Tag Archive

A podcast with Summer Qing [Qing Xu], co-star of Looper: Mandarin and English friendly version.

By Adam Lippe

Here is a podcast with actress Summer Qing (also known as Qing Xu), who plays the wife of Bruce Willis‘ character in Rian Johnson‘s twisty action sci-fi film Looper. Summer’s role is the main motivation for Willis’ entire journey through time. Summer was also in a few Chen Kaige films, like Farewell, My Concubine, and […]

Howl

By Adam Lippe

Recently I interviewed Noah Buschel, the director of The Missing Person,  on the various ways the independent film world works and how it has changed over the past ten years. Noah would know better than most about this subject, because he made three films in three different eras of independent films, always having to change […]

Away We Go

By Adam Lippe

There’s an undiagnosed illness that most people don’t know about. But it can affect their personalities completely. Away We Go, Sam Mendes’ (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) new comedy-drama about a couple (John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph) going through their first pregnancy and how they travel all across the country to try to find the best place […]

Mediocrity Breeds Contempt: Film Festivals Part II

By Adam Lippe

As mentioned in part I of this series (which you can read here), there’s an eagerness for an audience to fall in love with some hidden gem at a film festival, especially a smaller one. This was hammered home with The Answer Man (also known as Arlen Faber), which got a featured spot in the […]

Visitor Q

By Adam Lippe

The difference between the Farrelly brothers movies and Visitor Q is the difference between the necessity involved in slapstick gross out humor and darker black humor. Gross out humor requires that the characters have no self awareness of their situation, if they know exactly what’s going on, if Ben Stiller knew he had cum on […]

A few thoughts on Jonathan Demme

By Adam Lippe

What Paul Thomas Anderson takes most from Jonathan Demme, is the fact that in most of his films, especially in Something Wild, he shows an interest in all the people, from the main characters, down to the smallest extra part. You watch Something Wild and you want to know more about ‘Sister’ Carol East as […]

Now on DVD and Blu-Ray

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.