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A Podcast with Scott Cooper, the Director of Crazy Heart

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper who led lead actor Jeff Bridges to a Golden Globe Award. The film is about “Bad” Blake, an alcohol soaked, washed up rock/blues singer, touring dingy bars across the US. Unable to get albums released without the help of his former protege, and now big star, […]

Five Minutes of Heaven

By Adam Lippe

Period pieces always create a lot of problems for filmmakers, from the costumes, make-up, style of speech, and an overall look of the actors. It gets worse when the movie takes place in an era that the audience might have lived through. But when directors get bogged down in these small details, they often lose […]

Shrink

By Adam Lippe

You know what’s awful about shallow people? They’re just so… shallow. Shallow people have nothing to say, but despite that they seem completely self-involved, about what isn’t clear. If you don’t have thoughts, what could you be thinking of? What does the stereotypically shallow Hollywood agent consider when he’s yelling and screaming at people and […]

2008 In Review

By Adam Lippe

A great premise can be tantalizing to a studio. A corporation only thinks about a way to sell its product, it is uninterested in its level of mediocrity, so a solitary, exciting idea sounds great in a 30 second ad. A writer knows better, realizing that the initial premise is only the starting point, you […]

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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.