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A podcast with Sam Rockwell, Tony Goldwyn, and Betty Anne Waters on the film Conviction

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast about the film Conviction with star Sam Rockwell, director Tony Goldwyn, and subject Betty Anne Waters. [You can read a review of the film here.] While this may seem like a normal roundtable podcast, it is not. This is because I recently got a complaint from another reporter that I was using […]

Truth or Friction: Film Festivals Part V

By Adam Lippe

Few things will put you more in a position to question your level of maturity than covering a film festival. Shouldn’t I enjoy my medicine by burying myself in high minded dramas on important subject matter and dry documentaries that detail the struggles of a trendy third world country? What kind of an adult would […]

Really, I’m fine with you watering it down: Part I: 127 Hours and Conviction

By Adam Lippe

If, according to screenwriter William Goldman (The Princess Bride, All the President’s Men), “In Hollywood, nobody knows anything,” then why is there always the need to taper off the intensity (read: effectiveness) of a movie in order to make it more palatable to a mainstream audience? Marketing is admittedly guesswork, and with the right evidence, […]

Moon

By Adam Lippe

A sterile home is just plain creepy. It suggests something unlived in, frozen in time, free from human connection. David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers, The Fly, Scanners) knows this, which is why he’s always setting sections of his movies in hospitals, the most antiseptic place possible. The body that had previously inhabited the room is gone. […]

Matchstick Men

By Adam Lippe

Decent showoffy performances, but not much of a movie around it. The final scene pays off more than it should, but honestly, I didn’t care that much. Nicolas Cage has more to work with than say Gone in Sixty Seconds, but a lot of this material shows up in other films all the time, from […]

The Gong Show Movie

By Adam Lippe

Several years before The King of Comedy flopped (which wasn’t acknowledged as ahead of its time until The Larry Sanders Show had already caused it to be dated), writer/director/star Chuck Barris and co-writer Robert Downey Sr. covered the same material by giving us an inside look at how often the host of a variety show […]

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 [...]

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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.