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The 5 minute feature film, volume 2: This World, Then the Fireworks

By Adam Lippe

Here is volume 2 of the 5 Minute Feature Film series, this time on Michael Oblowitz’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s This World, Then the Fireworks. The 5 Minute Feature Film series is where I take a full length movie and cut it down to 5 minutes in length, re-score it, but tell basically the same […]

This World, Then the Fireworks

By Adam Lippe

When you watch a movie, is there always a giveaway about how intentional a level of incompetence is? What I mean is, at what point does the appearance of satire or parody drift off into the area of just plain old dreadful? Unless you were in the director’s brain while he was on set, there’s […]

The Reflecting Skin

By Adam Lippe

No matter how much a filmmaker might protest, laughable and incoherent content should never be excused as elliptical, complicated symbolism. Take a movie like Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch; on the surface, it’s a story about young girls who are forced to become prostitutes so they can avoid being lobotomized. The movie is told through the […]

A podcast with Ann Louise Bardach, the screenwriter of Dennis Hopper’s Backtrack

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Ann Louise Bardach, journalist for The New York Times, Newsweek, Slate, etc., and the screenwriter of Dennis Hopper’s Backtrack, the director’s cut of which I reviewed here. Now Backtrack was an incredibly troubled production, sitting on the shelf for two years before being dumped by its bankrupt distributor in a cut […]

Backtrack: Director’s Cut

By Adam Lippe

The imagery described by Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) in Silence of the Lambs of Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) where, as an orphaned young girl running away from the farm where she lives, carrying a baby lamb away from inevitable slaughter with her, is etched into society’s cultural mind as much as […]

Barbarosa

By Adam Lippe

There’s a very valid reason for Mel Brooks not being particularly visible to the press during the production of two classics of the 1980s. His production company, Brooksfilms, was responsible for both David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, but Brooks went uncredited as an executive producer. If you knew that Brooks […]

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.