Action/Adventure

An Ode to Val Kilmer

By Adam Lippe

Watching the thoroughly mediocre Entourage is a depressing experience. But there are some occasions where one is rewarded for their patience. In this particular episode, the characters were looking for weed, which seems to have dried up because of a massive drought on the West Coast. The main character’s health nut vegan girlfriend knows a […]

A few thoughts on Jonathan Demme

By Adam Lippe

What Paul Thomas Anderson takes most from Jonathan Demme, is the fact that in most of his films, especially in Something Wild, he shows an interest in all the people, from the main characters, down to the smallest extra part. You watch Something Wild and you want to know more about ‘Sister’ Carol East as […]

3,000 Miles to Graceland

By Adam Lippe

If you have not seen 3,000 Miles to Graceland, please do, or don’t, depending on your sensibility. I should note a few things about it. First, it is a heist film (oddly enough, it seems to rip off the terrible Reindeer Games), in which the heist occurs in the first twenty minutes, but the film […]

Pineapple Express

By Adam Lippe

The most surprising thing about the Seth Rogen-James Franco vehicle Pineapple Express obviously isn’t its pot humor, overt silliness, and the pushing of women to the side (this is a Judd Apatow production, after all). The surprise is that it is the most baldly homoerotic Hollywood buddy film since Damon Wayans stuck his gun up […]

2008 In Review

By Adam Lippe

A great premise can be tantalizing to a studio. A corporation only thinks about a way to sell its product, it is uninterested in its level of mediocrity, so a solitary, exciting idea sounds great in a 30 second ad. A writer knows better, realizing that the initial premise is only the starting point, you […]

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

By Adam Lippe

Harrison Ford is introduced in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull looking slack and small. This is not a good omen for someone who supposedly can beat any foe in a fistfight (numerously illustrated with endlessly repetitive punch noises added after the fact). The film also betrays its obviously huge budget, because […]

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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.