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Bullet in the Head

By Adam Lippe

A filmmaker like Larry Clark puts a viewer in a tough spot. When watching a movie like Kids, Bully, or Wassup Rockers, are we to believe that Clark has perfectly portrayed the aimlessness and idiocy of bored, wayward teenagers in search of a good time? Or is Clark just lazy himself, and he simply hasn’t […]

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day

By Adam Lippe

Is there any inherent pressure for a director when following up a failure, especially when you’ve made a sequel distributed by a studio that’s known for constantly releasing such fare? In the past few years, Sony has been putting out belated DTV sequels to the most random, unsuccessful movies in their back catalog; such as […]

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

By Adam Lippe

“That, my friend, is cowardice. It’s so yellow. It’s not even yellow, it’s beyond yellow. It’s canary yellow… Rodeo clowns, on the other hand, those are real men. I had a buddy from Austin, he was a rodeo clown. He had one arm. We used to call him, uh… One arm.” – Johnny Depp, at […]

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 […]

Full Contact

By Adam Lippe

The combination of the transfer of Hong Kong back into the hands of the Chinese and the Chow Yun-Fat/John Woo films like The Killer and Hard Boiled caused Hollywood to take notice of these foreign directors and actors wanting to cross over and establish themselves in a new venue. Producer Moshe Diamant, who had specialized […]

Crying Freeman

By Adam Lippe

The fact that Brotherhood of the Wolf was such a huge success overseas and has an enormous cult following in the US (and did receive a surprisingly large push from Universal for a foreign film) has renewed interest in Christophe Gans’ first film, the adaptation of the anime/comic book of Crying Freeman. The film never […]

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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.