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Dragged, Kicking and Screaming to Answer Year-End/Best of 2011 Questions

By Adam Lippe

I am not a fan of year-end lists. They are entirely reductive and self-congratulatory. However the text below was triggered by another critic, Examiner.com’s Jason Roestel, who asked me to contribute to his year-end piece. So this is a version that fixes as many grammatical errors as I originally had, as well as some significant […]

Public Enemies

By Adam Lippe

It’s quite the bold move to deliberately make your movie an eyesore. This is especially true when you’re someone like Michael Mann (Heat, Manhunter, Collateral), who is known specifically for his unique visuals. His new film, Public Enemies, is shot on video, and not in the same way that a lot of new movies are […]

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 […]

To Live and Die in LA

By Adam Lippe

Here’s the idea behind “An American, a Canadian, and an Elitist”: Rhett’s favorite movie is “Meatballs 4”, Josh likes Hollywood pap, and Adam is a prick who hates everything. We all watch far too many movies, and spend our time analyzing them. So we each watch the same movie, write our analysis of them, and […]

Collateral

By Adam Lippe

Despite Michael Mann’s expertise on the film “look,” the HD video Collateral was shot on looks exquisite, and is just right for the material. If there was one thing I liked about Mann’s Ali, it was the fights, and the way they were photographed, an almost 3-D effect of being there. Mann manages to similarly […]

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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.