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A podcast q+a with Danny Boyle and an audience q+a with Danny Boyle

By Adam Lippe

Here’s both a roundtable q+a with 127 Hours director Danny Boyle and an audience q+a recorded after a screening the night before the roundtable was held.  There’s a bit of overlap in the 50 total minutes (20 for roundtable, 30 for audience q+a) but considering the audience q+a (which is moderated by Philadelphia Inquirer critic […]

Truth or Friction: Film Festivals Part V

By Adam Lippe

Few things will put you more in a position to question your level of maturity than covering a film festival. Shouldn’t I enjoy my medicine by burying myself in high minded dramas on important subject matter and dry documentaries that detail the struggles of a trendy third world country? What kind of an adult would […]

Really, I’m fine with you watering it down: Part I: 127 Hours and Conviction

By Adam Lippe

If, according to screenwriter William Goldman (The Princess Bride, All the President’s Men), “In Hollywood, nobody knows anything,” then why is there always the need to taper off the intensity (read: effectiveness) of a movie in order to make it more palatable to a mainstream audience? Marketing is admittedly guesswork, and with the right evidence, […]

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 […]

Beeswax

By Adam Lippe

In Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, his adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s notoriously impenetrable novel, there’s a scene where Johnny Lee Miller’s character, Sick Boy, is heartbroken over the death of his child. All of the other heroin addicts in the room are stunned, staring at the dead baby. Sick Boy screams at Ewan McGregor’s character, Mark Renton, […]

An interview with Lynn Shelton, the director of Humpday

By Adam Lippe

Lynn Shelton, the director of Humpday (review and podcast here), was supporting her movie and I got a chance to pester her in person. Humpday is about two friends from college, now older. Ben (played by one of the credited pioneers of the Mumblecore movement, writer/director of The Puffy Chair and Baghead, Mark Duplass), is […]

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.