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Luke Wilson’s Hands Across America

By Adam Lippe

During the audio commentary for The Goonies, there’s a moment when the actor who played Chunk , Jeff Cohen (who is now an attorney), points out that a certain shot of his hands are “not my hands.” That’s about the way it should be, where the only person who notices that an insert shot, like the […]

The Music of Chance

By Adam Lippe

One of my least favorite terms to describe a movie/book/play is “a two-hander.” Sure, it’s a shorthand way of describing a piece of fiction that features only two characters, who are polar opposites of each other debating their particular points of view. But it’s such a reductive description, as if the story were so simplistic* […]

The Road

By Adam Lippe

During my interview with Shadow Billionaire director Alexis Spraic, she mentioned that she didn’t like the way that making documentaries had become a “competition about who can make the saddest film.” This line of thinking isn’t just limited to documentaries, indeed, many a fiction film falls into the trap of trying to bum out the […]

Antichrist

By Adam Lippe

Lars Von Trier has always had a canny way of indulging his critics by playing into their vision of him as a technically accomplished, but emotionally manipulative, misogynistic boor. Von Trier knows how to provoke the audience but it isn’t clear if he knows why he’s doing it (much like Vincent Gallo), other than to […]

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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.