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$10,000 Blood Money

By Adam Lippe

The Italian film industry sure loves their rip-offs. In the late 1960s, they made dozens of imitations of Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly). In the mid 1970s, they made countless crime films, primarily inspired by The French […]

Really, I’m fine with you watering it down: Part II: Blue Valentine, A Film Unfinished, and Red

By Adam Lippe

Continued from here: Sometimes the watering down of a movie is not from within, but the film gets punished for its honesty and direct emotion. Such is the case with Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine which received a bewildering NC-17 from the MPAA for, well, because Michelle Williams has a realistic orgasm on screen. The MPAA […]

Overnight

By Adam Lippe

Overnight is a highly amusing and deserving embarrassment of Troy Duffy, the writer/director of The Boondock Saints. It follows Duffy from when Harvey Weinstein found him at the bar he was bouncing at and signed him to direct the film, have his band play the music, and even buy the bar and let him manage […]

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.