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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 […]

The Guitar

By Adam Lippe

Completely shallow behavior expressed through endless materialism gets a bad rap. Ultimately, we’re all after stuff, better than what our neighbors have anyway. Life is just a series of shopping sprees at the mall, and if we can’t take it with us, we’ll be certain to max out our credit cards trying. Besides, personal relationships […]

I Love You, Man

By Adam Lippe

Good news. The mediocre movie is getting a lot better. Raising the forgettable bar without any effort is the second Paul Rudd high/no concept comedy in the last few months, I Love You, Man. With the Role Models DVD release piggybacking the I Love You, Man TV spot and the 2008 copyright date on ILY,M, […]

Cinematic Conventions

By Adam Lippe

I have always appreciated the way that Wet Hot American Summer makes fun of not just summer camp movies, which is an easy target, but many comedy conventions that have long been overused. Especially funny is the mocking of the sports movie, where they actually discuss all the clichés, from the ragtag losers who become […]

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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.