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The Road

By Adam Lippe

During my interview with Shadow Billionaire director Alexis Spraic, she mentioned that she didn’t like the way that making documentaries had become a “competition about who can make the saddest film.” This line of thinking isn’t just limited to documentaries, indeed, many a fiction film falls into the trap of trying to bum out the […]

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, […]

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 […]

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.