Tag Archive

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 […]

A podcast q+a with Karl Urban, one of the many stars of Red

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Karl Urban, co-star of the action-comedy Red with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, and Brian Cox (who was also in a 2008 movie named Red). This is a recording of a conference call between Karl and 3 journalists, including me. It runs quickly and it is short (under […]

Howl

By Adam Lippe

Recently I interviewed Noah Buschel, the director of The Missing Person,  on the various ways the independent film world works and how it has changed over the past ten years. Noah would know better than most about this subject, because he made three films in three different eras of independent films, always having to change […]

Angels in America

By Adam Lippe

Angels in America is surprising in how it overcomes a facile ending and some ridiculously silly sequences (angels wrestling with each other) to remain generally moving and intimate. Emma Thompson’s dual performances as an angel and a NooYawk nurse were hammy, but Pacino and Justin Kirk, as the dumped AIDS infected lover walking around in […]

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.