Tag Archive

The Tillman Story

By Adam Lippe

There are few things more American than assumed ignorance. We’re the good guys; everyone else just doesn’t know any better and needs our help to get properly informed. If they’re not interested in our particular wares, we get suspicious or aggressive, whether it’s about Democracy, weapons, religion, or French Freedom French Fries. Amir Bar-Lev’s The […]

Cohen and Tate

By Adam Lippe

The career of writer/director Eric Red fascinates for a number of reasons. But mostly because he melds the mystical and vague with utter incompetence. Red got his big break with his screenplay for The Hitcher, a combination of ridiculous 1980’s action, mysterious psychopath slasher film, open road spareness, and narrative incoherence mistaken for open-endedness, all […]

Up

By Adam Lippe

Do you like hearing kids screaming and parents rushing their children out of the theater never to return? Me too. Listening to the questions of the young ones surrounding me, as the opening montage comprised of miscarriages and cancer progressed (“why is she crying?”) made Up quite a distinct experience, and a delightful one at […]

The White Man’s Here. Who Needs Some Assimilation?

By Adam Lippe

When Gran Torino comes out on DVD in June, you all owe it to yourselves to see it (if you haven’t already). Not because it’s a great movie, but rather because it’s made from a perspective so antiquated that it’s no surprise that it was Clint Eastwood’s biggest hit in years. Granted, Clint is old […]

I Don’t Like Cars…

By Adam Lippe

I don’t like the air inside them, the claustrophobia, the seats, the leg room, the sounds of the road, traffic, either empty roads or packed. But does that mean I can’t appreciate a good car movie? It might. Sometimes you don’t know how your personal prejudices get in the way of watching movies. I know […]

The Italian Job (2003)

By Adam Lippe

When the movie was being released, I heard the story that Ed Norton was forced to do the movie, because he was under contract with Paramount and kept turning down script after script, and this was the last option he was given. And yet, Marky Mark claimed this was the best movie he’d ever been […]

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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.