January 2014 – Smug Film (1/7/13

The Wolf of Wall Street: Fuck This Movie, Fuck Jordan Belfort, Fuck The Audience, And, I Guess, Fuck Me Too

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Screenplay by Terence Winter
180 min.

Spoilers ahead.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. No siree.

I’d gone to the theater that snowy midday to see Inside Llewyn Davis again. I just wanted to once more curl up in some good ol’ depressing Coen brothers greatness, goddammit. But it was sold out! And the only movie that wasn’t was ol’ Martin Scorsese’s newest– The Wolf of Wall Street. I’d had mixed feelings about seeing it to begin with, but my boredom outweighed my uncertainty and I figured ‘ah, what the hell.’

Ah, I left the theater fuming with anger. I don’t just mean annoyed—I mean actually fuming mad and ranting about it in public. My anger seemed to stem from my inability to understand if this movie was brilliantly orchestrated as a relentless and morally superior lecture, or if was just a passive and amoral romp, letting the viewer decide what’s right and wrong. What I did know was that I resented the hell out of it—and I needed yell so from the top deck of my million dollar yacht in front of a thousand of my closest friends.
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On Documentaries: How and Why They Work, When They Work

mat Beyond the Mat (1999), one of the greatest documentaries of all time.

Documentaries have always been fascinating to me. They were born out of newsreels, short news segments that used to play before features in the theaters way back when. From the newsreels came smaller, more intimate human interest stories (Kubrick even made a few in his early days). An early example of this sort of thing, Nanook of the North, is often cited as one of the first documentaries—although, if you ask me, it’s nothing more than a piece of history. The production is stagey, and, as to be expected given the time period it came out, it’s dreadfully boring.

Around the 1960s, when cinema finally started to open up, a few people started to realize that vérité filmmaking could be used to create a documentary—the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman was an important landmark. It was distant yet intimate, objective yet close, and endlessly revealing. Although dated now, their early filmography marks the first departure into interesting and effective documentary filmmaking.
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A Review of ‘Rover (or Beyond Human: The Venusian Future and the Return of the Next Level)’

rover1

Rover (or Beyond Human: The Venusian Future and the Return of the Next Level) (2013)
Written and Directed by Tony Blahd
92 min.

Spoiler-free.

While the film community was flipping its dick over The Raid 2: Berandal and Nymphomaniac, a really cool little movie hit Park City’s neighboring Slamdance Festival, that city’s last bastion of actual independent cinema. Let me tell you about it.

My friend Tony had a church and a camera, and a wild idea for a movie about a cult that hires a videographer to tell the story of their origin, a Brigham Young-type saga of a man named Randall who’s spoken to higher beings on the planet Venus. Randall’s disciples are a handful of sad-eyed dreamers in matching Crocs, all aiming to please and anxious for their impending ascension to a murky “next level” on Venus.
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Paulie: Charlie Kaufman, Eat Your Heart Out

paulie
From left: Jay Mohr, Jay Mohr, and Jay Mohr.

Paulie (1998)
Directed by John Roberts
Written by Laurie Craig
91 min.

Spoiler-free.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—when you’re a kid, it’s damn near impossible to know whether a movie is revered or not. You watch a thing, and if you enjoy it, it’s a part of your world. And your world is only as big as you and your parents, so if you and your parents like the thing, it’s a ‘classic’. Only when you grow up do you discover, by asking friends and scouring the internet, how many movies you thought were well-known that were really just well-known to you.

It still throws me for a loop that I’m the only person in the history of the world who has seen Little Big League. When I was a kid, it played on TV just as much Rookie of the Year, but apparently, I’m the only one who flipped to it. I must’ve watched it damn near 30 times, and I still know parts from it by heart: “Kids today are amazing—I played winter ball down in Venezuela, and they had kids half his age, every one of them speaking Spanish. That’s a hard language.” “They speak Spanish in Venezuela.” “I know! That’s my point!”

But I digress.

The point is, Paulie is one of these such movies—a movie that, for whatever reason, hasn’t had its due, despite being ubiquitous at one point in time. And like Little Big League, it still holds up today. It’s thoroughly enjoyable family fare.

But it’s also so much more.

Paulie is the most ‘meta’ family film of all time.
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Fuck Writer’s Block

Adaptation (2002)

Writing is hard.

It should be easy, because you just sit down and describe the stuff in your head, but what about when there isn’t anything in your head? They call that ‘Writer’s Block’—which Jerry Seinfeld says is bullshit. “Writer’s Block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work,” he says.

And he’s absolutely right.

If you’re serious about being an artist, and making a living as a filmmaker, then you gotta write. It’s work in the same way that being a teacher or a construction worker or a nurse or an office person is. It’s work, so do it.
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