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The Company Men

By Adam Lippe

The most dominant trend in recent big budget films has been trying to humanize the superhero, as if he/she was a real person with real problems (Watchmen, Hancock, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, etc.). Sometimes, as with Defendor and Kick-Ass, the characters don’t have superpowers and the joke is not just their ineptitude but the annoyances of […]

Does your opinion matter? And since it doesn’t, will you like Hancock?

By Adam Lippe

As I’ve suggested in many of my reviews, Hollywood believes that the most important result from a film is a product – not necessarily entertainment, let alone art. Demonstrating this concept, a couple of recent films that were stripped down and spare to the point of absurdity, sometimes to their benefit, were The Incredible Hulk […]

Ugliness at and beneath the surface

By Adam Lippe

What Happens In Vegas… Roger Ebert, writing about Dice Rules, an Andrew “Dice” Clay concert film said that “it could not be more damaging to the career of Andrew “Dice” Clay if it had been made as a documentary by someone who hated him.” Well What Happens In Vegas is the equivalent, except this time […]

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.