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Funny People

By Adam Lippe

Last year’s biggest hit, The Dark Knight, proved a lot of things—about the strength of the franchise, about the positive financial advantages a movie has with a deceased star being the lead* (see: The Crow), and that you can change actors from film to film, such as with the part of Rachel Dawes, played by […]

The Dark Knight

By Adam Lippe

The late, great critic for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, talked about the manufacturing of the blockbuster and how the product was no longer important, just that it was considered a sellable ride. The Dark Knight is certainly a viable product: well made, sleek, sturdy, efficient, and yet sort of hollow. Part of the problem […]

Monster’s Ball

By Adam Lippe

Spoilers everywhere…. There’s an odd linking of vomit going throughout Monster’s Ball that I think has never been addressed. Billy Bob throws up in the first scene, but nothing is made of it. It’s just part of the routine. It doesn’t even faze him. And this sort of establishes the way that the people 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.