"Dees Condorman – he is not agent of CIA. He is writer of comic book!" Last night's Film Fight Happy Hour, film screening, prize giveaway, etc., was a lovely time all around – and thank you to the equally lovely people at the Art Authority for making it happen. I will say this – I know now that the fastest way to clear a room is to show a giggling Eighties kids' flick about mistaken identity and KGB spies. Whatever – it ruled. And hats off to those five or so people who actually sat through the whole thing. We'll announce next month's Film Fight topic in the next couple of weeks, so keep checking back in.

By most accounts, the video-game conference nonpareil, E3, has been a wash this year. Resident Evil 5, Gears of War 2, etc., etc. all met expectations, although I would have enjoyed them just as much during my usual clicks around IGN.com.

So, why bother wasting your precious blog-reading time? Because in case you didn't feel the shift in the Dark Side of the Force toward the west, Rick Perry was in LA for E3 to remind everybody that Texas is handing out money to gaming firms who are willing to brave the unrelenting heat. Heat that is clearly getting to Perry's head as he uttered groaners like, "I congratulate this growing industry on its success, and invite further expansion in Texas where the barbecue is hot and the video gaming is even hotter." Ugh!

Last week was all brawl, but this week, in the spirit of reconciliation (and, well, spirits at Happy Hour pricing), Josh "Lickin' His Wounds" Rosenblatt and I will be hosting a get-together at the United States Art Authority. I suppose we might talk about comic book movies some more, but honestly, neither one of us wants to go anywhere the subject ever again (or at least until the lines for Batman: The Dark Knight thin out some). So join us tomorrow night (Thursday, July 17) at 7pm at the Art Authority (2908 Fruth St.) for good drinks and good company, some prize giveaways, and (fingers crossed) a very special cinematic treat.**

Well, if the numbers hold, it looks like I'll be doing a victory lap at the Art Authority next Thursday, but who knows – maybe your troops will rally over the weekend. The polls will be open until Sunday at midnight, but as for you and me and this crazy experiment we call Film Fight goes – I think we're done. At least until we start all over again next month. What's your prize, you ask? (I'm sorry, for losing?) This press release arrived in my in-box a few days ago: "A DEFINITIVE ANTHOLOGY FROM THE MASTER OF SUSPENSE: THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK PREMIERE COLLECTION." You get to sit and watch all 8 discs with me. Punishment in your mind, maybe, but just you wait – I'll make a believer of you yet. It's been a pleasure.

From the archives: June 20, 2008 From: Kim Jones To: Josh Rosenblatt Re: First Film-Fight Topic Resolved: Kimberley Jones is a rank sentimentalist Pro: Josh Con: Kim So what's my prize? I'm hoping for a bowlful of chocolate-covered Brussels sprouts. Or the 32-DVD set of the Complete Works of Alfred Hitchcock. Though I'd settle for a signed copy of Limahl's Greatest Hits. It's been a pleasure fightin' you. How's this for next month's topic: Resolved: Yasujiro Ozu's use of mise en scene in the early 1950s was as much an aesthetic response to innovations in color cinematography in the work of Sergei Eisenstein as it was a reaction to the encroaching tides of Western colonialism in post-war Japan. I'd like to see you argue against that one.

I saw Polly Platt speak at UT a few years ago, and I can't recommend the experience enough. She's smart, blunt, and has a hell of a lot of war stories to share from her decades spent in the business as a producer, production designer, and screenwriter – most famously as former husband Peter Bogdanovich's chief collaborator on American classics like The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. She was also instrumental in rocketing Wes Anderson and the Wilson boys to acclaim with their debut feature Bottle Rocket. As part of its ongoing "Conversations in Film" series, the Austin Film Festival will host a talk between Platt and UT film historian Tom Schatz this Sunday (July 13) at 3pm at the Driskill Hotel, followed by a screening of The Last Picture Show at the Paramount Theatre. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit austinfilmfestival.com.

"Identity is fleeting and ever-changing, and so should our influences and loves be. Everything else is rank sentimentality." Identity may be fleeting and ever-changing, but why do we have to scrap our influences and loves every time we turn a new corner? Frankly, I think there's something a little bit distrustful about someone who so easily shucks off his earlier selves. I'm not the same person I was at age 10 or age 20, or every year in between, but I'll be damned if I'll be disloyal to those first loves, like Little Women and Les Misérables and The Muppets Take Manhattan and Clue the movie and Clue the board game and E.M. Forster and sweet, glum Eeyore and Jane Austen and Archers of Loaf and Charles Mingus and Running on Empty and about a gazillion other things that I'm not gonna let go, I'm not gonna stop talking about, and I'm not gonna stop letting, at least in small part, inform who I am today. So there it is: Kim Jones = Rank Sentimentalist

OK, so I’ve been doing a little research in honor of the last full day of our inaugural Film Fight, and I just stumbled upon an interesting bit of trivia. We all know about the Lincoln-Douglas debates that took place all over Illinois in 1858. They’re famous for the eloquence and logical elegance displayed by both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, and for the fact that they helped raise Lincoln’s national profile, thereby granting him the prominence he needed to run for president two years later. That we all knew. But I bet you didn’t know this: Stephen Douglas won the Senate race that year by forcing Lincoln – future defender of liberty, crusader against tyranny, genius of democracy, savior of the union – at their fifth and final debate in Quincy, Ill., to watch … in its entirety … Limahl’s video for his song “Never Ending Story.” Shocking, right? And cruel. One of the ablest minds of his generation, Lincoln was reduced to a quaking bowl of intellectual jelly on that ramshackle stage in Quincy. And as a consequence, he didn’t go the Senate that year, returning instead to his home in Springfield to convalesce for two years, during which time the union began to splinter, animosities grew, opinions hardened, and the seeds of rebellion and civil war were sown. If it weren’t for Lincoln’s brilliant use of A-Ha’s “Take On Me” during the presidential campaign of 1860, surely the United States would have collapsed and liberty as we know it would have been lost … meaning I wouldn’t enjoy the rights I do now to illegally download Russ Meyer movies and indulge my habit for prescription pain-killers. That’s how close, Kim, Limahl and his teased mullet came to destroying everything you and I hold dear. And yet you insisted on embedding that video. I’m disappointed.

Tonight I picked up David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, which has been sitting for a while now in my ever-daunting pile of to-read books. Flipping through the prologue, I came across what to me was an obvious but still wowzer statistic – that in the 1940s, at the height of their popularity, “comics were selling between eighty million and a hundred million copies every week, with a typical issue passed along or traded to six to ten readers, thereby reaching more people than movies, television, radio, or magazines for adults.” When we started this thing, point one we made was that we came to this as moviegoers, not comic book readers (maybe why we haven’t asked our fellow critic Marc Savlov to chime in – let’s be honest, we knew he’d wipe the floor with us). But in all our jousting, I’d hate for us to come off as seeming flip about comic books, because there’s an astonishingly rich history there. At the risk of spouting off about something I know very little, comic books, at least in their infancy, seemed to be an especially American enterprise, an artform up there with jazz that our nation could thump its chest proudly about: Yeah, we got there first.