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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 […]

MacGruber

By Adam Lippe

Those of us lucky enough to have seen Exhausted*, the 1981 John Holmes sycophant-umentary, may remember something the now world-weary director Julia St. Vincent, said on the DVD commentary. She described Holmes’ pursed lip expression during his moment of climax as one of his “monkey faces.” Now as the title character in MacGruber, the adaptation […]

44 Inch Chest

By Adam Lippe

Macho posturing doesn’t always have to be a cover for homoerotic tension. Sometimes, such as with a movie like Humpday, the homoerotic tension is created by the macho posturing. In that film, two friends drunkenly dare each other to make a gay porn together, and the next day, neither will back off for fear of […]

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

By Adam Lippe

For a long time, the cheapest place to shoot a movie was in Canada, often in Vancouver. Virtually every movie that was supposed to take place in New York City would be comprised of a few aerial shots of Manhattan and then any external scenes would be shot in close enough where you couldn’t identify […]

Public Enemies

By Adam Lippe

It’s quite the bold move to deliberately make your movie an eyesore. This is especially true when you’re someone like Michael Mann (Heat, Manhunter, Collateral), who is known specifically for his unique visuals. His new film, Public Enemies, is shot on video, and not in the same way that a lot of new movies are […]

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

By Adam Lippe

Over the past few years, director Tony Scott (Top Gun, True Romance, Enemy of the State) has been taking shots from the press over his recent fascination with film school tricks like flash frames, jump cuts, color filtering and his insistence on somehow cutting his films even faster than he used to. Whether this is […]

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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.