Thriller

Case 39

By Adam Lippe

In baseball terminology, the shift refers to when a left-handed power hitter who tends to pull the ball (in other words, hits the ball to right field, the shift is almost never used against right-handed batters) comes to the plate (such as Ryan Howard, David Ortiz, Adam Dunn, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, etc.) the infielders […]

Eye of the Beholder (1999)

By Adam Lippe

Comedian David Cross does a bit on his It’s Not Funny album about how common it is to see a gay couple who look exactly like one another, “same balding pattern, bushy mustache, reverse pear-shaped body.” He goes into more detail exploring how that must be sort of like masturbation, where you can either take […]

The Oxford Murders

By Adam Lippe

The money is no longer in America. It used to be that you weren’t considered a success until you made it in the US, so athletes, actors, and musicians from foreign countries have been trying to make their talents more accessible (read: dumbing down) whether it be by simplifying what made them great in the […]

Inception

By Adam Lippe

Christopher Nolan’s Inception shares a lot of similarities with Tarsem Singh’s The Cell*. It’s a highly ambitious story dealing with entering people’s minds and has grand and stylized visuals, and a harrumphing, doom-impending score by Hans Zimmer that could easily be confused for Howard Shore’s work (Along with The Cell, Shore writes music for most […]

A podcast with Nash Edgerton, director of The Square

By Adam Lippe

Australian stuntman Nash Edgerton made his first feature, The Square, back in 2008, but it was just released in the US.  The film is a twisty noir that takes place in a small, insular town, similar to Henrik Ruben Genz’s Terribly Happy (which also got a podcast dedicated to it).  I interviewed Edgerton along with […]

A Podcast with Henrik Ruben Genz, the Director of Terribly Happy

By Adam Lippe

Below is an interview with the director of the Danish dark comedy Terribly Happy, Henrik Ruben Genz. We discuss the connections between his film and Blood Simple, the satirical underpinnings of Terribly Happy and how that relates to political refugees in Denmark, the inherent humor within the arrogance of Dogme ’95 and how Lars Von […]

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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.