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The Reflecting Skin

By Adam Lippe

No matter how much a filmmaker might protest, laughable and incoherent content should never be excused as elliptical, complicated symbolism. Take a movie like Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch; on the surface, it’s a story about young girls who are forced to become prostitutes so they can avoid being lobotomized. The movie is told through the […]

The Company Men

By Adam Lippe

The most dominant trend in recent big budget films has been trying to humanize the superhero, as if he/she was a real person with real problems (Watchmen, Hancock, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, etc.). Sometimes, as with Defendor and Kick-Ass, the characters don’t have superpowers and the joke is not just their ineptitude but the annoyances of […]

Centurion

By Adam Lippe

With the constant threats on your life, being a soldier in a medieval army must have been the cause of an epidemic of acid reflux. If the movies are to be believed, you couldn’t have a mid-afternoon snack or take a power nap without the very real possibility of a foreign sword giving your throat […]

The Missing Person

By Adam Lippe

It’s a shame that Hollywood is only interested in making origin films for the heroes of comic book films. Such is the case with the recent X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Frankly, the heroes tend to be dull. And so, while there are some aberrations—such as with Lexi Alexander’s campy, silly, and ridiculously entertaining and colorful Punisher: […]

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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.