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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 […]

Fever Pitch (1985)

By Adam Lippe

There are few films that could legitimately be called unique, but Richard Brooks’ loony final film, Fever Pitch, has no problem earning that distinction. Often, when a once heralded filmmaker begins to lose his way, he either drifts off into obscurity (Richard Lester) or boredom (J. Lee Thompson), paying about half as much attention as […]

Bruce Almighty

By Adam Lippe

It’s a good thing there’s no God, because if this is his way of speaking to us, the one thing you might cull from this 100 minutes, he’s a really lousy screenwriter. There are so many things wrong with this movie, that it’s easier to remember the good things, Steve Carrell from The Daily Show […]

Better Luck Tomorrow

By Adam Lippe

Hover to read the Context Just because your movie gets picked up MTV, who bragged about its first independent film acquisition, doesn’t mean you have to throw in distracting MTVish style into your story because you don’t believe you have original material. It was a shame about this, because I liked a few of the […]

Year of the Dragon

By Adam Lippe

Year of the Dragon, Michael Cimino’s first film after Heaven’s Gate, was probably a dream project, seeing as he got to work with Mickey Rourke, one of the biggest and ballsiest stars of that era, and Oliver Stone (who co-wrote the script), whose sensibilities, especially at the time, were almost identical to Cimino’s. Both heavy […]

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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.