Thriller

Visitor Q

By Adam Lippe

The difference between the Farrelly brothers movies and Visitor Q is the difference between the necessity involved in slapstick gross out humor and darker black humor. Gross out humor requires that the characters have no self awareness of their situation, if they know exactly what’s going on, if Ben Stiller knew he had cum on […]

Transsiberian

By Adam Lippe

It is not always a mystery why some films manage to creatively avoid widespread distribution. Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian, a mix of travelogue, relationship drama, Runaway Train, and Renny Harlin’s hilariously anti-Russian Born American, doesn’t fit into a specific category. The movie is well made, has terrific, snowy photography, and its minimal ambitions are an asset. […]

The Butterfly Effect

By Adam Lippe

Sometimes director’s cut DVDs are a waste of time and a simple marketing scheme. I watched the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect and then watched the conclusion of the theatrical cut, and am mystified how anyone can even consider the latter’s ending to be valid. The director’s cut’s conclusion seems thematically correct, as it […]

Saw

By Adam Lippe

Lions Gate is choosing to release Saw with an R rating, though what they cut for it to initially receive an NC-17, I couldn’t tell you. It’s more gruesome in tone than anything else, in the same way that Seven doesn’t actually have much onscreen violence. But Saw is abysmal and gets worse the more […]

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 […]

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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.