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A podcast with Ann Louise Bardach, the screenwriter of Dennis Hopper’s Backtrack

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Ann Louise Bardach, journalist for The New York Times, Newsweek, Slate, etc., and the screenwriter of Dennis Hopper’s Backtrack, the director’s cut of which I reviewed here. Now Backtrack was an incredibly troubled production, sitting on the shelf for two years before being dumped by its bankrupt distributor in a cut […]

Backtrack: Director’s Cut

By Adam Lippe

The imagery described by Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) in Silence of the Lambs of Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) where, as an orphaned young girl running away from the farm where she lives, carrying a baby lamb away from inevitable slaughter with her, is etched into society’s cultural mind as much as […]

Scre4m [sensibly known as Scream 4]

By Adam Lippe

Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind — his adaptation of Chuck Barris’ book about his dual professions of hosting The Gong Show and being an assassin for the CIA — is a lot different from the movie that the director, George Clooney, put together. Apparently, Kaufman was upset by the fact that […]

Never Let Me Go

By Adam Lippe

One of the smartest things that Charlie Kaufman did with his script for Being John Malkovich was to push back the reveal of the central concept for almost an entire act. An interfering producer might have insisted that the movie start on page 30. But, luckily, Kaufman was also a credited executive producer on the […]

Where the Wild Things Are

By Adam Lippe

I really can’t draw. If there was ever proof of this, it was in college when I was taking a video production course and amongst all of the other little things that went into the writing, editing, directing, and organizational elements, we had to do storyboards. It is wishful thinking on a student production that […]

Cold Souls

By Adam Lippe

If you rip off an original idea in an original way, is it still stealing? Does it really matter one way or the other, since the presentation is more important than your “acquired” idea? The fallacy of the original idea is a nice trap thrown in by those rejecting material without needing to explain their […]

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.