Thriller

The Merry Gentleman

By Adam Lippe

In the pantheon of films about depressed hitmen either on their last job or on the verge of suicide, The Merry Gentleman stands tall, in the middle of the pack. Not as insightful, moving, nor funny as the William H. Macy starring Panic* or as wonderfully awful as Nicholas Cage’s foray in the remake of […]

Dirty Harry vs. The French Connection: The Fascist Cop Movies of 1971

By Adam Lippe

The late 1960’s were a troubled time for the major studios of Hollywood. Expensive musicals like Hello Dolly had failed as had pricey westerns like Paint Your Wagon. The success of Easy Rider was considered a breakthrough and set up the director-centric 1970’s spawning one crafty film nerd filmmaker after another, such as Francis Ford […]

Terrible Ideas Executed Superbly

By Adam Lippe

John Frankenheimer’s Dead-Bang has the most tired of all plots; beaten down, alcoholic cop (played by Don Johsnon), divorced and grizzled, gets yelled at by his superiors and screws up whenever he can. He runs down a ruthless criminal traveling from state to state trying to join with a well funded group of KKK members. […]

The Point Men

By Adam Lippe

No matter how blind he gets and how hoarse his voice becomes, Christopher Lambert will always be worth watching. Whether it is because one of his eyes is placed significantly higher than the other (which certainly aids his crosseyedness) or the fact that he looks like a cyborg with a screwed on head, his charisma […]

Physical Evidence

By Adam Lippe

On the recently deceased website JumptheShark.com,* it was decided that adding Ted McGinley to a TV show was the death knell, the very moment that the show would take a downturn, never to recover.(examples include Happy Days, Dynasty, and The Love Boat). In the case of the routine Burt Reynolds vehicle, Physical Evidence, he is […]

Cruising

By Adam Lippe

Cruising is the ultimate should-have-been movie. Director William Friedkin, free from the ego involved in making The Exorcist, where he took a trashy book and pretended it wasn’t (notice how he now spends a lot of his time claiming it isn’t a horror movie), and then rubbed your nose in the trashy elements he left […]

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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.