Drama

Redwoods

By Adam Lippe

There aren’t a lot of flaws in Doug Liman’s Swingers. The humor and insight into heterosexual insecurities and arbitrary rules is just as insightful nearly 15 years later, which is a credit to writer/star’s Jon Favreau’s script. But if there’s one distracting element, it’s a scene where Favreau blows a potential one night stand because […]

Shank

By Adam Lippe

Opening with a coke-filled clandestine Internet hook-up in the woods, quickly followed up with a painful headbutt, Simon Pearce’s Shank successfully treads the line between sweet romance, gay soft-core porn, gang violence, and aimless exploitation. The combination of all of these elements is the only way the movie is unique; otherwise, it’s just a coming-out […]

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

By Adam Lippe

For a long time, the cheapest place to shoot a movie was in Canada, often in Vancouver. Virtually every movie that was supposed to take place in New York City would be comprised of a few aerial shots of Manhattan and then any external scenes would be shot in close enough where you couldn’t identify […]

The Missing Person

By Adam Lippe

It’s a shame that Hollywood is only interested in making origin films for the heroes of comic book films. Such is the case with the recent X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Frankly, the heroes tend to be dull. And so, while there are some aberrations—such as with Lexi Alexander’s campy, silly, and ridiculously entertaining and colorful Punisher: […]

Local Anesthetic: Film Festivals Part IV

By Adam Lippe

“We want to show movies that won’t be seen at the local mallplex,” drunkenly exclaimed Harlan Jacobson, the artistic director of the 18 ½ Philadelphia Film Festival and a film community legend. It was awkward enough being a film critic at an invite-only party taking place at an upscale club. No matter how you try […]

Antichrist

By Adam Lippe

Lars Von Trier has always had a canny way of indulging his critics by playing into their vision of him as a technically accomplished, but emotionally manipulative, misogynistic boor. Von Trier knows how to provoke the audience but it isn’t clear if he knows why he’s doing it (much like Vincent Gallo), other than to […]

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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.