hard eight – Smug Film (1/7/13

1:11:24 | View on iTunes | Download Mp3

On this episode, I am joined by fellow Smug Film contributors Jenna Ipcar and Ned Martin. We discuss all things movie theaters—from our best and worst movie theater experiences, to the best theaters we’ve ever been to. As always, we go on tangents along the way, take a quick break for a movie joke by comedian Anthony Kapfer, and close the show with questions from our mailbag.

If you have a question for the show, leave it in the comments or email us at Podcast@SmugFilm.com.

If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, and leave a rating and a comment on there as well. Doing this helps us immensely as far as our ranking on there, which is what allows people to be able to discover us. Word of mouth is always best of all though, so spread the word!

By the way, the beautiful painting above is by artist Marianne Kuhn, and it is called Naro Cinema Norfolk VA. You can see the full painting and buy prints of it at FineArtAmerica.

Movie Stuff Referenced in this Episode:
Continue reading Smug Film Podcast Episode #2 – Movie Theaters (4/14/14)

master

The Master (2012)
Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
144 min.

Warning: this review contains spoilers I guess. Nothing happens in this movie though, so you can’t really be ‘spoiled’.

The Master isn’t a movie. It’s a bunch of footage. I’ll get to that, but first I need to walk you through how I feel about P.T. Anderson’s filmography. Excluding Hard Eight. Let’s just pretend Hard Eight doesn’t exist. That’s not difficult, since nobody has seen it or even heard of it. So, starting with Boogie Nights:

Boogie Nights is about a guy, Dirk Diggler, that part is clear, but then, for no reason, there’s a bunch of footage of other guys—ancillary ones. This is because P.T. Anderson wanted to make a three-hour movie. Which is insulting. It’s insulting because rather than try to make a good movie that people will like, he simply wanted to make a three-hour movie. And the way he attempted to do this (I say ‘attempted’ because the finished version is 155 minutes) was through loading it with superfluous side characters whose arcs don’t matter. They matter so little that their conclusions are either mind-blowingly lazy (the shot of Rollergirl sitting in a high school classroom shoved into a montage at the end) or completely nonexistent (we must visit the deleted scenes on the DVD to see what happens to the black porn actress. Apparently the guy she married beats her for some reason.)
Continue reading The Master: P.T. Anderson’s Bunch of Footage That Got Released Somehow