Smug Film Podcast Episode #3 – Movies That Got Us Into Movies (4/21/14)

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On this episode, I am joined by fellow Smug Film contributors John D’Amico and Jenna Ipcar. We discuss the movies that got us into movies, and were our gateway into obsession. As always, we go on tangents along the way, take a quick break for a movie joke by comedian Anthony Kapfer, and then 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!

Movie Stuff Referenced in this Episode:
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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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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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Wes Anderson, Please Don’t Become Tim Burton

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Wes Anderson is capable of perfect moments like this. But I don’t think he even cares.

I love him, don’t get me wrong. I’m a Wes Anderson fan. I really am. Every single one of his movies are either very good or great. Well, almost every single one. His latest, Moonrise Kingdom, is quite bad. And that worries me. Because until it, Anderson had that whole ‘style and substance’ thing down pat—and then suddenly, not so much. To the untrained eye, one might assume it was simply a much-needed slapdash, throwaway, breather film after the hard work and meticulousness of Fantastic Mr. Fox. But I suspect something worse going on. I suspect hackery.
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