Tag Archive

Dragged, Kicking and Screaming to Answer Year-End/Best of 2011 Questions

By Adam Lippe

I am not a fan of year-end lists. They are entirely reductive and self-congratulatory. However the text below was triggered by another critic, Examiner.com’s Jason Roestel, who asked me to contribute to his year-end piece. So this is a version that fixes as many grammatical errors as I originally had, as well as some significant […]

Grace

By Adam Lippe

The current issue of Newsweek has a picture of a baby staring straight at the camera with a slightly concerned look on her face, with the headline across her forehead “Is your baby racist?” A deliberately provocative question (the article is nothing more than extended book promotion for the authors of the piece), but as […]

Crank: High Voltage

By Adam Lippe

Is it possible to be consciously and intentionally out of control? If a Nascar driver were swerving and spinning for hundreds of laps and ended up winning the race, could he do the same thing again on purpose? Should you be given credit for a lucky accident? Donnie Darko might be the answer to those […]

Inglourious Basterds Podcast, with special guest Benji

By Adam Lippe

Below you’ll find a podcast about Quentin Tarantino’s  Inglourious Basterds, which I conducted with the famed star of 30 years worth of films, Benji. You can read a review of the film here. Click the play icon to listen to the podcast. Or you can download the podcast here. (Right-click, Save Link As…)

Inglourious Basterds

By Adam Lippe

The male psyche is such a fragile animal that virtually any questioning of it will result in either an abundance of defensive mechanisms kicking in or a complete melt-down. This is why men need to be right about everything and asking for help on any matter is considered a mortal sin of the ego. That’s […]

Lookin’ to Get Out vs. Lookin’ to Get Out: Revisionist History Vol. 1

By Adam Lippe

David Fincher’s Alien 3 is the best example of a very flawed film that was improved in a longer version, while still retaining all of those very same flaws. The theatrical cut, running just under two hours, has very little character development. And, therefore, apart from Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, doesn’t make you care about […]

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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.