Thriller

Full Contact

By Adam Lippe

The combination of the transfer of Hong Kong back into the hands of the Chinese and the Chow Yun-Fat/John Woo films like The Killer and Hard Boiled caused Hollywood to take notice of these foreign directors and actors wanting to cross over and establish themselves in a new venue. Producer Moshe Diamant, who had specialized […]

Cypher

By Adam Lippe

Miramax has a tendency to produce medium budget sci-fi and horror films and right before they are about to be released, they put them back in the vault for six months, so all of the momentum disappears, and then dump them into a few hundred theaters, with no promotion behind it. Recently this has happened […]

Crying Freeman

By Adam Lippe

The fact that Brotherhood of the Wolf was such a huge success overseas and has an enormous cult following in the US (and did receive a surprisingly large push from Universal for a foreign film) has renewed interest in Christophe Gans’ first film, the adaptation of the anime/comic book of Crying Freeman. The film never […]

Chopper

By Adam Lippe

The filmed version of legendary Australian criminal Mark “Chopper” Read’s semi-autobiographical book, is, along with Fight Club, one of the best unreliable narrator movies ever made. Read’s “novels” are extremely popular in his native land, as they concern his own criminal history, although, apparently there is no way to tell the difference between what is […]

Year of the Dragon

By Adam Lippe

Year of the Dragon, Michael Cimino’s first film after Heaven’s Gate, was probably a dream project, seeing as he got to work with Mickey Rourke, one of the biggest and ballsiest stars of that era, and Oliver Stone (who co-wrote the script), whose sensibilities, especially at the time, were almost identical to Cimino’s. Both heavy […]

Willard

By Adam Lippe

The biggest mistake made in 2003’s Willard was not in remaking a mediocre movie that’s mostly remembered for the sequel’s use of a Michael Jackson love song for a rat, but because they went with a PG-13. The tone is R rated, the violence seems overly toned down (and indeed was), the language is awkwardly […]

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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.