Horror

The Day of the Beast

By Adam Lippe

If filmmaking is an act of myth-making, than what is a filmmaker who spends his time busting up long held myths? He’s not Penn and Teller, who specialize in creating magic and then explaining to you what a dope you are for falling for it. He’s not a meta-filmmaker who likes to break the fourth […]

Scre4m [sensibly known as Scream 4]

By Adam Lippe

Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind — his adaptation of Chuck Barris’ book about his dual professions of hosting The Gong Show and being an assassin for the CIA — is a lot different from the movie that the director, George Clooney, put together. Apparently, Kaufman was upset by the fact that […]

Drive Angry/Faster/My Soul to Take/I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

By Adam Lippe

When will disreputable nihilism become boring? Hopefully never. But there comes a point where self-satisfied nastiness taken to an extreme needs a little bit of flavor to distinguish itself. Patrick Lussier’s Drive Angry tries to spice things up with its effective use of 3D and by cobbling together as many exploitation clichés as possible: the […]

Black Swan vs. Black Swan: Revisionist History Vol. 2, A Screener’s Revenge

By Adam Lippe

As a critic, my job is to be as objective as possible while acknowledging my own subjectivity. But what rarely comes into play, at least consciously, is whatever mood I might be in on the way into the theater. I saw Black Swan at the opening night of the Philadelphia Film Festival on October 14th. […]

Let Me In

By Adam Lippe

At the end of the late ‘80s teen movie, My Best Friend is a Vampire, the titular night walker, as played by future House star Robert Sean Leonard, is confronted in a cemetery by his parents. He’s accompanied by a very androgynous girl, and his parents are devastated because they don’t want their son to […]

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 […]

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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.