Drama

The Life Aquatic

By Adam Lippe

It may be near impossible to mix ironic distance with serious violence and death, but there was certainly an effort put forth in The Life Aquatic. I’m not sure what the point was to throw graphic violence and pirates into a self-conscious comedy satirizing such a thin target as how silly Jacques Cousteau films look […]

Palindromes

By Adam Lippe

Maybe it would have helped had I seen the movie with a suck up audience, the kind of Sundancy viewer that writer-director Todd Solondz pretends to mock but clearly desires their recognition. In fact all 8 of the people in attendance at the screening were silent the entire 100 minutes, except for myself, when the […]

Owning Mahowney

By Adam Lippe

Rarely has a movie captured the feeling of doom better than this one. You know what it’s like, where you find yourself in a repetitive cycle, constantly doing things that you know to be bad for you, and you don’t even really take any pleasure in it, it’s just a compulsive act. You know that […]

Mystic River

By Adam Lippe

From the television ads, Mystic River looked like your typical middlebrow Oscar movie, on a generic B movie subject but told in hushed tones with A list actors, which apparently covers up the generica (see In the Bedroom). I had just seen Sleepers the week before, another star studded, contrived, overrated, awards conscious drama about […]

Monster’s Ball

By Adam Lippe

Spoilers everywhere…. There’s an odd linking of vomit going throughout Monster’s Ball that I think has never been addressed. Billy Bob throws up in the first scene, but nothing is made of it. It’s just part of the routine. It doesn’t even faze him. And this sort of establishes the way that the people in […]

Lost in Translation

By Adam Lippe

“I have to leave, but I don’t want to.” “Then stay here… With me. We’ll start a jazz band.” While I was watching Lost in Translation, I was often restless and fidgety, but not in an impatient way. I had the feeling that I had during certain parts of Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming where […]

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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.