Tag Archive

Gravehopping

By Adam Lippe

During my first year of college, when I was still a film student, I met a Spaniard, also in the film program, who bragged about not watching any movies. “I don’t want to have any outside influences,” he said. I tried explaining the notion of parallel thinking; my senior year of high school I wrote […]

$10,000 Blood Money

By Adam Lippe

The Italian film industry sure loves their rip-offs. In the late 1960s, they made dozens of imitations of Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly). In the mid 1970s, they made countless crime films, primarily inspired by The French […]

Dirty Harry vs. The French Connection: The Fascist Cop Movies of 1971

By Adam Lippe

The late 1960’s were a troubled time for the major studios of Hollywood. Expensive musicals like Hello Dolly had failed as had pricey westerns like Paint Your Wagon. The success of Easy Rider was considered a breakthrough and set up the director-centric 1970’s spawning one crafty film nerd filmmaker after another, such as Francis Ford […]

I Don’t Like Cars…

By Adam Lippe

I don’t like the air inside them, the claustrophobia, the seats, the leg room, the sounds of the road, traffic, either empty roads or packed. But does that mean I can’t appreciate a good car movie? It might. Sometimes you don’t know how your personal prejudices get in the way of watching movies. I know […]

To Live and Die in LA

By Adam Lippe

Here’s the idea behind “An American, a Canadian, and an Elitist”: Rhett’s favorite movie is “Meatballs 4”, Josh likes Hollywood pap, and Adam is a prick who hates everything. We all watch far too many movies, and spend our time analyzing them. So we each watch the same movie, write our analysis of them, and […]

The Exorcist

By Adam Lippe

Most people are brainwashed into thinking The Exorcist is scary and makes you think, when I find it (along with a majority of my friends) to be a pretentious bore that takes itself way too seriously, and to interrupt the boredom, there is an occasional shock cut of something “disturbing,” although I would describe them […]

Now on DVD and Blu-Ray

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 [...]

Recent Reviews


Veegie Awards
Winner: BEST ONLINE FILM CRITIC, 2010 National Veegie Awards (Vegan Themed Entertainment)

Nominee: BEST NEW PRODUCT, 2011 National Veegie Awards: The Vegan Condom

Recent Comments

Archive

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.