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Predators

By Adam Lippe

After learning that I disliked his horror movie, a director at a film festival spent two days trying to confront me. I tried to be nice about it, complimenting the things I did enjoy such as the cinematography and how much he was able to get out of his obviously limited budget. He pestered me […]

Death at a Funeral (2010)

By Adam Lippe

When I was in college, I had to write a paper trying to explain why certain films were box office successes. It was 1998, and I surmised that the top 50 films as of the year’s end (in other words, final grosses were certainly not in by that point) were almost all formula; Buddy-cop, remake, […]

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 […]

Terminator Salvation

By Adam Lippe

They should remake Predator 2. Not because it’s a great movie, in fact, it is lousy 70% of the time, or any time someone opens their mouth. No, the reason to remake Predator 2 is because it is so flawed, but has some terrific hints of ideas near the conclusion, why the Predator does what […]

To Live and Die in LA

By Adam Lippe

Here’s the idea behind “An American, a Canadian, and an Elitist”: Rhett’s favorite movie is “Meatballs 4”, Josh likes Hollywood pap, and Adam is a prick who hates everything. We all watch far too many movies, and spend our time analyzing them. So we each watch the same movie, write our analysis of them, and […]

Saw

By Adam Lippe

Lions Gate is choosing to release Saw with an R rating, though what they cut for it to initially receive an NC-17, I couldn’t tell you. It’s more gruesome in tone than anything else, in the same way that Seven doesn’t actually have much onscreen violence. But Saw is abysmal and gets worse the more […]

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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.