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Really, I’m fine with you watering it down: Part I: 127 Hours and Conviction

By Adam Lippe

If, according to screenwriter William Goldman (The Princess Bride, All the President’s Men), “In Hollywood, nobody knows anything,” then why is there always the need to taper off the intensity (read: effectiveness) of a movie in order to make it more palatable to a mainstream audience? Marketing is admittedly guesswork, and with the right evidence, […]

A Podcast with Roger Nygard, the Director of Trekkies, Suckers, and his new documentary The Nature of Existence

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Roger Nygard, the director of Trekkies, Trekkies 2, High Strung (w/Steve Odekerk and Jim Carrey), Back to Back: American Yakuza 2, Suckers, and his new documentary The Nature of Existence. This hour long podcast covers such topics as how to sell your movie in Japan by adding a vs. to the […]

A podcast with Jesus and his insight into The Final Destination

By Adam Lippe

Below is a podcast I conducted with Jesus about his reaction to the recent 3-D hit, The Final Destination. You can read my review of the film here. Click the play icon to listen to the podcast. Or you can download the podcast here. (Right-click, Save Link As…)

The Final Destination

By Adam Lippe

It’s always tempting to dissect a movie that never had any intention of being analyzed. You can read any message you want in a slew of different films; especially if sloppy filmmaking and indecision have left the door open (as with Knowing). Surely, a director who prepared, shot, and edited his movie during a period […]

Watchmen

By Adam Lippe

Among horror fans, there is a legendary moment in one of Wes Craven’s early films that would influence nearly every complex film that followed. Hurting for money, Craven went to the well to sequelize a film that would have a hard time being a sequel, seeing as pretty much every notable character died in the […]

Ken Park

By Adam Lippe

Ken Park tries so hard to shock that it ceases to be anything but strained and obvious. This isn’t a surprise coming from director/photographer/borderline pedophile Larry Clark, considering he made the quite similar Bully, which also featured hateful, inarticulate,  stupid teenagers engaging in self-destructive behavior, all of it leading to acts of horrifying violence. But […]

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.