Tag Archive

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 […]

A Podcast with the creators of Black Dynamite, writer/star Michael Jai White and director Scott Sanders

By Adam Lippe

Here’s an interview with the writer/star and the director of the new blaxploitation parody, Black Dynamite, Michael Jai White (Spawn) and Scott Sanders (the review of the movie is here). The topics covered include comparisons to the movie Grindhouse, the political agenda of Black Dynamite, the specificity of the blaxploitation era (as well as the […]

Kansas City Bomber

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 […]

Death Race

By Adam Lippe

Watching a Paul W. S. Anderson movie is always a struggle. Gifted with one can’t miss big budget B movie after another, he does nothing with ideas like Alien vs. Predator, Soldier, Resident Evil, and the holy grail of overqualified actors picking up a paycheck, Event Horizon. How he screws these no-brainers up is not […]

The [Motor]Cycles of the Film Industry

By Adam Lippe

It is no secret that Hollywood loves to be environmentally conscious by recycling product. What starts out “pure” gets used and then thrown in the trash where it is crushed to make several different products. This purity in movie terms would be represented in an “original vision,” and something that could be easily replicated. Quality […]

A Decade Under the Influence and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

By Adam Lippe

A Decade Under the Influence, like the movie of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls reveals nothing surprising, but is competently made. It does go on for an hour more (and broken up into three segments for airing on IFC, it comes in just under 3 hours total), so it’s a little strange that they actually had […]

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 [...]

Recent Reviews


Veegie Awards
Winner: BEST ONLINE FILM CRITIC, 2010 National Veegie Awards (Vegan Themed Entertainment)

Nominee: BEST NEW PRODUCT, 2011 National Veegie Awards: The Vegan Condom

Recent Comments

Archive

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.