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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

By Adam Lippe

Back in 1991, when Naked Lunch was released to theaters, famed critic Roger Ebert had a rather unique response to the film. While he admitted that David Cronenberg had done a terrific job adapting the feeling of the William H. Burroughs novel that the movie was based on (there’s no real way to actually adapt […]

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, […]

Zombieland

By Adam Lippe

It’s been said that Russ Meyer primarily made silly exploitation movies filled with huge breasts, wild editing styles, and jokey narration because when he tried to make a real movie, such as The Seven Minutes, it would either be dull or devolve into camp, like his most famous films, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, […]

Paper Heart

By Adam Lippe

According to one of the starry-eyed children interviewed at an Atlanta playground during Nicholas Jasenovec’s mockumentary Paper Heart, the most romantic place to take a woman on a date is Applebee’s. Somehow, the child’s utterance is perfect for the movie’s subject, mumbly and ironically inexpressive comic and musician Charlyne Yi, who, for the purposes of […]

Funny People

By Adam Lippe

Last year’s biggest hit, The Dark Knight, proved a lot of things—about the strength of the franchise, about the positive financial advantages a movie has with a deceased star being the lead* (see: The Crow), and that you can change actors from film to film, such as with the part of Rachel Dawes, played by […]

Year One

By Adam Lippe

It doesn’t happen often. But sometimes you can tell how stale and unfunny a comedy is going to be just from the marketing alone. I’m not referring to the TV ads and trailers, which take bits out of context, often changing their meaning and humor value. I mean situations where a cast member shows up […]

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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.