Horror

A podcast with Tim League, CEO of The Alamo Drafthouse, Fantastic Fest, and Drafthouse Films

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Tim League, creator and CEO of The Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest. This was recorded around November 2010 and the interview was initiated because Tim and Alamo Drafthouse Films were putting out Chris Morris’ Four Lions as their first film. You can hear my interview with Chris Morris here. This very […]

The Lift

By Adam Lippe

Low budget filmmakers are told to use what they can get, writing their screenplays around what locations they can afford. Reservoir Dogs was made by a director (Quentin Tarantino) who knew he couldn’t afford to shoot a heist movie so he worked out a way to show everything but the heist. Sure, there’s a bit […]

Luke Wilson’s Hands Across America

By Adam Lippe

During the audio commentary for The Goonies, there’s a moment when the actor who played Chunk , Jeff Cohen (who is now an attorney), points out that a certain shot of his hands are “not my hands.” That’s about the way it should be, where the only person who notices that an insert shot, like the […]

A q+a with Fran Kranz, star of the new film The Cabin in the Woods

By Adam Lippe

Below is a q+a with actor Fran Kranz, who plays Marty, the resident stoner in the new meta-horror-comedy The Cabin in the Woods. It was recorded after a screening of the film on April 9th in Philadelphia. The Cabin in the Woods is the feature directing debut of Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard. It was produced […]

Paperhouse

By Adam Lippe

Don’t try to recapture your childhood. You’ll just end up watching The Goonies, grumbling, and muttering to yourself that you can’t believe you were such an easily entertained idiot. You also weren’t precocious, just irritating. Precocious is how adults describe children who annoy them, when they’re too polite to say so. My fear of disillusioning […]

Looking for Mr. Goodbar, with bonus musical slideshow

By Adam Lippe

It was then. That doesn’t make it right. But that doesn’t make it different either.” – Comedian Greg Proops on why racist behavior in old movies shouldn’t be excused, but it shouldn’t make them worthless either.   The above quote is a canny way to explain away dated material without condemning it for being what […]

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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.