Tag Archive

Funny People

By Adam Lippe

Last year’s biggest hit, The Dark Knight, proved a lot of things—about the strength of the franchise, about the positive financial advantages a movie has with a deceased star being the lead* (see: The Crow), and that you can change actors from film to film, such as with the part of Rachel Dawes, played by [...]

Zabriskie Point

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 [...]

Mac and Me

By Adam Lippe

While it would be fair to complain that the recent #1 film in the US, Disturbia, is a movie built on shameless product placement (check out that opening Coca-Cola moment in the first scene!), and doesn’t have to make a dime to be profitable, the producers still have something to strive for. While Adam Sandler [...]

Adventureland

By Adam Lippe

Selling nostalgia is a tricky thing. While you already have the advantage of being able to tap into people’s hazy memories and playing off their vague recognition and familiarity, you risk relying on such a lazy device to the point where you become guilty of The Wedding Singer syndrome, wherein the entire purpose was to [...]

Margaret

By Adam Lippe

One of the downsides of the disintegration of the theatrical release of independent films and the dissolving of  the indie arms of major studios, such as Picturehouse and Warner Independent, and the shutting down of daring studios like New Line is that the low-mid-budget films have no shot in the market. The reason for that [...]

Anger Management

By Adam Lippe

Hopeless in nearly every way. A very promising idea can’t make up it’s mind whether it’s goofy or genuine, and that is negated anyway by a double blunder of an ending, the first shameless part in Yankee Stadium, the second part which reveals that not only did you waste your time in real life, so [...]

Shaolin Soccer

By Adam Lippe

In 1997, when ownership of Hong Kong was returned to China from the United Kingdom, more than a transfer of land took place. Many filmmakers and actors, who sensed the upcoming political change, had already left to pursue careers in the US where they anticipated they would have more freedom to make the kinds of [...]

Pineapple Express

By Adam Lippe

The most surprising thing about the Seth Rogen-James Franco vehicle Pineapple Express obviously isn’t its pot humor, overt silliness, and the pushing of women to the side (this is a Judd Apatow production, after all). The surprise is that it is the most baldly homoerotic Hollywood buddy film since Damon Wayans stuck his gun up [...]

The Gay Action Hero is Still in the Closet

By Adam Lippe

Since the invention of postmodernism, it has been quite easy to find homoerotic subtext in any film involving bonding between members of the same sex (Lord of the Rings), men who like to hold guns (any buddy-cop action movie from Lethal Weapon to Damon Wayans’ gun

Now on DVD and Blu-Ray

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 of his reoccurring Saturday Night Live sketches, Will Forte doesn’t offer monkey faces exactly, but during his sex scenes, one of which is with his dead wife’s ghost, he offers a similarly ridiculous variation. Such excess is where Jorma Taccone’s MacGruber succeeds. When Taccone leaves behind the one note MacGyver parody that MacGruber was as a sketch and turns his movie into something energetically absurd[...]


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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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