Drama

Moment By Moment

By Adam Lippe

A notoriously forgotten film from 1978, this classic romance between budding closeted homosexual John Travolta and happily constipated lesbian Lily Tomlin is one of the most passionate movies that features a dog named Scamp and a character named Dan Santini never to be released on VHS, DVD, or LD. Somehow after the success of Carrie, […]

Wild At Heart

By Adam Lippe

There was some riff-raff about the fact that MGM’s new disc was the R rated cut, and not the unrated version that was released in Europe. The main difference is apparently in the smoke that appears when Dafoe blows his own head off, which was added to avoid an X. I watched the Region 2 […]

Taken

By Adam Lippe

Since Luc Besson stopped directing, he has become more than a veritable production factory. He has established his array of mediocre and indistinguishable French directors as minions to his every whim of entirely disposable and forgettable action nonsense. Their formulas are simple; minimal dialogue that can be easily uttered by the multinational cast in English. […]

Stop-Loss

By Adam Lippe

“You got a right to be stupid.” A more apt line to describe its characters and its intended audience could not be written. Stop-Loss,* an updated version of a Vietnam film, concerns the miscast Ryan Phillipe as a dedicated soldier in Iraq whose tour is coming to an end as the movie begins. When he […]

Save Me

By Adam Lippe

A movie on a great subject can be quite frustrating, because often, the filmmakers either chicken out and make something pat and obvious, or don’t have the skills or money to pull off their ambitions, and so you spend the entire running time praying it will get better. Screenings of movies like Save Me, an […]

Northfork

By Adam Lippe

Stunningly shot. Every single image is astonishing. Think the black and white imagery of Seven (which may be in color, but clearly was intended to look like drained color), with a stronger emphasis on dark blue and grey. But much like the movie it is trying to evoke, Days of Heaven, the story is unfocused […]

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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.