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Barbarosa

By Adam Lippe

There’s a very valid reason for Mel Brooks not being particularly visible to the press during the production of two classics of the 1980s. His production company, Brooksfilms, was responsible for both David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, but Brooks went uncredited as an executive producer. If you knew that Brooks […]

The Challenge

By Adam Lippe

It’s not that hard to imagine a young Steven Seagal, pre-ponytail, chins, and widow’s peak, thinking of himself as the most important crew member on the set of John Frankenheimer’s The Challenge. Hired to do the Akido stuntwork, Seagal could easily see himself as Scott Glenn’s lead character, the towering white American respectfully learning all […]

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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.