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A Man in Love (with bonus clip)

By Adam Lippe

It’s quite a bold move to try to explore mediocrity. Most of us never rise above it anyway. But if you have talent and you use it to look at those who can’t get past the middle, it can be seen as condescending and/or gloating. That’s why the context of mediocrity is so important; when […]

The Big Fix

By Adam Lippe

Is it hard to believe that the 1973 novel The Big Fix was released a whole year before the novel of Fletch? Is Fletch just a WASP-y version of The Big Fix’s Moses Wine? Jeremy Paul Kagan’s film version of The Big Fix, stars and was produced by Richard Dreyfuss, making the Jewish subtext unmistakable. […]

Super 8

By Adam Lippe

When the great fake critic Joe Bob Briggs was hosting Monstervision on TNT back in the mid-1990s, he was often forced to show films that he didn’t appreciate. This didn’t happen when he was on premium channels like The Movie Channel, proudly examining low budget schlock behind his stereotypical redneck character, where the exposure was […]

True Grit (2010)

By Adam Lippe

Atmosphere is everything to an experience. I remember going to A Tribe Called Quest concert when I was in college and, while the opening act was appropriate — middling, low-key rappers — the middle act was a hard rock band that looked and sounded somewhat like Living Colour (they of the early 90s hit Cult […]

Let Me In

By Adam Lippe

At the end of the late ‘80s teen movie, My Best Friend is a Vampire, the titular night walker, as played by future House star Robert Sean Leonard, is confronted in a cemetery by his parents. He’s accompanied by a very androgynous girl, and his parents are devastated because they don’t want their son to […]

Tightrope

By Adam Lippe

There’s nothing more menacing than a serial killer into S&M who completes the picture by wearing a stolen pair of Mr. Rogers’ sneakers*. Ok, maybe I’m just making up that last part. There’s no reason to think he stole the shoes, Mr. Rogers might have lent them out to him. Anyway, 1984’s tawdry Tightrope, a […]

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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.