Tag Archive

True Grit (2010)

By Adam Lippe

Atmosphere is everything to an experience. I remember going to A Tribe Called Quest concert when I was in college and, while the opening act was appropriate — middling, low-key rappers — the middle act was a hard rock band that looked and sounded somewhat like Living Colour (they of the early 90s hit Cult […]

Hollywood Air Force

By Adam Lippe

The late comedian Mitch Hedberg, in one of his more perceptive, addled observations, pointed out how multi-tasking is not solely a requirement of office work, but falls under Hollywood’s expectations as well: “As a comedian, I always get into situations where I’m auditioning for movies and sitcoms, you know? As a comedian, they want you […]

Five Minutes of Heaven

By Adam Lippe

Period pieces always create a lot of problems for filmmakers, from the costumes, make-up, style of speech, and an overall look of the actors. It gets worse when the movie takes place in an era that the audience might have lived through. But when directors get bogged down in these small details, they often lose […]

The Village

By Adam Lippe

You know, it’s clunky, the idea is kind of predictable, but I was spooked at times, and I always find M. Night’s films to be clever, if not always the day after viewing them. I’m glad what seemed to be the surprise was revealed at the beginning of act III, not the end. The concept […]

Leatherheads

By Adam Lippe

George Clooney’s insistence on playing the strapping buffoon lead is both refreshing and tiresome. Leatherheads is clearly inspired by his roles in the Coen brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty and O’ Brother Where Art Thou?, where he mixed double-take style kitchen sink slapstick, with movie-star charm and Cary Grant-like smugness. This is an odd idea, considering these […]

Azumi

By Adam Lippe

Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus was a huge cult hit that secured him a following all over the world. It was a down and dirty zombie-fu movie that mixed Evil Dead II with John Woo and Takashi Miike, and while it had much to amuse and entertain it suffered from the same problems that plague Kitamura’s Azumi. […]

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.