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Lisztomania

By Adam Lippe

There’s a famous story about how Paddy Chayefsky, screenwriter of Network, who had it in his contract that none of the dialogue that he wrote for Altered States could be changed. That presented a problem for any director brave enough to tackle the speech and science heavy material and still assert themselves on the set, […]

Tightrope

By Adam Lippe

There’s nothing more menacing than a serial killer into S&M who completes the picture by wearing a stolen pair of Mr. Rogers’ sneakers*. Ok, maybe I’m just making up that last part. There’s no reason to think he stole the shoes, Mr. Rogers might have lent them out to him. Anyway, 1984’s tawdry Tightrope, a […]

The Hangover

By Adam Lippe

There’s a famous scene in Doug Liman’s Swingers that is the key to understanding the entire career of The Hangover director Todd Phillips. As Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn go on a midnight venture in Swingers, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in an attempt to salve their wounds as failed actors and lotharios, […]

Keep Fooling Yourself: The Films of Dylan Kidd

By Adam Lippe

Somehow, despite being made by a first time filmmaker in love with his own dialogue and with a tendency to smear sentimentality in where it shouldn’t be, Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger is one of the better low profile studio/independent films of the decade. Campbell Scott, though he is given all the best lines as a […]

Numb

By Adam Lippe

A common occurrence in the current film market is troubled or interesting/challenging  productions with fairly well known stars going direct to DVD (Colin Hanks has three coming out within the next few months), when they used art house releases. The thinking is that most films are probably terrible, like the direct to video films of […]

California Split

By Adam Lippe

Here’s the idea behind “A Canadian, an American, and an Elitist”: Rhett’s favorite movie is Meatballs 4,  Shawn has an unhealthy fixation on Resident Evil, and Adam is a prick who hates everything. We all watch far too many movies, and spend our time analyzing them. So we each watch the same movie, write our […]

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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.