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Knight and Day

By Adam Lippe

He looks aghast at the poster for the party. I Sold My Mom’s Wheelchair. “Dance music for old people?” It’s the moment that John Cusack’s character in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity realizes that this poster is being used to promote a band he just signed, and the party and album title will be one he’s […]

The Marc Pease Experience

By Adam Lippe

The best examples of movies that use product placement as plot points are Tsui Hark’s Double Team which amongst other things, has our heroes hide behind a Coke machine, protecting them from certain death and Alexander Payne’s Election, where Matthew Broderick, because he is staring at a can of Pepsi, is able to deduce that […]

Year One

By Adam Lippe

It doesn’t happen often. But sometimes you can tell how stale and unfunny a comedy is going to be just from the marketing alone. I’m not referring to the TV ads and trailers, which take bits out of context, often changing their meaning and humor value. I mean situations where a cast member shows up […]

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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.