Tag: smug film

Forrest Gump: A Gritty Indie Film Masquerading as a Hollywood Epic

forrest


Forrest Gump (1994)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay by Eric Roth
From a novel by Winston Groom
142 min.

I know it’s weird, but there are actual people who don’t like Forrest Gump.  (Dr. Seuss described this phenomena as having a heart three sizes too small.)  Sentimentality is a powerful thing—it makes people cry and tricks intellectuals into thinking art isn’t good.  It also tricks moms into thinking that a movie with LSD use, a guy blowing his load early, sexual bartering, and child molestation is appropriate for an 8 year old—or, maybe I just have a really cool mom.

I was flipping through the channels the other day (I don’t use ‘the guide’) and I landed on Forrest Gump, which is the epitome of a ‘whenever it’s on TV I have to finish it’ movie.  I landed on one of Jenny’s hippie scenes, the one where a dude pulls up in a Volkswagen Beetle and asks if anyone wants to go to San Francisco, and Jenny says “I’ll go,” and he says “Far out!”, like a very happy hippie.  At that moment, I had a realization: Forrest Gump is a pretty weird movie to be on ABC Family (which is the channel it was on).  When I was a little kid, Forrest Gump was just a big, fun movie that made me laugh and then cry at the end.  When I was eight, I didn’t understand that when Forrest is sitting on Jenny’s bed in her dorm and she takes off her shirt, he ejaculates early.  Forrest Gump is a gritty, indie film masquerading as a Hollywood epic.

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Strongman: Pitch-Perfect Cinema Vérité

strongman


Strongman (2009)
Directed by Zachary Levy
113 min.

A day after I posted my How To Watch a Film essay, I received an email from the director of this film. He reached out because loved the essay and he’d gone through, with his own film, exactly what I described going through with my film, Rehearsals—people that were ambivalent about it when watching a screener and then blown away in a theater setting.

For a long time, he avoided releasing his film on DVD because he felt that a theater was the ideal setting to see it, and he wanted to do whatever he could to make sure as many people as possible could see it properly. However, he’s recently decided to finally take the plunge and release it on DVD and Digital, and it’s due out this month.

Zach was kind enough to send me an advance copy of the DVD in the mail, which I watched this past week, and let me tell you—this thing is plenty powerful on an average-sized flatscreen. I don’t know that I could even handle this thing in a movie theater. This is one of the most gripping vérité docs I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s no surprise at all that it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, was on Roger Ebert’s Year’s Best list, and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick.
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Halloween 4, 5, 6: The Most Fascinating and Flawed Trilogy in Film History

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Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

This time of year always gets me thinking about horror flicks, and there certainly are a lot of them to think about. They’ve been around as long as film itself, and despite evidence to the contrary, they still make horror films today! Whether the ones of today are actually any worse than they used to be is hard to say through the haze of nostalgia, but it is inevitably the American horror films of the 70’s and 80’s that I gravitate to—the films of my childhood. And none fascinate me more so than the Halloween series.
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Twisties: Why ‘Oblivion’ And Many Other Movies These Days Suck

oblivion


In my earliest Smug Film piece, I reviewed a movie called ATM and introduced this idea of ‘Roomies’—movies where the characters are trapped in some kind of room and the whole point is figuring out why they’re there and how to get out. Exam, The Breakfast Club, and Cube are some popular examples. Now I’m going to introduce you to Twisties, which have become quite prevalent lately.

I saw the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion in the theater by myself.  I like going to the movies by myself.  It’s cool.  There’s something about being by yourself in the grandeur of the theater that always reminds me how much I want to make movies.
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The Brotherhood of the Traveling Rants: That Weird Penis Guy Made a Great Movie

rants

The Brotherhood of the Traveling Rants (2013)
Directed by Steve Durand, Bryan Gaynor, Gavin McInnes
68 min.

Most of the people reading this probably have no idea who Gavin McInnes is. My first introduction to him was through his weird penis. I’m a big fan of Terry Richardson’s photography, and many years ago I saw a couple photos by him of some guy with pointy facial hair and a very pointy foreskin*. These photos forever stuck with me, and it wasn’t until about a year ago that I saw this mystery man again, on Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld. Turns out the pointy foreskin man is a smart and funny writer and comedian who has a lot of great outside-of-the-box opinions on stuff. And now, with this movie, I’ve been surprised by him once again—the man has some serious acting and filmmaking chops.

The Brotherhood of the Traveling Rants is one of those sorta-documentaries containing some real scenes and some fake scenes. This kind of gimmick is usually annoying and unsettling, because you never really have a sure foothold, and you spend the duration of the film trying to deduce what’s real and what’s fake rather than just following the actual story. This film gets that, though. The switch-offs between real and fake here are so goddamn tongue-in-cheek and good spirited that by the end, the whole damn thing approaches transcendence, satisfying both your funny bone and your heartstrings in ways you will never have thought possible from what is essentially a standup comedy film.
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