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The Music of Chance

By Adam Lippe

One of my least favorite terms to describe a movie/book/play is “a two-hander.” Sure, it’s a shorthand way of describing a piece of fiction that features only two characters, who are polar opposites of each other debating their particular points of view. But it’s such a reductive description, as if the story were so simplistic* […]

The Big Fix

By Adam Lippe

Is it hard to believe that the 1973 novel The Big Fix was released a whole year before the novel of Fletch? Is Fletch just a WASP-y version of The Big Fix’s Moses Wine? Jeremy Paul Kagan’s film version of The Big Fix, stars and was produced by Richard Dreyfuss, making the Jewish subtext unmistakable. […]

What?

By Adam Lippe

My theory has always been that Robert Altman fully developed his never-to-be-broken misanthropy while filming the conclusion of California Split. It was a spur of the moment decision on set, but who knows what Altman was going through personally at the time (he had a major problem with cocaine and alcohol)? George Segal and pal […]

Lookin’ to Get Out vs. Lookin’ to Get Out: Revisionist History Vol. 1

By Adam Lippe

David Fincher’s Alien 3 is the best example of a very flawed film that was improved in a longer version, while still retaining all of those very same flaws. The theatrical cut, running just under two hours, has very little character development. And, therefore, apart from Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, doesn’t make you care about […]

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, […]

Tyson

By Adam Lippe

Objectivity, while not the most important ingredient in a documentary, still should not be ignored. Tyson, director/gambler/narcisist James Toback’s portrait of his longtime friend former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, flatters itself with what it thinks is brutal honesty, but in fact has no more depth than a puff piece on Entertainment Tonight. If Toback (Two Girls and a […]

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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.