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Knight and Day

By Adam Lippe

He looks aghast at the poster for the party. I Sold My Mom’s Wheelchair. “Dance music for old people?” It’s the moment that John Cusack’s character in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity realizes that this poster is being used to promote a band he just signed, and the party and album title will be one he’s […]

Death at a Funeral (2010)

By Adam Lippe

When I was in college, I had to write a paper trying to explain why certain films were box office successes. It was 1998, and I surmised that the top 50 films as of the year’s end (in other words, final grosses were certainly not in by that point) were almost all formula; Buddy-cop, remake, […]

An Englishman in New York

By Adam Lippe

As a divisive figure in the then-burgeoning gay rights movement, writer-actor Quentin Crisp is worthy of being given a lengthy biopic, or at least one that gives equal time to arguing the ways he both helped and harmed the gay cause. An Englishman in New York, which covers Crisp’s life as a latter day theater […]

Edge of Darkness

By Adam Lippe

Did you know that in the censored-for-TV version of The Long Kiss Goodnight, the movie has been edited so much that it’s no longer clear that Geena Davis’ character is a government assassin with amnesia? In the way the film plays in the version that airs on Sunday mornings on TNT, the suggestion is that […]

Re-boot to the Head

By Adam Lippe

Bigger. Louder. Faster. These adjectives are the most deceptive in all of advertising, because they are almost as meaningless with context as without. The idea behind a “reboot” is to personify those three tantalizing words. In the case of the re-imagining of Star Trek, you’re being sold a brand name and nothing else. This new […]

Sex and the City: The Movie

By Adam Lippe

I am not the audience for this movie. I know this. I’m straight and male, and I thought the TV show was hideously written, like a misogynistic and glib gay man’s fantasy of what fashionable women in NYC are like, unknowingly miserable, shallow, and stupid. Is it fair for me to judge the film, especially […]

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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.