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Farewell, My Lovely

By Adam Lippe

When you rely on the 20 year old cycle of nostalgia as your form of entertainment, you know that the material is going to date instantly. It’s one thing to be a sort of time capsule movie that reflects the period it was made in (like William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA), but […]

A podcast with Going the Distance writer Geoff LaTulippe, potential egobursting ahead

By Adam Lippe

This podcast was a tough one. It’s an interview with the writer of Going the Distance, Geoff LaTulippe. Geoff wrote the original screenplay that was on the 2008 Blacklist (Up in the Air was also on it), which is a list of all of the best unproduced screenplays floating around Hollywood. I’ve read Geoff’s screenplay, […]

Going the Distance

By Adam Lippe

There are many critics who like to feign anger or moral outrage towards a movie. That’s purely an emotional reaction and not an intellectual one; the truth is that very few films are worthy of any sort of ire, it’s just a terrific way to get attention by piling on the derogatory snark. Exceptions do […]

A Podcast Q+A with Kelly McGillis, much awkwardness and bizarre fawning to follow

By Adam Lippe

Here is a podcast q+a with Kelly McGillis (Witness, Top Gun), recorded during Philadelphia’s QFest (Queerfest), as Ms. McGillis was being given the artistic achievement award. Normally, this isn’t the sort of q+a I’d upload, but the whole thing was so strange, I figured I should share. To give some context, Ms. McGillis was considered […]

Silent Running

By Adam Lippe

One of the oddest combinations of producer and director in the history of Hollywood occurred on Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, with Richard Gere as a moody, shallow gigolo. It contains Schrader’s (writer of Taxi Driver, director of Mishima, Hardcore, and Auto Focus) usual themes of guilt and introspection. American Gigolo was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, […]

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

By Adam Lippe

Over the past few years, director Tony Scott (Top Gun, True Romance, Enemy of the State) has been taking shots from the press over his recent fascination with film school tricks like flash frames, jump cuts, color filtering and his insistence on somehow cutting his films even faster than he used to. Whether this is […]

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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.