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The Men Who Stare At Goats

By Adam Lippe

No matter what you think of Saw as a film, it’s hard to deny that the guys who made it, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, are geniuses. Not that they’re all that talented, as a feature film Saw is derivative, badly acted, and needlessly convoluted. What differentiates Wan and Whannell from standard exploitation filmmakers (torture […]

Bad Blood

By Adam Lippe

That NC-17 rating sure is tantalizing. It will draw you into watching the most routine and uninteresting films. What could the ratings board have objected to so strenuously as to mark a film unacceptable for anyone but adults? Why are movies like the relatively tame Bank Robber or Teenage Bonnie and Klepto Clyde voted verboten […]

Shrink

By Adam Lippe

You know what’s awful about shallow people? They’re just so… shallow. Shallow people have nothing to say, but despite that they seem completely self-involved, about what isn’t clear. If you don’t have thoughts, what could you be thinking of? What does the stereotypically shallow Hollywood agent consider when he’s yelling and screaming at people and […]

Skeleton Crew

By Adam Lippe

The easiest way for filmmakers to get themselves out of being painted into the corner is with a deus ex machina. Sometimes that deus ex machina is a lapse of logic, like Samuel L. Jackson driving on the highway and looking out his window at the exact moment Bruce Willis flies out of a water […]

Moon

By Adam Lippe

A sterile home is just plain creepy. It suggests something unlived in, frozen in time, free from human connection. David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers, The Fly, Scanners) knows this, which is why he’s always setting sections of his movies in hospitals, the most antiseptic place possible. The body that had previously inhabited the room is gone. […]

The Unreliable Narrator

By Adam Lippe

My Best Fiend, director Werner Herzog’s documentary about his turbulent relationship with Klaus Kinski and the five films they made together, got me to thinking about what Kinski, dead long before the movie was made, would have had to say on the matter. Herzog got to make the movie his way, creating whatever message 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.