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Lisztomania

By Adam Lippe

There’s a famous story about how Paddy Chayefsky, screenwriter of Network, who had it in his contract that none of the dialogue that he wrote for Altered States could be changed. That presented a problem for any director brave enough to tackle the speech and science heavy material and still assert themselves on the set, […]

Fearless Frank

By Adam Lippe

In the days where there were no such things as digital video and affordable cameras for the consumer, it must have been fun to work simultaneously without a net and on a low budget. That way, you could experiment with formats and ideas — even if they weren’t fully formed ideas — playing around with […]

A podcast q+a with the director of Splice and Cube, Vincenzo Natali

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a 30-minute Q&A with Vincenzo Natali, the director of Splice, which I recorded after a screening of the film last week. Vincenzo was very composed and self-effacing and was willing to answer any question (including a deliberately absurd one I asked early on). Those who haven’t seen Splice may want to skip through this […]

Otto; or Up With Dead People

By Adam Lippe

Sometimes a movie has absolutely no conceivable audience, and you feel like applauding it just for its existence, regardless of quality. Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or Up With Dead People is a cheap mess, mixing his penchant for camp and gay porn, with zombies and avant-garde film references, not to mention film-within-a-film nonsense. Otto is clumsy […]

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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.