Thriller

On art and commerce: An audio interview with Fissure director Russ Pond

By Adam Lippe

Below you’ll find an interview with the director of Fissure, Russ Pond (the review can be read here), that I conducted recently. The interview is about 17 minutes long and I’ve broken it up into three parts. The first two parts discuss the movie itself, so if you want to avoid spoilers, I’d be cautious […]

Fissure

By Adam Lippe

When a movie disorients you for 2/3 of its running time, making you feel like you can follow it, but never quite get a handle on it, without ever getting too confused, the eventual explanation is almost always going to be a let down. This is often a consequence of being ambitious, and carrying out […]

Tightrope

By Adam Lippe

There’s nothing more menacing than a serial killer into S&M who completes the picture by wearing a stolen pair of Mr. Rogers’ sneakers*. Ok, maybe I’m just making up that last part. There’s no reason to think he stole the shoes, Mr. Rogers might have lent them out to him. Anyway, 1984’s tawdry Tightrope, a […]

Shrivel Me Timber; Erotic Thrillers Vol. 1: Traces of Red

By Adam Lippe

If the idea of seeing Jim Belushi as a sex symbol isn’t appealing to you, then I don’t know what to say. Clearly Traces of Red is too good for you. As I detailed in the [Motor]Cycles of the Film Industry article, Hollywood does things in cycles. When the 1980’s teen sexploitation market dried up […]

Cohen and Tate

By Adam Lippe

The career of writer/director Eric Red fascinates for a number of reasons. But mostly because he melds the mystical and vague with utter incompetence. Red got his big break with his screenplay for The Hitcher, a combination of ridiculous 1980’s action, mysterious psychopath slasher film, open road spareness, and narrative incoherence mistaken for open-endedness, all […]

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

By Adam Lippe

Over the past few years, director Tony Scott (Top Gun, True Romance, Enemy of the State) has been taking shots from the press over his recent fascination with film school tricks like flash frames, jump cuts, color filtering and his insistence on somehow cutting his films even faster than he used to. Whether this is […]

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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.