Action/Adventure

Re-boot to the Head

By Adam Lippe

Bigger. Louder. Faster. These adjectives are the most deceptive in all of advertising, because they are almost as meaningless with context as without. The idea behind a “reboot” is to personify those three tantalizing words. In the case of the re-imagining of Star Trek, you’re being sold a brand name and nothing else. This new […]

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

By Adam Lippe

“That, my friend, is cowardice. It’s so yellow. It’s not even yellow, it’s beyond yellow. It’s canary yellow… Rodeo clowns, on the other hand, those are real men. I had a buddy from Austin, he was a rodeo clown. He had one arm. We used to call him, uh… One arm.” – Johnny Depp, at […]

Kansas City Bomber

By Adam Lippe

Here’s the idea behind “A Canadian, an American, a Lawyer, and an Elitist”: Rhett’s favorite movie is Meatballs 4,  Shawn has an unhealthy fixation on Resident Evil, Richard scoffs at anything that isn’t pretentious and hoity toity, and Adam is a prick who hates everything. We all watch far too many movies, and spend our […]

Death Race

By Adam Lippe

Watching a Paul W. S. Anderson movie is always a struggle. Gifted with one can’t miss big budget B movie after another, he does nothing with ideas like Alien vs. Predator, Soldier, Resident Evil, and the holy grail of overqualified actors picking up a paycheck, Event Horizon. How he screws these no-brainers up is not […]

How cheap theaters and indifferent audiences are ruining the movies, or how to avoid writing a review of Hellboy II: Golden Army.

By Adam Lippe

Intending to write a full review based on copious notes, I sat in front of the monitor, thinking. Not because of writer’s block, but the realization that the movie had not been given a fair shake. By me, maybe, but certainly by the theater. My experience with the movie was that it was tiring, overplotted, […]

The Sequel Rule

By Adam Lippe

Quite some time ago, I came to the realization that I had not been to a sequel in the theater since Hannibal, a book which I hated, but I was dragged by my ex and a friend who wanted to see it. I thought about why sequels were made and to what kind of movies […]

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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.