All Posts – Page 77

Promised Land: Good Job, Gus

Promised Land (2012)
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Screenplay by John Krasinski & Matt Damon
Story by Dave Eggers
106 min.

Promised Land is a good movie. And Gus Van Sant is a good director. And Matt Damon and John Krasinski are good actors and writers.

This is a movie that nobody saw last year. It’s a small movie, the kind that still gets made by mega celebrities like Matt Damon but that nobody sees because the market is pretty well taken over by other kinds of movies like Taken 2 and The Vow. But I’m not here to wax pretentiously about lowest common denominato, fluff that ‘Hollywood’ is so ‘evil’ for churning out. (The hipsters have that market well cornered.) I’m here, rather, to talk about Promised Land. But first, about Gus Van Sant.
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Donnie Darko: Nobody Understands It Except Me

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Donnie Darko (2001)
Written & Directed by Richard Kelly
113 min. (Original Cut)
133 min. (Director’s Cut)

Spoilers ahead.

The first time I saw this movie, I hated it. Or rather, I hated where it ended up. I appreciated the journey, but not the destination. God damn does it wrap up in a cheese ball way. That ‘Mad World’ montage? Jena Malone’s and Donnie’s mother staring at each other? Man did that shit bug me. So much so that for a while I wrote off the entire movie as bad.

But then, here and there, I’d think about the parts I liked and want to watch it again. And each time I’d re-watch, I’d like the movie a bit more. But that ending remained a sticking point. It always made me cringe.

I can’t remember exactly when I came to the realization that the ending is supposed to make you cringe from its cheesiness—and that Donnie laughing in bed is meant to be him laughing at the cheesy resolution—but once I did, god damn. Fireworks in the brain. What a movie. Five stars.
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Advice Column #7 (4/29/13)

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What’s the oldest great movie? Like legitimately great, not just great ‘for its time’ or something. – Mia R.

Editor’s Note (12/4/14): We no longer answer movie questions through our advice column. We answer them in the mailbag segment of our podcast. Send them to Cody@SmugFilm.com and we will answer on the show!
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Not All Anime Is For Shitty Kids

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Only Yesterday, a grown ass man’s anime.

I kinda hate Dragon Ball Z. And Sailor Moon. And Pokémon. Not because any of them are particularly bad or anything—they’re Saturday morning cartoons, so who cares. But their ubiquity in pop cultural memory has forever colored our impression of anime at large. The great big sparkling eyes and the spiky hair the hyperviolence and the hypersexualized portrayal of girls and the over the top melodrama and the overbearing cuteness are all things seen as inseparable from the medium itself.
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‘Connected’: I Don’t Caaaaare!

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Connected (2011)
Directed by Tiffany Shlain
Written by Tiffany Shlain, Ken Goldberg, Carlton Evans, and Sawyer Steele
82 min.

There’s a great scene in Dumb and Dumber where Jim Carrey has been waiting for Mary Samsonite at the bar for hours, and the black woman from The Young and the Restless (I know this because my mom watches it) comes and sits next to him. When we cut back hours later, she’s in the middle of a long, boring story about her ex-boyfriend. Being an idiot, Lloyd makes no attempt to hide his annoyance when asked, with chipper enthusiasm, “And do you know what he said next?” He responds: “Nooo, and I don’t caaare!”

Watching this movie is like sitting next to that woman.
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