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Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus

By Adam Lippe

Here’s the idea behind “A Canadian, an American, a Lawyer, and an Elitist”: Rhett’s favorite movie is Meatballs 4,  Shawn has an unhealthy fixation on Resident Evil, Richard scoffs at anything that isn’t pretentious and hoity toity, and Adam is a prick who hates everything. We all watch far too many movies, and spend our […]

District 13: Ultimatum

By Adam Lippe

On Conan O’Brien’s final show before he was forced off The Tonight Show, he said that people should try to avoid being cynical about life, as that was his least favorite emotion. It’s a noble gesture and it’s a nice thought that one can go through life believing people and not looking for ulterior motives. […]

From Paris With Love

By Adam Lippe

There’s a scene in one of my favorite movies, Kicking and Screaming (the one about post-college ennui, not Will Ferrell screaming at pee-wee soccer players) where one character, Otis, responds to a challenge to name eight movies where a monkey plays a key role. After a few titles, the character, played by Carlos Jacott, starts […]

The [Motor]Cycles of the Film Industry

By Adam Lippe

It is no secret that Hollywood loves to be environmentally conscious by recycling product. What starts out “pure” gets used and then thrown in the trash where it is crushed to make several different products. This purity in movie terms would be represented in an “original vision,” and something that could be easily replicated. Quality […]

Ultraviolet

By Adam Lippe

Minimalism is treated by the public in different ways, depending on the subject matter. With Phillip Glass, his music has been little more than a variation on the same theme for nearly thirty years, and yet is cited as a genius. With Jim Jarmusch, his spare, droll films, such as Stranger than Paradise and Down […]

The Gay Action Hero is Still in the Closet

By Adam Lippe

Since the invention of postmodernism, it has been quite easy to find homoerotic subtext in any film involving bonding between members of the same sex (Lord of the Rings), men who like to hold guns (any buddy-cop action movie from Lethal Weapon to Damon Wayans’ gun literally up Adam Sandler’s ass in Bulletproof) or women […]

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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.