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Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus

By Adam Lippe

Here’s the idea behind “A Canadian, an American, a Lawyer, and an Elitist”: Rhett’s favorite movie is Meatballs 4,  Shawn has an unhealthy fixation on Resident Evil, Richard scoffs at anything that isn’t pretentious and hoity toity, and Adam is a prick who hates everything. We all watch far too many movies, and spend our […]

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 […]

The Dark Knight

By Adam Lippe

The late, great critic for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, talked about the manufacturing of the blockbuster and how the product was no longer important, just that it was considered a sellable ride. The Dark Knight is certainly a viable product: well made, sleek, sturdy, efficient, and yet sort of hollow. Part of the problem […]

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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.