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The Other Guys

By Adam Lippe

Screaming non-sequiturs at the top of your lungs will only get you so far in life. If you’re Will Ferrell, it can get you a financially successful, but poorly made, one-note comedy like Stepbrothers. The fatal flaw of Step Brothers is that Ferrell and John C. Reilly spent their time bellowing profanity at each other […]

Hamlet 2

By Adam Lippe

There are few things more obnoxious than a satire that keeps nudging you to remind you it’s only kidding. Hamlet 2, which is like if Waiting For Guffman were played as a straight comedy instead of as a documentary, and made sure to remove anything remotely funny, panders and plays it safe to the point […]

Tropic Thunder

By Adam Lippe

The big budget Hollywood satire is more than just an oxymoron, it is simply bewildering. How could a $90 million movie, distributed by Dreamworks, a company co-founded by Steven Spielberg, and owned by Viacom, be hard on “the business?” The answer is, it can’t, and therefore Tropic Thunder is a very broad and obvious satire, […]

I Want You

By Adam Lippe

Michael Winterbottom‘s I Want You is about a mute 14 year old in England who, with his curiously high end equipment despite the poverty he lives in, records couples making out, having sex, and other embarrassing and plot important situations. Rachel Weisz is the woman he falls in love with, she was also in love […]

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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.