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Valhalla Rising

By Adam Lippe

It would make sense that creating a brutal, no-brainer medieval movie, with tons of clanking swords, stabbings, bludgeoning, grunting, and minimal dialogue would be simple and not require either a big budget or a level of acting above say, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Cyborg. You’d be wrong of course; otherwise there would be much […]

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 […]

Love Me If You Dare

By Adam Lippe

What starts out as an emptyheaded but amusing Amelie riff, with the magical realism, swooping camerawork, green and brown filtered into every shot, quickly turns maddeningly banal as soon as the characters become adults. Suddenly, it becomes an invisible obstacle romance, where they create things between them and other characters (like the guy’s father) act […]

Dellamorte Dellamore

By Adam Lippe

I first saw Dellamorte Dellamore in the theater in May of 1996 under the US title of Cemetery Man. I remember being very amused for the most part, it was a film that had a weird rhythm to it, an anything goes quality that certainly I didn’t see in most mainstream fare. At a certain […]

Amelie: Or how by writing a review on the three different versions I bought, I can write it off on my taxes.

By Adam Lippe

That Amelie is vacuous, blindly optimistic, without meaning, nor about anything in particular did not stop it from being the second best movie screened in the US in 2001 (the best was far and away Battle Royale, which still has no distribution). Stuffed with so many bizarre and wonderful ideas as to shame Being John […]

Dark Water

By Adam Lippe

Hideo Nakata (Ringu, Chaos) is an extremely talented director, who thrives on creating dread inducing atmosphere out of simple elements. And when he is working on the mystery rather than the revelation of the story, the movie works very well. Nakata clearly storyboards all of his shots in advance, each frame seems to be taken […]

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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.