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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 […]

The Master

By Adam Lippe

One of comedian Pete Holmes’ best physical bits has him showing the audience how he likes to stand, with his arms at his sides and with his back arched as he juts his stomach out. “Everybody knows that this is the most comfortable way to stand. I want to stand like a pregnant woman stirring […]

The 5 minute feature film, volume 2: This World, Then the Fireworks

By Adam Lippe

Here is volume 2 of the 5 Minute Feature Film series, this time on Michael Oblowitz’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s This World, Then the Fireworks. The 5 Minute Feature Film series is where I take a full length movie and cut it down to 5 minutes in length, re-score it, but tell basically the same […]

This World, Then the Fireworks

By Adam Lippe

When you watch a movie, is there always a giveaway about how intentional a level of incompetence is? What I mean is, at what point does the appearance of satire or parody drift off into the area of just plain old dreadful? Unless you were in the director’s brain while he was on set, there’s […]

A Man in Love (with bonus clip)

By Adam Lippe

It’s quite a bold move to try to explore mediocrity. Most of us never rise above it anyway. But if you have talent and you use it to look at those who can’t get past the middle, it can be seen as condescending and/or gloating. That’s why the context of mediocrity is so important; when […]

Surf II: The End of the Trilogy

By Adam Lippe

It may sound like a truly terrible idea, but I’ve based my entire life on lessons learned from the films of John Travolta. Watching Battlefield Earth, I gleaned that in order to control a planet of human beings; one must wear enormous platform shoes as well as repeatedly hit your head on low ceilings. This […]

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.