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Limitless

By Adam Lippe

You’re always in trouble when you go high concept because it means, if you’re going to be fair to yourself, you shouldn’t take the easy way out and just pile on the clichés. What’s the point of having promise and then going through the motions anyway, considering you’re not interested in developing your own idea? […]

A podcast with Chris Morris, the writer/director of Four Lions

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Chris Morris, the writer/director of the suicide bomber satire, Four Lions. While Morris is not particularly well known in the US, he has a huge following in the UK, where his satirical TV shows like Brass Eye, Nathan Barley, and the surrealist shock comedy Jam, have made quite an impression. And […]

Catfish

By Adam Lippe

Last year, when I wrote about Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up, I suggested that it was some sort of miracle that a movie directed with such condescension and pandering was still engaging and entertaining. When one of the most dominant elements of production is off-putting, it’s unlikely that a viewer will be […]

A Podcast Q&A with John C. Reilly, star of Magnolia, Chicago, Stepbrothers and the new film Cyrus

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast q&a with the star of the Duplass brothers’ new film Cyrus, John C. Reilly. The interview was held after a Philadelphia screening of Cyrus. There’s nothing mindblowing about the questions, they cover the expected topics like working with Will Ferrell, Marisa Tomei, and the differences between playing comedy and playing drama. However, […]

Beeswax

By Adam Lippe

In Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, his adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s notoriously impenetrable novel, there’s a scene where Johnny Lee Miller’s character, Sick Boy, is heartbroken over the death of his child. All of the other heroin addicts in the room are stunned, staring at the dead baby. Sick Boy screams at Ewan McGregor’s character, Mark Renton, […]

My Effortless Brilliance

By Adam Lippe

The ever-changing definition of the term hipster is troubling for anyone who either tries to pigeonhole someone into that category or someone who feels that it may be the only way for them to fit in, no matter how insincere the entire concept is. Poseur isn’t quite right, though there’s certainly an element of 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.