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He Never Meta Film Reference He Didn’t Like: A Review of Cop Out

By Adam Lippe

The late, great film critic Pauline Kael wrote that “an homage is a plagiarism that your lawyer tells you is not actionable.” Where do you draw that line though? When does gentle chiding and affection turn into parody? Certainly a film like last year’s Black Dynamite made that difficult to determine; because, while it tried [...]

Ninja Assassin

By Adam Lippe

The big-budget version of an exploitation movie is fool’s gold. Sure, the filmmaker who could have used some more money to make his action sequences more convincing or get more than one take of any given shot is a worthy cause. But there’s scrappy charm in low-budget films and you forgive the mistakes as part [...]

Style Over Stupid: Vol. 1, Black Dynamite vs. New York, I Love You

By Adam Lippe

I’d imagine it’d be hard to convince someone to give you money for what amounts to a film school exercise. Not so much for the actors who will probably have a ball playacting and indulging their most deliberately childish ideas. Take, for example a movie like Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho, a thoroughly [...]

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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[...]


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

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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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