Tag Archive

Dirty Weekend (1993)

By Adam Lippe

When you’ve made silly movies all your life and you suddenly want to be taken seriously, where do you go? Director Russ Meyer (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Vixen!, Cherry, Harry, and Raquel) made quickly edited, campy movies filled with irony, with the stories often about women with large breasts using their sexuality to the best […]

Shank

By Adam Lippe

Opening with a coke-filled clandestine Internet hook-up in the woods, quickly followed up with a painful headbutt, Simon Pearce’s Shank successfully treads the line between sweet romance, gay soft-core porn, gang violence, and aimless exploitation. The combination of all of these elements is the only way the movie is unique; otherwise, it’s just a coming-out […]

Shrink

By Adam Lippe

You know what’s awful about shallow people? They’re just so… shallow. Shallow people have nothing to say, but despite that they seem completely self-involved, about what isn’t clear. If you don’t have thoughts, what could you be thinking of? What does the stereotypically shallow Hollywood agent consider when he’s yelling and screaming at people and […]

Adventureland

By Adam Lippe

Selling nostalgia is a tricky thing. While you already have the advantage of being able to tap into people’s hazy memories and playing off their vague recognition and familiarity, you risk relying on such a lazy device to the point where you become guilty of The Wedding Singer syndrome, wherein the entire purpose was to […]

Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

By Adam Lippe

How does one review a movie where, by the opening credits, one of the main characters has delighted himself by jizzing on his own face? “The best scene of its kind since Shortbus!” I guess the only important question is if it is funny.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

By Adam Lippe

Someone should have combined this and Judge Dredd to combine two huge failures into one, and so Stallone could have battled the beasts in this film in who could say “I am the law!” less convincingly. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to care about when the two most interesting actors in the movie, Brando […]

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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.