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Inception

By Adam Lippe

Christopher Nolan’s Inception shares a lot of similarities with Tarsem Singh’s The Cell*. It’s a highly ambitious story dealing with entering people’s minds and has grand and stylized visuals, and a harrumphing, doom-impending score by Hans Zimmer that could easily be confused for Howard Shore’s work (Along with The Cell, Shore writes music for most […]

Do You Have Any Change For the Trending Machine? Part I: The Living Wake

By Adam Lippe

There’s a reason the public, and especially those within the industry, consider Hollywood executives as the unofficial whipping boys for the evil studio system. It doesn’t only have to do with their need to justify their jobs by offering up extraneous and contradictory notes and suggestions for filmmakers to improve their products. It isn’t just […]

Local Anesthetic: Film Festivals Part IV

By Adam Lippe

“We want to show movies that won’t be seen at the local mallplex,” drunkenly exclaimed Harlan Jacobson, the artistic director of the 18 ½ Philadelphia Film Festival and a film community legend. It was awkward enough being a film critic at an invite-only party taking place at an upscale club. No matter how you try […]

Northfork

By Adam Lippe

Stunningly shot. Every single image is astonishing. Think the black and white imagery of Seven (which may be in color, but clearly was intended to look like drained color), with a stronger emphasis on dark blue and grey. But much like the movie it is trying to evoke, Days of Heaven, the story is unfocused […]

Dellamorte Dellamore

By Adam Lippe

I first saw Dellamorte Dellamore in the theater in May of 1996 under the US title of Cemetery Man. I remember being very amused for the most part, it was a film that had a weird rhythm to it, an anything goes quality that certainly I didn’t see in most mainstream fare. At a certain […]

Brazil

By Adam Lippe

Terry Gilliam has always claimed that studios dump or meddle with his movies because they don’t know how to sell them. I hadn’t seen Brazil in its entirety since my freshman year of college, I chalked up the hour I watched as a senior being bored and distracted as simply not being in the mood. […]

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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.