Tag Archive

Burn! – Uncut

By Adam Lippe

If we’re to believe the point of view of the Dr. Mengele doppelganger in the recent revenge-on-the-Nazis thriller The Debt, then the SS believed that the reason the Jews were the perfect victims was because they were not going to fight back. Not that they weren’t strong people, but that they believed in self-preservation. To […]

A podcast with Chris Morris, the writer/director of Four Lions

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Chris Morris, the writer/director of the suicide bomber satire, Four Lions. While Morris is not particularly well known in the US, he has a huge following in the UK, where his satirical TV shows like Brass Eye, Nathan Barley, and the surrealist shock comedy Jam, have made quite an impression. And […]

Clash of the Titans (2010)

By Adam Lippe

It’s not a secret that the goal of reputable porn filmmakers has been to make a movie that is both erotic and dramatically riveting. Since the early 70s, the heyday of well made pornography (which includes such titles as The Opening of Misty Beethoven and The Devil in Miss Jones), there have been a few […]

Shank

By Adam Lippe

Opening with a coke-filled clandestine Internet hook-up in the woods, quickly followed up with a painful headbutt, Simon Pearce’s Shank successfully treads the line between sweet romance, gay soft-core porn, gang violence, and aimless exploitation. The combination of all of these elements is the only way the movie is unique; otherwise, it’s just a coming-out […]

The Men Who Stare At Goats

By Adam Lippe

No matter what you think of Saw as a film, it’s hard to deny that the guys who made it, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, are geniuses. Not that they’re all that talented, as a feature film Saw is derivative, badly acted, and needlessly convoluted. What differentiates Wan and Whannell from standard exploitation filmmakers (torture […]

Five Minutes of Heaven

By Adam Lippe

Period pieces always create a lot of problems for filmmakers, from the costumes, make-up, style of speech, and an overall look of the actors. It gets worse when the movie takes place in an era that the audience might have lived through. But when directors get bogged down in these small details, they often lose […]

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 [...]

Recent Reviews


Veegie Awards
Winner: BEST ONLINE FILM CRITIC, 2010 National Veegie Awards (Vegan Themed Entertainment)

Nominee: BEST NEW PRODUCT, 2011 National Veegie Awards: The Vegan Condom

Recent Comments

Archive

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.