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Death Watch

By Adam Lippe

Just because you’re prescient, doesn’t make you smart. It might be an accident. Take Richard Brooks’ Wrong is Right, his penultimate film (and his second looniest, behind his final film Fever Pitch), made 5 years after his last studio film, 1977’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Now Wrong is Right appears to have guessed right in […]

The 5 minute feature film, volume 2: This World, Then the Fireworks

By Adam Lippe

Here is volume 2 of the 5 Minute Feature Film series, this time on Michael Oblowitz’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s This World, Then the Fireworks. The 5 Minute Feature Film series is where I take a full length movie and cut it down to 5 minutes in length, re-score it, but tell basically the same […]

This World, Then the Fireworks

By Adam Lippe

When you watch a movie, is there always a giveaway about how intentional a level of incompetence is? What I mean is, at what point does the appearance of satire or parody drift off into the area of just plain old dreadful? Unless you were in the director’s brain while he was on set, there’s […]

The Reflecting Skin

By Adam Lippe

No matter how much a filmmaker might protest, laughable and incoherent content should never be excused as elliptical, complicated symbolism. Take a movie like Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch; on the surface, it’s a story about young girls who are forced to become prostitutes so they can avoid being lobotomized. The movie is told through the […]

The Tree of Life

By Adam Lippe

Is there a significant difference between getting your money’s worth and getting too much? In terms of moviegoing, there’s two ways of dealing with that thought; Since you’ve paid, you have to get as much as you can out of the experience. Or, since you’ve paid, it’s your time and your money, and torturing yourself […]

Christine

By Adam Lippe

Christine is like three different movies in one, and they never gel. One is a realistic high school movie about a nerd trying to get along in school and in his family. Then there are the scenes with the bully, William Ostrander/Buddy Repperton, which move into the camp arena, since his performance is so wonderfully […]

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Roadracers

By Adam Lippe

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]

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Featured Quote (written by me)

On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.