Latest Article

Dragged, Kicking and Screaming to Answer Year-End/Best of 2011 Questions

By Adam Lippe

I am not a fan of year-end lists. They are entirely reductive and self-congratulatory. However the text below was triggered by another critic, Examiner.com’s Jason Roestel, who asked me to contribute to his year-end piece. So this is a version that fixes as many grammatical errors as I originally had, as well as some significant [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]


An ode to Ken Russell, RIP

By Adam Lippe

In honor of director Ken Russell (The Devils, Women in Love, Crimes of Passion, Lisztomania, Tommy) who died yesterday, I’m posting a video I edited exploring his themes and motifs, narrated by Russell himself. Sound is required, watching it in a large window is recommended, and considering the rather decadent nature of his films, I [...]

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 [...]

The Brain

By Adam Lippe

In the history of fantastic bad ideas, none may seem as foolhardy as the fact that Ed Hunt, the director of the schlocky Canadian horror film The Brain, originally intended for the titular character, an alien from outer space encased in gelatinous goo who wants to use TV to brainwash the human race, the ability [...]

Now on DVD and Blu-Ray

Super 8

By Adam Lippe

When the great fake critic Joe Bob Briggs was hosting Monstervision on TNT back in the mid-1990s, he was often forced to show films that he didn’t appreciate. This didn’t happen when he was on premium channels like The Movie Channel, proudly examining low budget schlock behind his stereotypical redneck character, where the exposure was lower and the censorship infinitesimal. During his TNT run, Joe Bob found himself having to dissect movies like Look Who’s Talking Too and Mannequin 2: On the Move. One of his funniest episodes (he commented right after the commercial breaks), was an eye-opening experience for me, because it was when I realized that all 7 year olds were and are dumb. Especially me.

The subject of his mockery was[...]

This week’s Medium Rare Cinema screening

Bruce Weber's

Let's Get Lost

Thursday, January 26th at 7PM, 7141 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19119, inside the Video Library.
There will be prizes, air conditioning, coffee, free popcorn, and a post-screening discussion. Click here for more information.

You can find the January 2012 schedule here


Winner: BEST ONLINE FILM CRITIC, 2010 National Veegie Awards (Vegan Themed Entertainment)

Nominee: BEST NEW PRODUCT, 2011 National Veegie Awards: The Vegan Condom

Archive

Featured Quote (written by me)

On Watchmen:

At the funeral of the conflicted, narcissistic, and mean-spirited superhero The Comedian, each of what appears to be ten different people get their own extremely detailed flashback to their interactions with their fallen friend. As the camera slowly moves past each character that had their screen time, eventually stopping at whom I thought was the priest, who then gets five minutes to look to his past, I kept waiting for the dirt and the coffin to get their fill in too.

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