Thriller

Matchstick Men

By Adam Lippe

Decent showoffy performances, but not much of a movie around it. The final scene pays off more than it should, but honestly, I didn’t care that much. Nicolas Cage has more to work with than say Gone in Sixty Seconds, but a lot of this material shows up in other films all the time, from […]

Better Luck Tomorrow

By Adam Lippe

Hover to read the Context Just because your movie gets picked up MTV, who bragged about its first independent film acquisition, doesn’t mean you have to throw in distracting MTVish style into your story because you don’t believe you have original material. It was a shame about this, because I liked a few of the […]

Hide and Seek

By Adam Lippe

Throughout the commentary track on Alone in the Dark, director Uwe Boll complains that there won’t be an Alone in the Dark 2 because no one saw the first one, and they saw Boogeyman and Hide and Seek instead. And apparently, according to him, because of their moderate successes, there will be sequels to these […]

The Village

By Adam Lippe

You know, it’s clunky, the idea is kind of predictable, but I was spooked at times, and I always find M. Night’s films to be clever, if not always the day after viewing them. I’m glad what seemed to be the surprise was revealed at the beginning of act III, not the end. The concept […]

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 […]

The Dark Knight

By Adam Lippe

The late, great critic for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, talked about the manufacturing of the blockbuster and how the product was no longer important, just that it was considered a sellable ride. The Dark Knight is certainly a viable product: well made, sleek, sturdy, efficient, and yet sort of hollow. Part of the problem […]

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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.