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Style Over Stupid: Vol. 1, Black Dynamite vs. New York, I Love You

By Adam Lippe

I’d imagine it’d be hard to convince someone to give you money for what amounts to a film school exercise. Not so much for the actors who will probably have a ball playacting and indulging their most deliberately childish ideas. Take, for example a movie like Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho, a thoroughly […]

Somers Town

By Adam Lippe

The ability of some films to knock you into a blissful trance despite the absence of anything substantial occurring on screen is not just a credit to the filmmakers but a nearly unexplainable phenomenon. Jim Jarmusch made Stranger Than Paradise, a movie about nothing people, doing nothing. The scenes are long blackout sketches where the camera rarely, if ever moves, and the dialogue is dull on the surface. And yet, the movie is hilarious. Jarmusch pulled off this same feat in Down By Law, but the droll tricks started to wear thin…

The Guitar

By Adam Lippe

Completely shallow behavior expressed through endless materialism gets a bad rap. Ultimately, we’re all after stuff, better than what our neighbors have anyway. Life is just a series of shopping sprees at the mall, and if we can’t take it with us, we’ll be certain to max out our credit cards trying. Besides, personal relationships […]

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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.