Love Me If You Dare

By Adam Lippe

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What starts out as an emptyheaded but amusing Amelie riff, with the magical realism, swooping camerawork, green and brown filtered into every shot, quickly turns maddeningly banal as soon as the characters become adults. Suddenly, it becomes an invisible obstacle romance, where they create things between them and other characters (like the guy’s father) act entirely irrationally so as to create the sense that they are fighting against the world, as opposed to the fact that they are just, stupid. The dialogue, while passable at first, turns incomprehensible, a dinner scene has the lead asking to have “just head-on dialectic on the state of the heart.” Fantasy sequences are merely distractions and confused (there’s a scene where we see some character being hung from a lamppost, but we don’t know who it is or why they are there, and the movie forgets about it) and the ending not only cheats but is afraid of actually resolving.

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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.