Tag Archive

Dream Lover: Uncut

By Adam Lippe

Trends are rarely more than coincidences. Sure, there are always going to be imitators of success, such as Madonna making Body of Evidence to capitalize on the trend of the erotic thriller genre that goes back to Basic Instinct a year earlier (though the genre existed before, it just didn’t have a name). But realize […]

A Bittersweet Life

By Adam Lippe

Back in the mid-1990s, when gay cinema was just coming out of the closet and into the mainstream, there was a charming, formulaic lesbian comedy called The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Girls in Love. There’s nothing particular special about the film and I can’t face watching it again, since there’s no doubt, with its […]

$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 […]

Drive Angry/Faster/My Soul to Take/I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

By Adam Lippe

When will disreputable nihilism become boring? Hopefully never. But there comes a point where self-satisfied nastiness taken to an extreme needs a little bit of flavor to distinguish itself. Patrick Lussier’s Drive Angry tries to spice things up with its effective use of 3D and by cobbling together as many exploitation clichés as possible: the […]

I’m Still Here

By Adam Lippe

Andy Kaufman was* hilarious. But only in retrospect. If you went to a comedy club and had to sit through one of his on-stage readings of The Great Gatsby, it’s a very reasonable response to heckle him and eventually leave. Such meta-commentary on the notion of entertainment and the expectation of a comedian performing for […]

BearCity

By Adam Lippe

As gay films hit the mainstream in the early 90s, a valid topic for a movie was a 90-minute “coming out” story that always included acceptance from peers and parents by the conclusion of the film. Getting past these hurdles is important for any minority group. But once the shock of the group’s existence is […]

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.