Drama

Adventureland

By Adam Lippe

Selling nostalgia is a tricky thing. While you already have the advantage of being able to tap into people’s hazy memories and playing off their vague recognition and familiarity, you risk relying on such a lazy device to the point where you become guilty of The Wedding Singer syndrome, wherein the entire purpose was to […]

When Will I Be Loved

By Adam Lippe

When Will I Be Loved, another James Toback venture into his dated version of the unseemly, has mostly gained notoriety for Neve Campbell’s nude scenes, which bookend the film, and have literally nothing to do with it. Toback’s legendary misogyny is often hidden behind the idea that strong women know how to assert their sexuality, […]

Cool Blue

By Adam Lippe

It used to take a lot of effort for a star vehicle to go straight to video, especially during the late 1980’s, at the height of VHS’s popularity. Cool Blue probably seemed like an ideal low-budget project for Woody Harrelson, where he could stretch by playing the struggling artist, but also cater to his fans […]

Streetwalkin’

By Adam Lippe

Memories of a never was: Looking back on a long career of someone not even worthy of a ghostwriter By Randall Batinkoff Chapter 4 I spent that Thursday afternoon trying to convince my agent that I wasn’t Balthazar Getty.

Wisdom

By Adam Lippe

When Emilio Estevez turned 24 years old, directly after the success of St. Elmo’s Fire, The Breakfast Club, Repo Man, The Outsiders and writing the screenplay for the S.E. Hinton adaptation That Was Then… This Is Now, he convinced Fox to let him write, direct, and star in his own film, under the aegis of […]

The Boost

By Adam Lippe

James Woods was the best American actor of the 1980’s. What made his performances so interesting were not just his intensity, vitality, and believability, but that he often did it with a sub-par script and/or direction. For every Salvador and Videodrome, there was Cop, True Believer, and Best Seller. This even extended to his 90’s […]

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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.