Tag: smug film

‘Dark Horse’ & ‘Damsels in Distress’: A Tale of Two Departures

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One of the best shots in recent history. This, right here, is how you say ‘fuck you’.

Dark Horse (2011)
Written and Directed by Todd Solondz
86 min.

Spoiler-free.

I should’ve seen this one in theaters. But I didn’t. I listened to people. I should never listen to people. People are shit. By ‘people’ I mean those-who-tell-you-a-movie-sucks-and-that-it-is-an-unwelcome-departure-from-said-filmmaker. Those people. Fuck those people.

Why is it that they never caution you about the right movies? I would’ve killed for someone to tap me on the shoulder before I saw Damsels in Distress and warn me that Whit Stillman—a once perfect filmmaker of remarkable integrity—has decided to cop out and pander to a generation he doesn’t understand, and isn’t even worth understanding. But no. They had to warn me about this one instead.
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We Now Offer Free Movie Advice!

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Typical Smug Film reader at a movie store.

If cinema has taught us anything, it’s not to trust robots. So why get movie recommendations from robots? Robots don’t know anything about movies. If they did, they’d make ’em themselves or whatever. So fuck all that algorithmic nonsense on Netflix and Amazon and IMDb and countless other sites. Nothing beats good ol’ fashioned advice from a knowledgable film buff who enjoys stuff from all genres. But gone are the days when you could walk into a video store and get that sort of service. Which is why we have started a free movie advice column.

Every Monday (Beginning March 18th) Cody Clarke and John D’Amico will answer a new batch of your requests. Simply fill out the form below, and you can kiss your ‘what to watch’ woes away! (Form will not appear in RSS.)

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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.
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Eventually, This Will Be a Review of the Movie ‘Husbands’ by John Cassavetes

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Rob Fortucci, one of my best friends, commissioned this review.  I met him in tenth grade—in film class, no less.  First hour at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School, in affluent/middle class Shelby Township, Michigan.

By the time we met we had each already cultivated our respective cinephile statuses.  Mine was completely traditional—my parents and grandparents are movie buffs and introduced me to all the kid-friendly classics, everything from Spielberg to Chaplin.  At around 12, I started venturing out on my own into more ‘subversive’ territory, as one does.  By the time I met Rob at 14, I was already a Kubrick, Scorsese, and Allen fanatic, and a true student of the 70’s and ‘golden age cinema’.
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Argo: I Barely Watched It (So You Don’t Have To)

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Yes, this is really from the god damn movie.

Argo
Directed by Ben Affleck
Screenplay by Chris Terrio
121 min.

I tapped out after about 15 minutes on this one, and normally, I’d just not review the thing on here, and tweet “argo sucks ass” and call it a day, but I gotta talk about this fucking thing. Because I look at a movie like this and I can’t understand the world I live in. This movie is so the antithesis of everything I value as far as movies are concerned (and what you, ideally, should value too) and it’s times like these I feel like the great Roddy Piper in They Live, staring at the plain-to-see ugliness in front of me, and I just wanna force glasses onto everyone around me with my words. So here goes.
Continue reading Argo: I Barely Watched It (So You Don’t Have To)