Comedy

Shaolin Soccer

By Adam Lippe

In 1997, when ownership of Hong Kong was returned to China from the United Kingdom, more than a transfer of land took place. Many filmmakers and actors, who sensed the upcoming political change, had already left to pursue careers in the US where they anticipated they would have more freedom to make the kinds of […]

Leatherheads

By Adam Lippe

George Clooney’s insistence on playing the strapping buffoon lead is both refreshing and tiresome. Leatherheads is clearly inspired by his roles in the Coen brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty and O’ Brother Where Art Thou?, where he mixed double-take style kitchen sink slapstick, with movie-star charm and Cary Grant-like smugness. This is an odd idea, considering these […]

Dellamorte Dellamore

By Adam Lippe

I first saw Dellamorte Dellamore in the theater in May of 1996 under the US title of Cemetery Man. I remember being very amused for the most part, it was a film that had a weird rhythm to it, an anything goes quality that certainly I didn’t see in most mainstream fare. At a certain […]

Chopper

By Adam Lippe

The filmed version of legendary Australian criminal Mark “Chopper” Read’s semi-autobiographical book, is, along with Fight Club, one of the best unreliable narrator movies ever made. Read’s “novels” are extremely popular in his native land, as they concern his own criminal history, although, apparently there is no way to tell the difference between what is […]

Beyond Re-Animator

By Adam Lippe

Very disappointing. The charm of the first two films is in the humor and the amusingly low budget effects that “interact” with the cast. There is one creature in the opening sequence of Beyond Re-Animator, a rather uninspired one at that, and nothing else for about 75 more minutes after having to suffer through a […]

Amelie: Or how by writing a review on the three different versions I bought, I can write it off on my taxes.

By Adam Lippe

That Amelie is vacuous, blindly optimistic, without meaning, nor about anything in particular did not stop it from being the second best movie screened in the US in 2001 (the best was far and away Battle Royale, which still has no distribution). Stuffed with so many bizarre and wonderful ideas as to shame Being John […]

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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.