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Dragged, Kicking and Screaming to Answer Year-End/Best of 2011 Questions

By Adam Lippe

I am not a fan of year-end lists. They are entirely reductive and self-congratulatory. However the text below was triggered by another critic, Examiner.com’s Jason Roestel, who asked me to contribute to his year-end piece. So this is a version that fixes as many grammatical errors as I originally had, as well as some significant […]

F For Fake

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 […]

Never Let Me Go

By Adam Lippe

One of the smartest things that Charlie Kaufman did with his script for Being John Malkovich was to push back the reveal of the central concept for almost an entire act. An interfering producer might have insisted that the movie start on page 30. But, luckily, Kaufman was also a credited executive producer on the […]

The Informant!

By Adam Lippe

Being intentionally campy is a slippery slope. There are generally two polar opposites that filmmakers aim for, with John Waters and his deliberately wretched acting and fecal excess on one side and Pedro Almodovar and his brightly colored wallpaper and screaming transvestites on the other. Well, maybe there’s not a huge difference, but in terms […]

A review and podcast on The Cove

By Adam Lippe

Below you’ll find a review of Louie Psihoyos’ documentary, The Cove. I’m also including a podcast about the film which I conducted with famed dictator Pol Pot, the former Prime Minister of Cambodia. Click the play icon to listen to the podcast. Or you can download the podcast here. (Right-click, Save Link As…) The use […]

Moon

By Adam Lippe

A sterile home is just plain creepy. It suggests something unlived in, frozen in time, free from human connection. David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers, The Fly, Scanners) knows this, which is why he’s always setting sections of his movies in hospitals, the most antiseptic place possible. The body that had previously inhabited the room is gone. […]

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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.