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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 […]

Silent Running

By Adam Lippe

One of the oddest combinations of producer and director in the history of Hollywood occurred on Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, with Richard Gere as a moody, shallow gigolo. It contains Schrader’s (writer of Taxi Driver, director of Mishima, Hardcore, and Auto Focus) usual themes of guilt and introspection. American Gigolo was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, […]

Spellbound (2002)

By Adam Lippe

For several years, I watched the National spelling bee competitions on ESPN, and they were so nerve-wracking that I had to take breaks every 40 minutes or so. It was a combination of watching these kids suffer, the pressure their parents must place on them, the fact that they no doubt get teased mercilessly in […]

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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.