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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 […]

A podcast with Billy Corben, director of Cocaine Cowboys, Raw Deal, Square Grouper, and The U

By Adam Lippe

Below is an interview with director Billy Corben, who made the two Cocaine Cowboys films, Raw Deal, Limelight, Square Grouper (his new documentary about pot smuggling in Florida, which he happened to be promoting at the time of this interview), and The U, which is relevant now since its subject is Miami University’s football team, […]

Drive Angry/Faster/My Soul to Take/I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

By Adam Lippe

When will disreputable nihilism become boring? Hopefully never. But there comes a point where self-satisfied nastiness taken to an extreme needs a little bit of flavor to distinguish itself. Patrick Lussier’s Drive Angry tries to spice things up with its effective use of 3D and by cobbling together as many exploitation clichés as possible: the […]

Some Kind of Monster

By Adam Lippe

Some Kind of Monster, about the production of Metallica’s St. Anger album, is a 140 minute explanation for how forgettable, corporate metal gets made. While a featurette for a movie that is bad in a rather traditional, boring way, is rarely going to be detailed, and certainly not going to really reveal the depth of […]

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.