Sci-Fi

Escape From the Bronx [aka Bronx Warriors 2]

By Adam Lippe

You always know who the villain of any movie is going to be once you see a scale model. This guy envisions some future with all sorts of newfangled property and technology and he’s obviously hired someone to build this tiny replica of what’s on his mind. Now I can see how an architect might […]

A podcast with Summer Qing [Qing Xu], co-star of Looper: Mandarin and English friendly version.

By Adam Lippe

Here is a podcast with actress Summer Qing (also known as Qing Xu), who plays the wife of Bruce Willis‘ character in Rian Johnson‘s twisty action sci-fi film Looper. Summer’s role is the main motivation for Willis’ entire journey through time. Summer was also in a few Chen Kaige films, like Farewell, My Concubine, and […]

Death Watch

By Adam Lippe

Just because you’re prescient, doesn’t make you smart. It might be an accident. Take Richard Brooks’ Wrong is Right, his penultimate film (and his second looniest, behind his final film Fever Pitch), made 5 years after his last studio film, 1977’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Now Wrong is Right appears to have guessed right in […]

The 5 minute feature film, volume 3: Virus + a bonus review of Virus

By Adam Lippe

Here is my 5 minute interpretation of John Bruno’s Virus, a sci-fi thriller from 1999 starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Sutherland, and William Baldwin. As a movie, about a mysterious electrical life-force that animates killer robots on an abandoned Russian research vessel in the South Pacific, Virus is somehow simultaneously frantic and low energy. It’s […]

Nicolas Cage and the Temple of Contractual Obligation

By Adam Lippe

When my girlfriend and I moved to Columbus, Ohio, we did not have much time to find a place to live. We settled on a location that was converted from a post office to a building full of large lofts. The apartment was huge, but it had quite a few deficits. There were no lights […]

Megaforce

By Adam Lippe

The initial financial failure of Disney’s Tron (directed by Steven Lisberger) was attributed to the enormous expectations based on the egregious expense of the project because of the complicated computer effects. Tron was simplistic story-wise, and the replication of the feel of a video game would become commonplace not long after its 1982 release. The […]

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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.