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Do You Have Any Change For the Trending Machine? Part I: The Living Wake

By Adam Lippe

There’s a reason the public, and especially those within the industry, consider Hollywood executives as the unofficial whipping boys for the evil studio system. It doesn’t only have to do with their need to justify their jobs by offering up extraneous and contradictory notes and suggestions for filmmakers to improve their products. It isn’t just […]

Edge of Darkness

By Adam Lippe

Did you know that in the censored-for-TV version of The Long Kiss Goodnight, the movie has been edited so much that it’s no longer clear that Geena Davis’ character is a government assassin with amnesia? In the way the film plays in the version that airs on Sunday mornings on TNT, the suggestion is that […]

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

By Adam Lippe

For a long time, the cheapest place to shoot a movie was in Canada, often in Vancouver. Virtually every movie that was supposed to take place in New York City would be comprised of a few aerial shots of Manhattan and then any external scenes would be shot in close enough where you couldn’t identify […]

Tightrope

By Adam Lippe

There’s nothing more menacing than a serial killer into S&M who completes the picture by wearing a stolen pair of Mr. Rogers’ sneakers*. Ok, maybe I’m just making up that last part. There’s no reason to think he stole the shoes, Mr. Rogers might have lent them out to him. Anyway, 1984’s tawdry Tightrope, a […]

The Merry Gentleman

By Adam Lippe

In the pantheon of films about depressed hitmen either on their last job or on the verge of suicide, The Merry Gentleman stands tall, in the middle of the pack. Not as insightful, moving, nor funny as the William H. Macy starring Panic* or as wonderfully awful as Nicholas Cage’s foray in the remake of […]

Dirty Harry vs. The French Connection: The Fascist Cop Movies of 1971

By Adam Lippe

The late 1960’s were a troubled time for the major studios of Hollywood. Expensive musicals like Hello Dolly had failed as had pricey westerns like Paint Your Wagon. The success of Easy Rider was considered a breakthrough and set up the director-centric 1970’s spawning one crafty film nerd filmmaker after another, such as Francis Ford […]

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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.