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Camille (1936)

By Adam Lippe

Here’s the idea behind “A Canadian, an American, a Lawyer, and an Elitist”: Rhett’s favorite movie is Meatballs 4,  Shawn has an unhealthy fixation on Resident Evil, Richard scoffs at anything that isn’t pretentious and hoity toity, and Adam is a prick who hates everything. We all watch far too many movies, and spend our […]

District 13: Ultimatum

By Adam Lippe

On Conan O’Brien’s final show before he was forced off The Tonight Show, he said that people should try to avoid being cynical about life, as that was his least favorite emotion. It’s a noble gesture and it’s a nice thought that one can go through life believing people and not looking for ulterior motives. […]

From Paris With Love

By Adam Lippe

There’s a scene in one of my favorite movies, Kicking and Screaming (the one about post-college ennui, not Will Ferrell screaming at pee-wee soccer players) where one character, Otis, responds to a challenge to name eight movies where a monkey plays a key role. After a few titles, the character, played by Carlos Jacott, starts […]

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…

Taken

By Adam Lippe

Since Luc Besson stopped directing, he has become more than a veritable production factory. He has established his array of mediocre and indistinguishable French directors as minions to his every whim of entirely disposable and forgettable action nonsense. Their formulas are simple; minimal dialogue that can be easily uttered by the multinational cast in English. […]

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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.