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Lookin’ to Get Out vs. Lookin’ to Get Out: Revisionist History Vol. 1

By Adam Lippe

David Fincher’s Alien 3 is the best example of a very flawed film that was improved in a longer version, while still retaining all of those very same flaws. The theatrical cut, running just under two hours, has very little character development. And, therefore, apart from Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, doesn’t make you care about […]

Transsiberian

By Adam Lippe

It is not always a mystery why some films manage to creatively avoid widespread distribution. Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian, a mix of travelogue, relationship drama, Runaway Train, and Renny Harlin’s hilariously anti-Russian Born American, doesn’t fit into a specific category. The movie is well made, has terrific, snowy photography, and its minimal ambitions are an asset. […]

Garden State

By Adam Lippe

Garden State manages a high wire act for the first hour, where writer/director/star Zach Braff plays the straight man to all the odd things that are going on around him. At any moment it could have fallen apart and become one of those films where everyone in the small town is kooky and colorful and […]

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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.