Action/Adventure

I Really Wanted to Get Smart

By Adam Lippe

Wanton violence and nihilism is not always a bad thing. As with anything, it is entirely about tone. Having just finished watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, in all its studio-polished, R-rated glory – where the question of character deaths was not an “if” proposition, but rather a “when” – it became clear what […]

The Many Face(s) of Liv Tyler

By Adam Lippe

There is no reason, ever, to cast Liv Tyler as a scientist. Less convincing than even Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough or Tara Reid as a genius anthropologist in Alone in the Dark, Liv Tyler is better suited to play a beleaguered girlfriend, trapped in a house while […]

The Island Is the Loudest Anti-stem Cell Research Movie Ever

By Adam Lippe

Who knew director Michael Bay (Armageddon, Bad Boys II, Transformers) was interested in any political issue at all? Or maybe it was an accident that in The Island, he made the scientist trying to solve the world’s diseases, the villain? Perhaps it was a coincidence that the heroes, the clones of rich people condemned to […]

The [Motor]Cycles of the Film Industry

By Adam Lippe

It is no secret that Hollywood loves to be environmentally conscious by recycling product. What starts out “pure” gets used and then thrown in the trash where it is crushed to make several different products. This purity in movie terms would be represented in an “original vision,” and something that could be easily replicated. Quality […]

The Treadmill Thriller

By Adam Lippe

Paycheck is one of the better examples of what I call the Treadmill Thriller, in which a character is involved, unknowingly in building/devising something world altering for the government or a shady corporation, or he witnessed the building of it, and after the 20 minute set-up of this product, he spends the next 70 minutes […]

I Don’t Like Cars…

By Adam Lippe

I don’t like the air inside them, the claustrophobia, the seats, the leg room, the sounds of the road, traffic, either empty roads or packed. But does that mean I can’t appreciate a good car movie? It might. Sometimes you don’t know how your personal prejudices get in the way of watching movies. I know […]

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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.