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The Big Fix

By Adam Lippe

Is it hard to believe that the 1973 novel The Big Fix was released a whole year before the novel of Fletch? Is Fletch just a WASP-y version of The Big Fix’s Moses Wine? Jeremy Paul Kagan’s film version of The Big Fix, stars and was produced by Richard Dreyfuss, making the Jewish subtext unmistakable. […]

He Never Meta Film Reference He Didn’t Like: A Review of Cop Out

By Adam Lippe

The late, great film critic Pauline Kael wrote that “an homage is a plagiarism that your lawyer tells you is not actionable.” Where do you draw that line though? When does gentle chiding and affection turn into parody? Certainly a film like last year’s Black Dynamite made that difficult to determine; because, while it tried […]

Me and Him

By Adam Lippe

True film connoisseurs are eminently familiar with the later works of director Bob Clark, when he took a right turn from his popular early horror and exploitation titles like Black Christmas and Porky’s and chose to follow in the footsteps of his classic A Christmas Story by exclusively exploring the younger market. His most notable […]

Nothing But Trouble

By Adam Lippe

Everything about Nothing But Trouble is so elaborate, yet so pointless. The only laugh in the entire movie is when Dan Aykroyd put a gas nozzle on a tin of Hawaiian Punch. However, there is the enjoyable notion of a condiment train and that gaffe where Demi Moore’s [pre-surgery] tits fall out of the top […]

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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.