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In a Glass Cage

By Adam Lippe

How do you keep an audience in a state of shock for an entire film? It’s probably a delicate balance and part of that balance is making sure you don’t push it too far. There are many extreme gore or rape/revenge movies that try so hard to offend and alienate that they just become laughable. […]

The Invention of Lying

By Adam Lippe

In a recent interview on Conan O’Brien’s late night show, Michael Moore told a story about the difficulty in making a movie about the evils of capitalism (his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, you can read my review here, a longer version will appear soon) for a studio*, a business that thrives on capitalism. […]

Moon

By Adam Lippe

A sterile home is just plain creepy. It suggests something unlived in, frozen in time, free from human connection. David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers, The Fly, Scanners) knows this, which is why he’s always setting sections of his movies in hospitals, the most antiseptic place possible. The body that had previously inhabited the room is gone. […]

The Life Aquatic

By Adam Lippe

It may be near impossible to mix ironic distance with serious violence and death, but there was certainly an effort put forth in The Life Aquatic. I’m not sure what the point was to throw graphic violence and pirates into a self-conscious comedy satirizing such a thin target as how silly Jacques Cousteau films look […]

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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.