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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 […]

Whatever Works

By Adam Lippe

Is it possible for a movie to be stagey and dated even if it was neither based on a play nor more than a few weeks old? Are cranky Jews all the same or is there a significant difference based on where they grew up and the specific cause of their self-hatred? Do all recent […]

Vicky Christina Barcelona

By Adam Lippe

B-movie legend Bruce Campbell said in his autobiography If Chins Could Kill, that he was more than happy to take a role in the expensive, dreadful, Michael Crichton adaptation Congo, because it meant he’d get a free [and well paid] trip to Africa. Watching Woody Allen’s new film Vicky Christina Barcelona, one might easily assume […]

The Island Is the Loudest Anti-stem Cell Research Movie Ever

By Adam Lippe

Who knew director Michael Bay (Armageddon, Bad Boys II, Transformers) was interested in any political issue at all? Or maybe it was an accident that in The Island, he made the scientist trying to solve the world’s diseases, the villain? Perhaps it was a coincidence that the heroes, the clones of rich people condemned to […]

Lost in Translation

By Adam Lippe

“I have to leave, but I don’t want to.” “Then stay here… With me. We’ll start a jazz band.” While I was watching Lost in Translation, I was often restless and fidgety, but not in an impatient way. I had the feeling that I had during certain parts of Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming where […]

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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.