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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 […]

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 […]

Life During Wartime

By Adam Lippe

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and you imitate yourself, does that mean you’re flattering yourself too? Catherine Breillat, a director often accused of taking herself too seriously while trying to punish the audience, tried to pull off this self-flattery thing with her 2002 film Sex is Comedy, which mocked her infamous 2001 […]

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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.