Action/Adventure

Terminator 3

By Adam Lippe

Very poorly paced and written, and awkwardly acted by Nick Stahl. The Terminatrix doesn’t have much to do, and they don’t give her any cool powers. She seems a step backwards (and she is vanquished in a rather simple way as well) from Robert Patrick’s T-1000 from T2. The huge flaw at the center of […]

The Italian Job (2003)

By Adam Lippe

When the movie was being released, I heard the story that Ed Norton was forced to do the movie, because he was under contract with Paramount and kept turning down script after script, and this was the last option he was given. And yet, Marky Mark claimed this was the best movie he’d ever been […]

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

By Adam Lippe

Someone should have combined this and Judge Dredd to combine two huge failures into one, and so Stallone could have battled the beasts in this film in who could say “I am the law!” less convincingly. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to care about when the two most interesting actors in the movie, Brando […]

Ultraviolet

By Adam Lippe

Minimalism is treated by the public in different ways, depending on the subject matter. With Phillip Glass, his music has been little more than a variation on the same theme for nearly thirty years, and yet is cited as a genius. With Jim Jarmusch, his spare, droll films, such as Stranger than Paradise and Down […]

The Dark Knight

By Adam Lippe

The late, great critic for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, talked about the manufacturing of the blockbuster and how the product was no longer important, just that it was considered a sellable ride. The Dark Knight is certainly a viable product: well made, sleek, sturdy, efficient, and yet sort of hollow. Part of the problem […]

Taken

By Adam Lippe

Since Luc Besson stopped directing, he has become more than a veritable production factory. He has established his array of mediocre and indistinguishable French directors as minions to his every whim of entirely disposable and forgettable action nonsense. Their formulas are simple; minimal dialogue that can be easily uttered by the multinational cast in English. […]

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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.