Action/Adventure

Iron Man

By Adam Lippe

For about 80 minutes, Iron Man is clearly the best comic book adaptation ever made. Sharp and witty, allowing for Robert Downey Jr. to give a completely freewheeling and simultaneously arrogant and self-deprecating performance, the movie makes fun of the dumb clichés inherent in these origin films, and makes it about the people and not […]

The Forbidden Kingdom

By Adam Lippe

Shoehorning a white teenager into a Chinese period piece just to make Americans feel like they’re not watching a foreign film is a deeply cynical move. Pretending the kid can perform martial arts, even in his dreams, is just plain foolish. But the strangest aspect of The Forbidden Kingdom, is that it misses the point […]

Watchmen

By Adam Lippe

Among horror fans, there is a legendary moment in one of Wes Craven’s early films that would influence nearly every complex film that followed. Hurting for money, Craven went to the well to sequelize a film that would have a hard time being a sequel, seeing as pretty much every notable character died in the […]

Outlander

By Adam Lippe

A promisingly silly premise, alien spaceship crashes into the water during the time of Vikings and the survivor tries to win the hearts of the humans who don’t understand him (A more appropriate title might have been Army of Dorkness), is buried in the ground immediately by a concession to the English speaking market. As soon as he lands, removes his protective […]

Tropic Thunder

By Adam Lippe

The big budget Hollywood satire is more than just an oxymoron, it is simply bewildering. How could a $90 million movie, distributed by Dreamworks, a company co-founded by Steven Spielberg, and owned by Viacom, be hard on “the business?” The answer is, it can’t, and therefore Tropic Thunder is a very broad and obvious satire, […]

Does your opinion matter? And since it doesn’t, will you like Hancock?

By Adam Lippe

As I’ve suggested in many of my reviews, Hollywood believes that the most important result from a film is a product – not necessarily entertainment, let alone art. Demonstrating this concept, a couple of recent films that were stripped down and spare to the point of absurdity, sometimes to their benefit, were The Incredible Hulk […]

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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.