Tag Archive

Parade (2009)

By Adam Lippe

On an October 2011 episode of WTF, Marc Maron’s podcast where he interviews other comics, comedian Hannibal Buress talked about his first venture in NY when he was a struggling comic. Buress says then, he was going to as many open mics as he could. But moving from Chicago to follow his dream, he was […]

The Fighter

By Adam Lippe

Being a midget can have its advantages, especially in the world of TV acting. This is because what plays best on camera, specifically in close-up, is to have a big head and a small body. That’s why most actors are so short and have enormous heads. A lot of the major action stars of the […]

World’s Greatest Dad

By Adam Lippe

For all the mean-spirited humor and nasty comeuppances it contains as a movie, Heathers is rather tame. This isn’t the fault of screenwriter Daniel Waters, who envisioned a conclusion far darker than the comparatively quaint one used. Waters had planned a scene where Winona Ryder kills Christian Slater and then blows up the school and […]

Away We Go

By Adam Lippe

There’s an undiagnosed illness that most people don’t know about. But it can affect their personalities completely. Away We Go, Sam Mendes’ (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) new comedy-drama about a couple (John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph) going through their first pregnancy and how they travel all across the country to try to find the best place […]

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, […]

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 […]

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.