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Life During Wartime

By Adam Lippe

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and you imitate yourself, does that mean you’re flattering yourself too? Catherine Breillat, a director often accused of taking herself too seriously while trying to punish the audience, tried to pull off this self-flattery thing with her 2002 film Sex is Comedy, which mocked her infamous 2001 […]

Palindromes

By Adam Lippe

Maybe it would have helped had I seen the movie with a suck up audience, the kind of Sundancy viewer that writer-director Todd Solondz pretends to mock but clearly desires their recognition. In fact all 8 of the people in attendance at the screening were silent the entire 100 minutes, except for myself, when the […]

Owning Mahowney

By Adam Lippe

Rarely has a movie captured the feeling of doom better than this one. You know what it’s like, where you find yourself in a repetitive cycle, constantly doing things that you know to be bad for you, and you don’t even really take any pleasure in it, it’s just a compulsive act. You know that […]

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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.