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The Lift

By Adam Lippe

Low budget filmmakers are told to use what they can get, writing their screenplays around what locations they can afford. Reservoir Dogs was made by a director (Quentin Tarantino) who knew he couldn’t afford to shoot a heist movie so he worked out a way to show everything but the heist. Sure, there’s a bit […]

City of Hope

By Adam Lippe

In a movie filled with memorably bad dialogue, the one line that stands out in Megaforce, Hal Needham’s highly expensive venture into homoerotic war movies, is the scene where Ace Hunter (played by Barry Bostwick with a headband and full body spandex) informs the villain Duke Guerera, played by Henry Silva, that he might as […]

The 5 minute feature film, volume 3: Virus + a bonus review of Virus

By Adam Lippe

Here is my 5 minute interpretation of John Bruno’s Virus, a sci-fi thriller from 1999 starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Sutherland, and William Baldwin. As a movie, about a mysterious electrical life-force that animates killer robots on an abandoned Russian research vessel in the South Pacific, Virus is somehow simultaneously frantic and low energy. It’s […]

Parade (2009)

By Adam Lippe

On an October 2011 episode of WTF, Marc Maron’s podcast where he interviews other comics, comedian Hannibal Buress talked about his first venture in NY when he was a struggling comic. Buress says then, he was going to as many open mics as he could. But moving from Chicago to follow his dream, he was […]

A q+a with Fran Kranz, star of the new film The Cabin in the Woods

By Adam Lippe

Below is a q+a with actor Fran Kranz, who plays Marty, the resident stoner in the new meta-horror-comedy The Cabin in the Woods. It was recorded after a screening of the film on April 9th in Philadelphia. The Cabin in the Woods is the feature directing debut of Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard. It was produced […]

The 5 minute feature film, volume 1: Trespass

By Adam Lippe

As a companion piece to my analysis of Nicolas Cage’s current career, below is a visual summation of his 2011 movie Trespass, co-starring Nicole Kidman and Cam Gigandet. I’ve edited the entire thing down to just under 5 minutes, briefly glossing over important plot points (without major spoilers), yet you’ll still get the sense of […]

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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.