley saw starring in the Stephen King adaptation as a personal and professional nadir. He was so addicted to cocaine and heroin that he saw the movie as his final feature film before giving up the profession to become a professional DJ and/or drug dealer.

Robots are autistic. They aren’t all autistic, mind you, but many of them are, particularly at the very advanced end of the spectrum. Humanoid robots are designed to look and act like human beings. The people they end up resembling and behaving like are frequently neurodivergent. The same is true of aliens. Not every alien is autistic, of course. The ones in Mars Attacks! probably are not, but in pop culture, many are heavily coded as neurodivergent, most notably Mr. Spock from Star Trek.

David Cronenberg didn’t just flirt with the mainstream during the Reagan decade: he entered it with uncharacteristically commercial projects like 1981’s Scanners, 1983’s The Dead Zone and the surprise smash 1986 remake The Fly. The 1988 psychological horror film Dead Ringers isn’t as accessible as the filmmaker’s other films from the decade, except for 1…