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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 […]

Neighbors

By Adam Lippe

After reading Wired, where writer Bob Woodward extensively covers not just John Belushi’s downward spiral, but the extremely troubled production of Neighbors which included  director John G. Avildsen and John Belushi (in his final film) fighting on set, the constant rewriting and dilution of Larry Gelbart’s dark, original script, which was apparently quite close in […]

Moment By Moment

By Adam Lippe

A notoriously forgotten film from 1978, this classic romance between budding closeted homosexual John Travolta and happily constipated lesbian Lily Tomlin is one of the most passionate movies that features a dog named Scamp and a character named Dan Santini never to be released on VHS, DVD, or LD. Somehow after the success of Carrie, […]

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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.