Movies Can Make Any Song Good

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I don’t care who you are or what music you typically like, if Step Brothers doesn’t make you fall in love with the song Por Ti Volaré by Andrea Bocelli, there’s something wrong with you.

Aside from being a huge film buff, I’m a huge music buff. Hell, I’m just plain buff. (25/m/nyc/d&d free ;-* ). Basically though, there ain’t a genre of movies or music where there ain’t at least some stuff I dig. And that’s the way things should be. Who are these people who, for instance, ‘don’t like rap’ or ‘don’t like horror’ or whatever? How can anyone be so lazy? There’s tons of different types of horror movies, tons of different types of rap. To write off an entire genre is just lame. It’s 2013, people—if you don’t have eclectic taste, get the fuck outta here.

However, I can understand people not liking something if they don’t have any context for it. If you’ve never heard, for instance, reggae, hearing it for the first time will be a love it or hate it experience—it either speaks to you or it doesn’t. Its context is either hardwired inside you, a sleeping giant in your brain waiting to be woken by the right tones, or the context must be instilled. And to instill said context takes volition—it may necessitate listening to lots of different reggae artists, and various styles of reggae, and reading up on the history of the genre, until something clicks in your brain. Or, you could just fucking watch The Harder They Come.
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Not All Movies Should Have Jokes, But All Movies Should Have a Sense of Humor

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Click for bigger version.

There is a moment in Fargo (I’ll never stop talking about Fargo) that makes me die with laughter every single time I watch it. The movie is packed with black comedy and irony and brilliant deadpans (the license plate joke, holy shit) and some basic but perfect physical gags (Jean Lundegaard bursting out of the shower draped in its curtain like a kid in a homemade ghost costume), but I ain’t talking abaout all that stuff. I’m talking about the stills above. This moment seems to be more of an editorial in-joke than an actual written joke, but of course you never can tell with the Coen brothers. After Jean’s dad and Stan Grossman and Jerry discuss the plot’s central ransom over breakfast, Jerry is at the counter. The beaming cashier asks how Jerry’s meal was. After he answers rather shortly, he comes back with an affable “How you doin’” and when it cuts back to her, we see her cock her head to the side before it cuts again. All she does is cock her head to the side. No response, no change in expression, just a slight pitch. It’s hilarious. It’s insanely funny.
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10 Woefully Underrated Comedies

It’s not hard for comedies to slip under the radar. Like any ‘genre film’, so many are pumped out each year that it’s almost impossible to keep track of which ones are good. Unless something gets an alarmingly high rating on Rotten Tomatoes, or was made by people you trust no matter what the Tomatometer says, you probably aren’t going to see it. And then you’re going to forget it even existed. Here’s ten great ones that probably passed you by.

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Dan in Real Life (2007) | Dir. Peter Hedges | 98 min. 
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The Master: P.T. Anderson’s Bunch of Footage That Got Released Somehow

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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.)
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