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Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus

By Adam Lippe

Here’s the idea behind “A Canadian, an American, a Lawyer, and an Elitist”: Rhett’s favorite movie is Meatballs 4,  Shawn has an unhealthy fixation on Resident Evil, Richard scoffs at anything that isn’t pretentious and hoity toity, and Adam is a prick who hates everything. We all watch far too many movies, and spend our […]

Black Swan vs. Black Swan: Revisionist History Vol. 2, A Screener’s Revenge

By Adam Lippe

As a critic, my job is to be as objective as possible while acknowledging my own subjectivity. But what rarely comes into play, at least consciously, is whatever mood I might be in on the way into the theater. I saw Black Swan at the opening night of the Philadelphia Film Festival on October 14th. […]

MacGruber

By Adam Lippe

Those of us lucky enough to have seen Exhausted*, the 1981 John Holmes sycophant-umentary, may remember something the now world-weary director Julia St. Vincent, said on the DVD commentary. She described Holmes’ pursed lip expression during his moment of climax as one of his “monkey faces.” Now as the title character in MacGruber, the adaptation […]

Shutter Island

By Adam Lippe

Timing is one of the most delicate and important attributes a person can have. Every little decision we make can be affected by timing; from simply crossing the street when we have the light to knowing that the best time to take a bathroom break isn’t when you’re in the middle of carrying a piano […]

Youth in Revolt

By Adam Lippe

Exploring the sexuality of teenagers is, for some fuzzy moralistic reason, a faux pas. We can acknowledge as a society that young boys and girls have sexual thoughts, and once they pass puberty, those thoughts dominate their lives, even if they don’t know how to deal with them. Teenage sexual desire is a universal feeling, […]

Silent Running

By Adam Lippe

One of the oddest combinations of producer and director in the history of Hollywood occurred on Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, with Richard Gere as a moody, shallow gigolo. It contains Schrader’s (writer of Taxi Driver, director of Mishima, Hardcore, and Auto Focus) usual themes of guilt and introspection. American Gigolo was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, […]

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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.