R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman

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Today we lost one of the absolute best. An actor who put his all in to every role, always giving you your money’s worth, never wasting a moment of your time. A virtuoso, with all the adoration one could ever want or need from their peers and from audiences. Just goes to show, you can have it all, and still throw it away.

Addiction is something I’ve never personally experienced, so I’m by no means an expert. But I do know what it looks like. It looks like the trading of soul gratification for momentary gratification. It looks like an invited wave, grabbing hold of your beach and eroding every castle you’ve ever built, telling you it’s all just sand anyway, so why bother having them. It is evil, and it lies, and it is the ultimate internal resistance. I hope he is finally at peace.

I’d say I ‘miss’ him, but I never knew his mortal self. I only ever knew his timeless self, which will be here as long as cinema—which is to say, forever. Everything good about this man is immortal. Everything bad, I never encountered, and will never encounter. My heart goes out to his family, who I’m sure have been struggling with his two selves for some time. I hope they are able to find peace as well.
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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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Our First Anniversary!

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Tomorrow, January 7th, marks the first anniversary of Smug Film! Thank you, everyone, who has visited our site in the last 365 days or so. I know I can speak for everyone here when I say that we are honored whenever anyone reads something on our site. In this Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, BuzzFeed world, sites like Smug Film—ones that produce actual, substantial content—seem to be disappearing. And so, when you choose to read one of our posts, you are voting, with your eyes and your brain and your free time, for the existence of full meals on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, bite-size sweets are fine in moderation, but man have they become rampant in the last couple years. It seems as though we’re stuck in this weird time period where the less attention a thing takes, the more popular it is, and the more time people spend with it. Basically, it’s like everyone’s playing Candy Crush non-stop, whether they’re even playing the actual game or not, ya feel me? But I digress.
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Cody Clarke’s 2013 in Film

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Didn’t see too many new movies this year. Only thirteen in total. Mostly just watched older stuff. In fact, I went to the theaters to see old movies way more than I went to see new ones. This was a particularly great year for screenings of classics, here in NYC. BAM devoted a month to all of John Cassavetes’ films, and did a mini Douglas Sirk retrospective too. And Film Forum had King Kong—a staggeringly gorgeous print of it.

The new movies I did see in theaters this year were Blue Jasmine, This is the End, Gravity, and Escape From Tomorrow. Only liked one of those. As such, I doubt I’ll be going to the theaters to see a new movie any time soon.

Of the thirteen 2013 movies I saw this year (four in theaters, nine on VOD or Netflix) I only liked half, so my list is split into two parts. Part one is the good, part two is the bad. Any films marked 2012 were originally completed in 2012, but released theatrically in 2013.

By the way, there were a bunch of 2013 movies I tried on Netflix that I couldn’t bring myself to finish, and tapped out at the 15-minute mark—such as Frances Ha and Computer Chess—but I didn’t feel comfortable putting all those on this list because I didn’t give them a full viewing. Full enough to know I didn’t want to watch them, yes, but not full enough to really pick them apart.

Anyway, here goes. Feel free to agree or disagree with me in the comments section and whatnot.
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Merry Christmas!

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Merry Christmas (2013)
Written & Directed by Santa Claus
1440 min.

Spoiler-free.

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