Action/Adventure

Knowing How To Punish Your Audience

By Adam Lippe

In 1991, a masterpiece of excess was unleashed around the world. Initially, it was a cult item, its greatest claim to fame was that a clip from the film, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, was featured as the introduction to the Five Questions segment on The Daily Show, back when Craig Kilborn was hosting. The […]

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. […]

Second Sight

By Adam Lippe

Much like the Pat Morita/Jay Leno vehicle, Collision Course, Second Sight has been an HBO staple for a very long time. Both heavily feature actors better suited for TV and neither has any aspirations to be anything less than reassuringly irritating. However, unlike virtually every second of Collision Course, Second Sight is never boring, despite […]

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 […]

Wisdom

By Adam Lippe

When Emilio Estevez turned 24 years old, directly after the success of St. Elmo’s Fire, The Breakfast Club, Repo Man, The Outsiders and writing the screenplay for the S.E. Hinton adaptation That Was Then… This Is Now, he convinced Fox to let him write, direct, and star in his own film, under the aegis of […]

Cherry 2000

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 […]

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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.