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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 […]

Terrible Ideas Executed Superbly

By Adam Lippe

John Frankenheimer’s Dead-Bang has the most tired of all plots; beaten down, alcoholic cop (played by Don Johsnon), divorced and grizzled, gets yelled at by his superiors and screws up whenever he can. He runs down a ruthless criminal traveling from state to state trying to join with a well funded group of KKK members. […]

Stop-Loss

By Adam Lippe

“You got a right to be stupid.” A more apt line to describe its characters and its intended audience could not be written. Stop-Loss,* an updated version of a Vietnam film, concerns the miscast Ryan Phillipe as a dedicated soldier in Iraq whose tour is coming to an end as the movie begins. When he […]

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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.