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The Fighter

By Adam Lippe

Being a midget can have its advantages, especially in the world of TV acting. This is because what plays best on camera, specifically in close-up, is to have a big head and a small body. That’s why most actors are so short and have enormous heads. A lot of the major action stars of the […]

Black Swan vs. Black Swan: Revisionist History Vol. 2, A Screener’s Revenge

By Adam Lippe

As a critic, my job is to be as objective as possible while acknowledging my own subjectivity. But what rarely comes into play, at least consciously, is whatever mood I might be in on the way into the theater. I saw Black Swan at the opening night of the Philadelphia Film Festival on October 14th. […]

A Podcast with Scott Cooper, the Director of Crazy Heart

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper who led lead actor Jeff Bridges to a Golden Globe Award. The film is about “Bad” Blake, an alcohol soaked, washed up rock/blues singer, touring dingy bars across the US. Unable to get albums released without the help of his former protege, and now big star, […]

Big Fan

By Adam Lippe

If Taxi Driver is considered the last movie word on how loners slowly lose their grip on reality and devolve into misguided violent martyrdom, where do those without the gaul or stones to engage in violent activism fit in? Surely, there’s more of the type too timid or scared to act on their fantasies, otherwise […]

Moon

By Adam Lippe

A sterile home is just plain creepy. It suggests something unlived in, frozen in time, free from human connection. David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers, The Fly, Scanners) knows this, which is why he’s always setting sections of his movies in hospitals, the most antiseptic place possible. The body that had previously inhabited the room is gone. […]

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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.