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Dragged, Kicking and Screaming to Answer Year-End/Best of 2011 Questions

By Adam Lippe

I am not a fan of year-end lists. They are entirely reductive and self-congratulatory. However the text below was triggered by another critic, Examiner.com’s Jason Roestel, who asked me to contribute to his year-end piece. So this is a version that fixes as many grammatical errors as I originally had, as well as some significant […]

Valhalla Rising

By Adam Lippe

It would make sense that creating a brutal, no-brainer medieval movie, with tons of clanking swords, stabbings, bludgeoning, grunting, and minimal dialogue would be simple and not require either a big budget or a level of acting above say, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Cyborg. You’d be wrong of course; otherwise there would be much […]

How cheap theaters and indifferent audiences are ruining the movies, or how to avoid writing a review of Hellboy II: Golden Army.

By Adam Lippe

Intending to write a full review based on copious notes, I sat in front of the monitor, thinking. Not because of writer’s block, but the realization that the movie had not been given a fair shake. By me, maybe, but certainly by the theater. My experience with the movie was that it was tiring, overplotted, […]

The Sequel Rule

By Adam Lippe

Quite some time ago, I came to the realization that I had not been to a sequel in the theater since Hannibal, a book which I hated, but I was dragged by my ex and a friend who wanted to see it. I thought about why sequels were made and to what kind of movies […]

Outlander

By Adam Lippe

A promisingly silly premise, alien spaceship crashes into the water during the time of Vikings and the survivor tries to win the hearts of the humans who don’t understand him (A more appropriate title might have been Army of Dorkness), is buried in the ground immediately by a concession to the English speaking market. As soon as he lands, removes his protective […]

Leave the Cults to the Scientologists

By Adam Lippe

“Attention Wal-mart shoppers: Pink Flamingos is on sale this week for just $9.99 and if you buy it today, courtesy of our promotions department, at check-out, you’ll receive a complimentary pooper scooper and bib.” In the late winter of 1995, at a low-rent theater on the lower east side of Manhattan, I snuck into a […]

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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.