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A podcast with Josh Shelov, the writer/director of The Best and the Brightest

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Josh Shelov, the writer/director of The Best and the Brightest. While the film is screening in Philadelphia as you read this (that is, if you’re reading this as soon as I post it, so, that would just be me), it will open in a more traditional fashion in the next few […]

Knight and Day

By Adam Lippe

He looks aghast at the poster for the party. I Sold My Mom’s Wheelchair. “Dance music for old people?” It’s the moment that John Cusack’s character in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity realizes that this poster is being used to promote a band he just signed, and the party and album title will be one he’s […]

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 […]

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 […]

Opening in theaters May 15th

By Adam Lippe

The best movie of last year, not released to US theaters, was Big Man Japan, a hilarious, moving, silly, deadpan, ridiculous mockumentary. Imagine if Christopher Guest made a movie about Godzilla, as if he were real, and you sort of get the idea, but it is a lot better than that description. Big Man Japan […]

Me and Him

By Adam Lippe

True film connoisseurs are eminently familiar with the later works of director Bob Clark, when he took a right turn from his popular early horror and exploitation titles like Black Christmas and Porky’s and chose to follow in the footsteps of his classic A Christmas Story by exclusively exploring the younger market. His most notable […]

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.