Comedy

Gigli

By Adam Lippe

Wouldn’t it be easy to call it the worst movie ever made? The bandwagon already has a seat saved just for me, and it comes with a complimentary bong hit of conformity and acceptance. Does Gigli have anything to recommend in it? Not really. It’s an utter miscalculation, and as the movie goes on, it […]

Garden State

By Adam Lippe

Garden State manages a high wire act for the first hour, where writer/director/star Zach Braff plays the straight man to all the odd things that are going on around him. At any moment it could have fallen apart and become one of those films where everyone in the small town is kooky and colorful and […]

Can a live action cartoon be watchable?

By Adam Lippe

During a recent viewing of the insufferable Kung Fu Hustle, I was struck not by the plotlessness, the odd and meaningless insertions of homophobia (one character is continuously ridiculed for being a “fairy,” each time they call him that he does a little dance and exits frame, nothing ever comes of it), or the complete […]

Bumfights

By Adam Lippe

A few days ago, I saw Bumfights: A Cause For Concern, which is not aptly named, as there are is but a 4 second [staged] clip where one bum bites another. Mostly, it’s made up of clips of suburban teenagers fighting, badly. But the producers also pay bums to injure themselves, tattoo things on themselves, […]

Bubba Ho-Tep

By Adam Lippe

  Sometimes you go into a movie really wanting to like it and hoping and praying that it lives up to the hype. It’s really hard not to like Bruce Campbell and you root for the movie to build into a grand horror-comedy masterpiece. The humongous 3-D lettering of the title card implies something that […]

Brazil

By Adam Lippe

Terry Gilliam has always claimed that studios dump or meddle with his movies because they don’t know how to sell them. I hadn’t seen Brazil in its entirety since my freshman year of college, I chalked up the hour I watched as a senior being bored and distracted as simply not being in the mood. […]

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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.