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Looking for Mr. Goodbar, with bonus musical slideshow

By Adam Lippe

It was then. That doesn’t make it right. But that doesn’t make it different either.” – Comedian Greg Proops on why racist behavior in old movies shouldn’t be excused, but it shouldn’t make them worthless either.   The above quote is a canny way to explain away dated material without condemning it for being what […]

Drive Angry/Faster/My Soul to Take/I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

By Adam Lippe

When will disreputable nihilism become boring? Hopefully never. But there comes a point where self-satisfied nastiness taken to an extreme needs a little bit of flavor to distinguish itself. Patrick Lussier’s Drive Angry tries to spice things up with its effective use of 3D and by cobbling together as many exploitation clichés as possible: the […]

A podcast with Joe Winston, the director of What’s the Matter With Kansas?

By Adam Lippe

Here’s an audio interview with Joe Winston who directed, along with his wife Laura Cohen, the documentary adaptation of Thomas Frank’s best-selling book, What’s the Matter With Kansas? Though you might think that this will be a discussion between two commie liberals bashing on heartland folk, that assumption would only be half right, because there’s […]

Brüno

By Adam Lippe

The major reason that Freddy Got Fingered was such a failure had nothing to do with it being offensive or gross. If anything, the juxtaposition of Tom Green looking like a very plain, gee-whiz Canadian as he fellates a cow’s nipples is what makes him funny in the first place (especially on his original MTV […]

Palindromes

By Adam Lippe

Maybe it would have helped had I seen the movie with a suck up audience, the kind of Sundancy viewer that writer-director Todd Solondz pretends to mock but clearly desires their recognition. In fact all 8 of the people in attendance at the screening were silent the entire 100 minutes, except for myself, when the […]

Now on DVD and Blu-Ray

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.