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He Never Meta Film Reference He Didn’t Like: A Review of Cop Out

By Adam Lippe

The late, great film critic Pauline Kael wrote that “an homage is a plagiarism that your lawyer tells you is not actionable.” Where do you draw that line though? When does gentle chiding and affection turn into parody? Certainly a film like last year’s Black Dynamite made that difficult to determine; because, while it tried […]

Crank: High Voltage

By Adam Lippe

Is it possible to be consciously and intentionally out of control? If a Nascar driver were swerving and spinning for hundreds of laps and ended up winning the race, could he do the same thing again on purpose? Should you be given credit for a lucky accident? Donnie Darko might be the answer to those […]

I Love You, Man

By Adam Lippe

Good news. The mediocre movie is getting a lot better. Raising the forgettable bar without any effort is the second Paul Rudd high/no concept comedy in the last few months, I Love You, Man. With the Role Models DVD release piggybacking the I Love You, Man TV spot and the 2008 copyright date on ILY,M, […]

American Wedding

By Adam Lippe

American Wedding is kind of an anti-achievement because it seems to insist that it’s much dumber than it should be. Since these movies are just sitcoms with vulgarity, there is little to be distracted by. The first film was guilty of stopping the movie dead in order to set up the gross out jokes, which […]

The Rundown

By Adam Lippe

The Rundown has furious action sequences, at a pace not seen since Jackie Chan’s First Strike, is edited like a Robert Rodriguez movie, so you can’t see the seams, and Christopher Walken trying to explain The Tooth Fairy to people who don’t speak his language. The surrounding material is a mishmash of clichés, but The […]

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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.