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The Social Network

By Adam Lippe

Do casting directors have a better sense of irony than previously thought? Obviously, that’s a nugget that hovers over all of us daily, overtaking our will until we can think of nothing else, but how else to explain the casting of Justin Timberlake as Napster co-founder Sean Parker in David Fincher’s The Social Network? Napster’s […]

Catfish

By Adam Lippe

Last year, when I wrote about Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up, I suggested that it was some sort of miracle that a movie directed with such condescension and pandering was still engaging and entertaining. When one of the most dominant elements of production is off-putting, it’s unlikely that a viewer will be […]

Never Let Me Go

By Adam Lippe

One of the smartest things that Charlie Kaufman did with his script for Being John Malkovich was to push back the reveal of the central concept for almost an entire act. An interfering producer might have insisted that the movie start on page 30. But, luckily, Kaufman was also a credited executive producer on the […]

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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.