Thriller

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. […]

Street Kings

By Adam Lippe

“I woke up, and I was a cliché.” The fact that this isn’t the first line of dialogue in Street Kings, a new cop-thriller with Keanu Reeves, should be considered a missed opportunity. Opening with Reeves getting out of bed to a blaring alarm, fully clothed, hearing a neighborhood dog barking, loading his gun, stumbling […]

Naked Killer

By Adam Lippe

The Hong Kong equivalent of Jerry Bruckheimer, writer/producer/director Wong Jing has been cashing in on trends for so many years, it’s no wonder that his movies are completely dated within a year. Watching films like City Hunter, where Jackie Chan dresses up as every character from the Street Fighter 2 video game, or the inane […]

L’Enfer

By Adam Lippe

L’Enfer threatens to have a more interesting backstory than the film itself. Originally written by director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique) in 1964, Clouzot made several attempts to make the film, but always had problems with the structure, and needlessly elaborate fantasy sequences. Thirty years later, Clouzot’s widow sold the script to a producer, who offered it […]

Kill Bill vol. 1 and 2

By Adam Lippe

Kill Bill is like Cinematic Doo Doo. And I don’t mean that in necessarily a negative way. Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino is taking all of the movies he digested as a teenager and shitting them all over the audience. Whether you choose to be a coprophiliac is up to you. Sometimes I was hungry, other times […]

A Trifecta of Rape and Revenge: I Spit on Your Grave/Last House on the Left/Thriller: A Cruel Picture

By Adam Lippe

I Spit on Your Grave My first viewing of I Spit on Your Grave was in high school. I felt it was a terrible movie that followed no logic and the endless rape scenes were effective only in that they didn’t shy away from brutality. However, the movie was very poorly made and written, and […]

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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.