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Whatever Works

By Adam Lippe

Is it possible for a movie to be stagey and dated even if it was neither based on a play nor more than a few weeks old? Are cranky Jews all the same or is there a significant difference based on where they grew up and the specific cause of their self-hatred? Do all recent […]

Cohen and Tate

By Adam Lippe

The career of writer/director Eric Red fascinates for a number of reasons. But mostly because he melds the mystical and vague with utter incompetence. Red got his big break with his screenplay for The Hitcher, a combination of ridiculous 1980’s action, mysterious psychopath slasher film, open road spareness, and narrative incoherence mistaken for open-endedness, all […]

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

By Adam Lippe

Over the past few years, director Tony Scott (Top Gun, True Romance, Enemy of the State) has been taking shots from the press over his recent fascination with film school tricks like flash frames, jump cuts, color filtering and his insistence on somehow cutting his films even faster than he used to. Whether this is […]

Away We Go

By Adam Lippe

There’s an undiagnosed illness that most people don’t know about. But it can affect their personalities completely. Away We Go, Sam Mendes’ (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) new comedy-drama about a couple (John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph) going through their first pregnancy and how they travel all across the country to try to find the best place […]

The Merry Gentleman

By Adam Lippe

In the pantheon of films about depressed hitmen either on their last job or on the verge of suicide, The Merry Gentleman stands tall, in the middle of the pack. Not as insightful, moving, nor funny as the William H. Macy starring Panic* or as wonderfully awful as Nicholas Cage’s foray in the remake of […]

The Hangover

By Adam Lippe

There’s a famous scene in Doug Liman’s Swingers that is the key to understanding the entire career of The Hangover director Todd Phillips. As Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn go on a midnight venture in Swingers, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in an attempt to salve their wounds as failed actors and lotharios, […]

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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.