Tag: alex hiatt

10 Must-Read Smug Film Posts (Our 100th Post!)

I am quite pleased to announce that this is the 100th Smug Film post! Woo! We began on January 7th, 2013 and we’ve been cranking ‘em out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday since then—never missing a single day. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s also been an absolute blast, and we couldn’t be prouder of our output thus far.

Chances are, you haven’t read every single one of our posts, and that’s fine; with so many, it’s certainly not expected. But any self-respecting fan of our work should have read the following posts. And if you’re completely new here, this list is a great place start:

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Mrs. Doubtfire Is One Of The Greatest Super Hero Movies Ever Made
Continue reading 10 Must-Read Smug Film Posts (Our 100th Post!)

The Lords of Salem: A Love Letter To A Lost Genre

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The Lords of Salem (2013)
Written & Directed by Rob Zombie
101 min.

Mild spoilers.

If there’s one movie trend I can totally get behind, it’s the “B Movie Love Letter”. It’s almost its own genre at this point. Recent examples include Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, Wright and Pegg’s Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (and their upcoming The World’s End), Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained (really his whole catalogue), Ti West’s House of the Devil, Lexi Alexander’s Punisher: War Zone, and Peter Travis’ Dredd. And Star Wars and Indiana Jones are some not so recent examples. These filmmakers mine their inspirations for their best aspects and transplant them into modern productions—which are almost inevitably better than the movies they pay homage to, as the ‘originals’ were often made quickly and on the cheap just to provide cheap thrills and make a buck or two. Dredd was much talked about last year, and I’m hoping The Lords of Salem gets similar attention this year, because it’s even more fun.
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A Blank Stare Is Worth A Thousand Words

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There’s a small moment in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation that’s stuck with me more than the rest of the movie (a movie which is little else besides small memorable moments). It’s the morning when Bill Murray’s character Bob is supposed to leave Tokyo, but he’s all tore up because he’s fallen for the young, idle Charlotte, who’ll stay in Tokyo after he’s gone. Whomever that group of Japanese suits is that’s been hauling from him from job to job wants a picture with him (because he’s a movie star I guess) so they all line up. But when they go to take the photo, Murray’s smile fades and his gaze wanders to watch Charlotte walk to the elevator. The look on his face is packed with enough longing and conflict and anguish to fill a sushi boat—yet his expression is pretty bare. It’s kind of a frown, but not exactly. He looks more tired than anything. It calls to mind the zombie mimicking instructions from Shaun of the Dead: “Vacant, with a hint of sadness. Like a drunk who’s lost a bet.” It’s also sad as hell. It’s not the realization that they’ll never see each other again that gets to me, it’s that damned stare.
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Not All Anime Is For Shitty Kids

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Only Yesterday, a grown ass man’s anime.

I kinda hate Dragon Ball Z. And Sailor Moon. And Pokémon. Not because any of them are particularly bad or anything—they’re Saturday morning cartoons, so who cares. But their ubiquity in pop cultural memory has forever colored our impression of anime at large. The great big sparkling eyes and the spiky hair the hyperviolence and the hypersexualized portrayal of girls and the over the top melodrama and the overbearing cuteness are all things seen as inseparable from the medium itself.
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Life of Pi: An Allegory, or rather, a ‘Tell-egory’

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(Still taken from the wonderful site BeforeVFX.Tumblr.com)

Life of Pi (2012)
Directed by Ang Lee
Screenplay by David Magee
127 min.

Disclaimer: No, I haven’t read the book, and I understand full well that there are probably differences between the book and the movie, and that I would possibly ‘understand’ more about the story the movie tries to tell if I’d read the book.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

I could not talk about the Oscar winner for Visual Effects without first bitching about its visual effects, but I’ll try to keep it short, as my thoughts on VFX have already been made clear enough. Basically, the CG in Life of Pi is certainly impressive, no doubt. More than once, I went back and paused on frames to gawk at the insane level of detail they crammed into the animals, which are animated with eye-popping fluidity. They may be too fluid, however, because I found myself slipping in the uncanny valley here and there—the most jarring moments being when footage of an actual tiger is juxtaposed with a CG tiger in quick succession. By and large though, the omnipresence of CG animals isn’t too bothersome. It’s integrated into the physical set well enough that it usually feels like it’s really there.
Continue reading Life of Pi: An Allegory, or rather, a ‘Tell-egory’