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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 […]

Ninja Assassin

By Adam Lippe

The big-budget version of an exploitation movie is fool’s gold. Sure, the filmmaker who could have used some more money to make his action sequences more convincing or get more than one take of any given shot is a worthy cause. But there’s scrappy charm in low-budget films and you forgive the mistakes as part […]

Crank: High Voltage

By Adam Lippe

Is it possible to be consciously and intentionally out of control? If a Nascar driver were swerving and spinning for hundreds of laps and ended up winning the race, could he do the same thing again on purpose? Should you be given credit for a lucky accident? Donnie Darko might be the answer to those […]

District 9 Review and Podcast

By Adam Lippe

Below you’ll find a review of Neill Bloomkamp’s Action-Sci-fi hybrid, District 9. I’m also including a podcast about the film which I conducted with the official mascot for Hamburger Helper, Helping Hand. Click the play icon to listen to the podcast. Or you can download the podcast here. (Right-click, Save Link As…) The downside 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, […]

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 […]

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.