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World’s Greatest Dad

By Adam Lippe

For all the mean-spirited humor and nasty comeuppances it contains as a movie, Heathers is rather tame. This isn’t the fault of screenwriter Daniel Waters, who envisioned a conclusion far darker than the comparatively quaint one used. Waters had planned a scene where Winona Ryder kills Christian Slater and then blows up the school and […]

Paper Heart

By Adam Lippe

According to one of the starry-eyed children interviewed at an Atlanta playground during Nicholas Jasenovec’s mockumentary Paper Heart, the most romantic place to take a woman on a date is Applebee’s. Somehow, the child’s utterance is perfect for the movie’s subject, mumbly and ironically inexpressive comic and musician Charlyne Yi, who, for the purposes of […]

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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.