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Redwoods

By Adam Lippe

There aren’t a lot of flaws in Doug Liman’s Swingers. The humor and insight into heterosexual insecurities and arbitrary rules is just as insightful nearly 15 years later, which is a credit to writer/star’s Jon Favreau’s script. But if there’s one distracting element, it’s a scene where Favreau blows a potential one night stand because […]

District 9 Review and Podcast

By Adam Lippe

Below you’ll find a review of Neill Bloomkamp’s Action-Sci-fi hybrid, District 9. I’m also including a podcast about the film which I conducted with the official mascot for Hamburger Helper, Helping Hand. Click the play icon to listen to the podcast. Or you can download the podcast here. (Right-click, Save Link As…) The downside of […]

The Hangover

By Adam Lippe

There’s a famous scene in Doug Liman’s Swingers that is the key to understanding the entire career of The Hangover director Todd Phillips. As Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn go on a midnight venture in Swingers, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in an attempt to salve their wounds as failed actors and lotharios, […]

The Sequel Rule

By Adam Lippe

Quite some time ago, I came to the realization that I had not been to a sequel in the theater since Hannibal, a book which I hated, but I was dragged by my ex and a friend who wanted to see it. I thought about why sequels were made and to what kind of movies […]

Iron Man

By Adam Lippe

For about 80 minutes, Iron Man is clearly the best comic book adaptation ever made. Sharp and witty, allowing for Robert Downey Jr. to give a completely freewheeling and simultaneously arrogant and self-deprecating performance, the movie makes fun of the dumb clichés inherent in these origin films, and makes it about the people and not […]

The Rundown

By Adam Lippe

The Rundown has furious action sequences, at a pace not seen since Jackie Chan’s First Strike, is edited like a Robert Rodriguez movie, so you can’t see the seams, and Christopher Walken trying to explain The Tooth Fairy to people who don’t speak his language. The surrounding material is a mishmash of clichés, but The […]

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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.