I have to admit, the movie in production that I may be most excited about these days may be one I know the least about: Amy Heckerling’s Vamps.  It’s not just the reunion of Clueless‘s director and lead, although that should be enough to get every woman in about a 30-year age range pretty damn excited.  It’s not just the inclusion of the adorable Krysten Ritter.  Honestly, I think it’s just that I’m excited to have some female vampire leads for a change, women who are vampires when the movie, or series of novels, or TV show they’re in begins.

Perhaps that sounds semantic.  But in the three biggest vampire pop culture franchises right now, the vampire leads are all male.  Whether it’s Edward Cullen in Twilight, Bill and Eric in True Blood, or the good-boy-bad-boy vamp brothers in The Vampire Diaries, the main vampire characters are always men.  There are female vampires in the picture, but they’re always supporting characters, even if they’re semi-awesome, like Alice Cullen, perhaps the only Twilight character I liked, or Pam in True Blood.  And they’re generally fairly focused inward on the vampire community.  The male lead vamps are always attracted to girls who are at minimum metaphorical virgins (and literal virgins in Twilight and True Blood).  Getting bit is pretty much the same thing as getting fucked for the first time, if you’ll pardon my language: you bleed, and you’re changed.

I think Herckerling’s formula, which makes the main characters female vampires, and makes them romantic-comedy age, rather than coming-of-age, will upset that sexual dynamic, which besides being problematic, is just boring.  I don’t know precisely what it’ll look like: will we see Ritter and Alicia Silverstone, her co-star, as predators?  As thoughtful vampires like Angel and Spike?  Whatever they are, they’ll be different.  And if Heckerling could do for the vampire craze (and hey, maybe even for romantic comedies) what she did for teen movies, I will be eternally grateful.

Jamelle is a genius.

So, I really dislike the term “freak” for women are sexually adventurous and liberated.  It sets up a strange, ugly double standard, where being a sexually expressive is both desirable and deviant: women are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.  One of the reasons I liked Cee-Lo’s “Closet Freak,” I suppose, was that he was applying a feminized term to himself, making freakiness equal-opportunity.  Plus, sparkly wings!

But I don’t think that the reason it’s titled “Freak” is the only reason I’m not really grooving on Estelle’s new single with Kardinal Offishal (it’s in a list on the page, just scroll down a bit).  I’m sorry, but “Every single girl should embrace their inner freaky freak / Don’t be scared, don’t be shy, yes you’ve got to let it breath” is neither the level of insight nor the quality of wordplay I expect from the woman who gave us “1980,” and “Just a Touch.”  Much less “Don’t Talk,” which lets her take on a traditional male role, telling a hot guy she doesn’t want him for his conversation:

Next Atlantic.com column, inspired by a vicious Buzz and Twitter fight over the relative merits of Beyonce and Solange Knowles with my PostBourgie fam, is up.  And thanks to the research for it, I’ve been spinning Solange’s cover of Coldplay’s Viva La Vida with her band for two straight days.  It’s straight-up gorgeous, and there’s this fab rock-Supremes vibe going with her and her backup singers, I think:

I started to pull material for block quotes from Thomas Doherty’s polemic on the decline of film criticism in The Chronicle for Higher Education, then realized it was going to be most of the article, so I’ll just tell you to go read it.  It’s quite good, and quite provocative.  That said, I think it makes a very, very common mistake in criticism of web-based writing: saying that it’s dominated by amateurs with little technical knowledge and little interest in prose style; as yet unmonetizable and unrecognized by the academy is not actually a convincing case against a form that’s still new.  Sure, I agree with this:

Coherent language within feasible space—words to write by, even when the prose is no longer bound by linear rhetoric and finite column inches. The demise of that tradition of film criticism would really suck.

But it’s not like film criticism reached its heights immediately after the development of the medium.  It took a long time to get to Pauline Kael, James Agee and Roger Ebert.  It’s far too early to determine that the internet has killed that tradition permanently, and I’d argue that experiments like the New Yorker’s Front Row blog and The Atlantic‘s Culture Channel, and my Lord, Roger Ebert’s amazing online presence are experiments that are figuring out how to harness the energy and immediacy of the web into products that are well-written, thoughtful, and personal in the ways that the best criticism can be.  The internet’s upset all journalism and writing professions.  Film criticism is not necessarily more or less a victim than any other disrupted disciplines.  And it’s no further from, or closer to, solutions.