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Megaforce

By Adam Lippe

The initial financial failure of Disney’s Tron (directed by Steven Lisberger) was attributed to the enormous expectations based on the egregious expense of the project because of the complicated computer effects. Tron was simplistic story-wise, and the replication of the feel of a video game would become commonplace not long after its 1982 release. The […]

Take Me Home Tonight

By Adam Lippe

Of the many funny things that comedian Faizon Love said during his frequent guest spots on Dinner For Five, regarding a film he co-starred in, Torque, one of the most perceptive was how the producers were far more worried about assembling the soundtrack rather than the screenplay. It’s a common downside to having to sell […]

Let Me In

By Adam Lippe

At the end of the late ‘80s teen movie, My Best Friend is a Vampire, the titular night walker, as played by future House star Robert Sean Leonard, is confronted in a cemetery by his parents. He’s accompanied by a very androgynous girl, and his parents are devastated because they don’t want their son to […]

Fearless Frank

By Adam Lippe

In the days where there were no such things as digital video and affordable cameras for the consumer, it must have been fun to work simultaneously without a net and on a low budget. That way, you could experiment with formats and ideas — even if they weren’t fully formed ideas — playing around with […]

An Englishman in New York

By Adam Lippe

As a divisive figure in the then-burgeoning gay rights movement, writer-actor Quentin Crisp is worthy of being given a lengthy biopic, or at least one that gives equal time to arguing the ways he both helped and harmed the gay cause. An Englishman in New York, which covers Crisp’s life as a latter day theater […]

Grace

By Adam Lippe

The current issue of Newsweek has a picture of a baby staring straight at the camera with a slightly concerned look on her face, with the headline across her forehead “Is your baby racist?” A deliberately provocative question (the article is nothing more than extended book promotion for the authors of the piece), but as […]

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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.