August in Los Angeles is hotter than ... well, it's hot there, and who wants to be hanging outdoors getting all sweaty and sticky? Not me, and probably not you, either, my fellow cinema fans. But no worries, American Cinematheque has you covered: August 2-26, they'll be running the 7th Annual Festival of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction! That's right, kids -- the whole steamy month of August you can be inside a nice, cool movie theater, chilling out with all the werewolves, vampires and freaky mad scientists your geeky little hearts desire. Here's all the scoop:

From August 2-26 at The Egyptian, and August 9-12 at The Aero, you'll be able to check out all kinds of scary stuff, including rarely seen films not even available on DVD. The fest will feature tributes to the work of late author Kurt Vonnegut and director Curtis Harrington (who both passed away earlier this year), with Memorial Tribute screenings. Vonnegut fans will get a real treat -- a double feature of adaptations of his works Slaughterhouse-Five, directed by George Roy Hill, and Happy Birthday, Wanda Jane, directed by Mark Robson. Harrington's 1967 film Games, which stars James Caan, will screen as well.

I keep wondering if I will like the movie version of Toby Young's memoir How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. I hated the book, mostly because I couldn't stand Young's pathetic voice, but so far the casting of the adaptation has me intrigued. With the exception of Kirsten Dunst, the players are of a high enough caliber to make all the unlikeable characters at least enjoyable to watch -- especially now that the great Jeff Bridges has signed on to play the character based on Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (named Clayton Harding in the script). Also added to the cast is Gillian Anderson, who will play a top PR person. Bridges and Anderson join Dunst, Danny Huston and Simon Pegg, who will star as Young.

The casting of Bridges as Carter should make How to Lose Friends even more comparable to The Devil Wears Prada, but I hope the actor won't make his character as much of a caricature as Meryl Streep made hers -- though I don't mean to put Streep's Oscar-nominated performance down. I would just rather Bridges play a more complex, believable person, who could be completely understood as the villain in Young's miserable world, while also appearing to audiences as a smart, justifiably difficult boss. After all, the book suggests that -- unlike Andy's resentment of Miranda in Prada -- Young actually has a lot of admiration for Carter. And more than Carter, the other Condé Nasties or anyone else, Young is his own villain.

In addition to the casting, I am anxious to see what the tone of How to Lose Friends will be. Directed by Robert B. Weide, who is an enormous fan and documenter of the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Lenny Bruce and the Marx Brothers, as well as a former director for Curb Your Enthusiasm, the movie will hopefully be influenced by the humor of at least one of those subjects. I also hope that the movie is good enough to get Weide some more clout in Hollywood. For ten years I've been dying for him to get to work on a project he once mentioned interest in: an adaptation of Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People begins shooting next month.

He wasn't directly associated with the movies, but Kurt Vonnegut was a literary icon whose work and persona often carried over into the cinema, even when he wasn't actually involved. The author, who wrote some of America's funniest and most poignant pieces of fiction and non-fiction, died Wednesday night in New York City, and I have to say that I'm more broken up about it than I have ever been with any celebrity's passing. His wife, photographer Jill Krementz, said that he had fallen several weeks ago and suffered irreversible brain injuries.

A few of his books were made into movies, despite the fact that his prose is more about telling than it is about showing, thereby making his works unlikely candidates for the visual medium. Surprisingly, some, like Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night, are terrific. Unfortunately, others, like Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick (Of Another Kind) are completely wretched. There have been others, mostly based on short stories, mostly made-for-television and mostly unavailable. And there have long been talks of adaptations of the novels Cat's Cradle, which Leonardo DiCaprio is trying to make, and Sirens of Titan, which Mother Night screenwriter Robert B. Weide has been interested in for many years.

One of the most random links Vonnegut had to the movies, though, came with the Rodney Dangerfield guilty pleasure Back to School. The writer made one of the most memorable cameos ever, appearing as himself in a sequence in which Dangerfield's character gets an "F" on a paper about Vonnegut. The joke: Vonnegut himself was paid to write the paper. Also, interestingly enough, Back to School co-star Keith Gordon went on to direct Mother Night. Another strange connection came in the late 1990s, when a lot of so-so teen movies were explicitly referencing Vonnegut or his books. I can only remember this definitely being done in Varsity Blues, Disturbing Behavior and Can't Hardly Wait, but I could swear there were more.

You might question my picking of Back to School as a guilty pleasure. The Rodney Dangerfield movie, about a rude, millionaire businessman who enrolls in the college his son attends, was pretty well received by critics and it did really well at the box office (almost taking in $100 million in 1986). But I never enjoyed it for being a good movie. Dangerfield, while compared to Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields by Roger Ebert, always seemed to me an acquired taste. A taste I never acquired enough to enjoy any of his other pictures. When it came out, I was just a kid and I loved it in the same way I loved other dumb comedies of the '80s. When it was funny, it made me laugh and when it was slow -- take any scene with Sally Kellerman, for instance -- it made me bored. Later in life, I figured my enjoyment was based on nostalgia, though I had new appreciations in that I was then a fan of Oingo Boingo (and front man Danny Elfman) and Kurt Vonnegut, who appear in cameos as themselves.

Today, I appreciate it on another personal, rather than critical, level. As I begin college today after a ten-year hiatus, I feel somewhat related to Dangerfield's character of Thornton Melon. Sure, he was going for the first time and I'm returning after having dropped out, and he was much, much older than I am now, but nonetheless, I am an older-than-usual college student. Unfortunately I'm not rich enough to have a hot tub in my dorm (actually I won't be living in a dorm) or hire Vonnegut to write my papers on his own work. I also don't plan on wooing any professors, going out for the diving team, or doing much of what Melon does in the movie -- I would like to see if Burt Young wants the job of my bodyguard, though.