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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

By Adam Lippe

For a long time, the cheapest place to shoot a movie was in Canada, often in Vancouver. Virtually every movie that was supposed to take place in New York City would be comprised of a few aerial shots of Manhattan and then any external scenes would be shot in close enough where you couldn’t identify […]

The Marc Pease Experience

By Adam Lippe

The best examples of movies that use product placement as plot points are Tsui Hark’s Double Team which amongst other things, has our heroes hide behind a Coke machine, protecting them from certain death and Alexander Payne’s Election, where Matthew Broderick, because he is staring at a can of Pepsi, is able to deduce that […]

Mac and Me

By Adam Lippe

While it would be fair to complain that the recent #1 film in the US, Disturbia, is a movie built on shameless product placement (check out that opening Coca-Cola moment in the first scene!), and doesn’t have to make a dime to be profitable, the producers still have something to strive for. While Adam Sandler […]

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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.