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Farewell, My Lovely

By Adam Lippe

When you rely on the 20 year old cycle of nostalgia as your form of entertainment, you know that the material is going to date instantly. It’s one thing to be a sort of time capsule movie that reflects the period it was made in (like William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA), but […]

A Podcast with Scott Cooper, the Director of Crazy Heart

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper who led lead actor Jeff Bridges to a Golden Globe Award. The film is about “Bad” Blake, an alcohol soaked, washed up rock/blues singer, touring dingy bars across the US. Unable to get albums released without the help of his former protege, and now big star, […]

A podcast with Alexis Spraic, the director of Shadow Billionaire

By Adam Lippe

Here’s an audio interview I did with Alexis Spraic, the director of Shadow Billionaire, a movie without a distributor at the moment, that I reviewed here. We talk about how hard it must be to profile her subject Larry Hillblom, DHL magnate and procurer of young Vietnamese and Filipino virgin girls, in an objective fashion, […]

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day

By Adam Lippe

Is there any inherent pressure for a director when following up a failure, especially when you’ve made a sequel distributed by a studio that’s known for constantly releasing such fare? In the past few years, Sony has been putting out belated DTV sequels to the most random, unsuccessful movies in their back catalog; such as […]

Shadow Billionaire

By Adam Lippe

The laziest thing about biopics is that they tend to neglect establishing what’s so special about their subject matter, simply because they happen to be about a famous person. The abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, who had an acclaimed film made about his life in 2000, Pollock, starring and directed by Ed Harris, may have […]

On art and commerce: An audio interview with Fissure director Russ Pond

By Adam Lippe

Below you’ll find an interview with the director of Fissure, Russ Pond (the review can be read here), that I conducted recently. The interview is about 17 minutes long and I’ve broken it up into three parts. The first two parts discuss the movie itself, so if you want to avoid spoilers, I’d be cautious […]

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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.