{"id":2145,"date":"2013-05-14T21:25:52","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T01:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=2145"},"modified":"2017-08-29T05:58:55","modified_gmt":"2017-08-29T09:58:55","slug":"10-actually-good-movies-people-think-are-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/10-actually-good-movies-people-think-are-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Actually Good Movies People Think Are Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tarantino\" Quentin Tarantino, director of some actually good ‘cool’ movies.<\/em> This is a companion piece to my 10 Awful Movies People Think Are Cool<\/a> list.\u00a0 Read that one first.\u00a0 Or read this one first.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t really matter.
\"hos\" 10.\u00a0 Hostel: Part II<\/a> | Dir. Eli Roth<\/b><\/p>\n

I don’t like Hostel<\/a>.\u00a0 It takes too long to get to the good stuff.\u00a0 And while we’re waiting, we have to listen to these annoying frat boys talk to each other.\u00a0 Hostel: Part II<\/a> is the exact same movie but with hot girls, a more exotic location, a more precise and biting premise, a better ending, and a let’s-get started-right-away approach to the action. I like to think of Hostel as a practice<\/i> movie, the \u2018rough draft\u2019 for Hostel: Part II, which is way more refined and tonally much more interesting.\u00a0 Plus, you get to see the girl from Welcome to the Dollhouse<\/a> naked!\u00a0 But, to be serious, some of the imagery is so haunting that I don’t even like thinking about it. And rather than showing us said haunting imagery with inept, overdone, artificially intense handheld shots, Roth’s camera is static and objective.\u00a0 A door opens and we linger on a man tearing off a piece of a restrained, awake man’s leg as his victim screams in pain.\u00a0 Only movies can produce those kinds of images.\u00a0 Fucking nuts.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \"storytell\"<\/p>\n

9.\u00a0 Storytelling<\/a> | Dir. Todd Solondz<\/b><\/p>\n

It’s interesting to me how Todd Solondz gets away with his blatant shock cinema approach.\u00a0 I think it’s because his style is so grounded and his tone is so inviting.\u00a0 His almost sitcom-esque scores brings delight to the reprehensible. Storytelling<\/a>, or at least a section of it, is basically an indictment of my favorite movie of all time, American Movie<\/a>.\u00a0 I don’t begrudge it for that, and in fact, I could be wrong, although it certainly reads that way and I’d love to know more. Either way, the shock moments (”fuck me, nigger” et al.) are effective, and also honest, and what we’re left with is a very fun, intelligent movie.\u00a0 This is shock cinema I can get behind.<\/p>\n

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\"good\"8. Goodfellas<\/a> | Dir. Martin Scorsese<\/b><\/p>\n

All of Scorsese’s movies are \u2018cool\u2019, even the awful ones like New York, New York<\/a> or the ones nobody has seen like Kundun<\/a>.\u00a0 His unabashed love for all things cinematic, and his kinetic, visceral attack on the viewer is cool under any title. Goodfellas<\/a> is the coolest of his movies. Probably because it’s the best.\u00a0 And definitely not because it\u2019s about the mafia.\u00a0 The mafia isn’t cool.\u00a0 Think of the biggest losers in your high school, the bullies that thought they were cool because they wore gold chains and were wannabe tough.\u00a0 Those guys weren’t cool.\u00a0 Goodfellas is cool because at the end of the movie, the main character gets out of his chair and starts talking at the camera. Because a slow motion shot pushes in on De Niro with Sunshine of Your Love in the background.\u00a0 Because of the violence and the red, the dialogue and the drugs.\u00a0 It’s cool from every possible angle, and Marty wouldn’t have it any other way. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"scar\" 7. Scarface<\/a> | Dir. Brian De Palma<\/b><\/p>\n

Apart from number one, this is the only other movie here that is famous solely<\/i> for being cool.\u00a0 Despite that, it’s a good movie, albeit long as fuck.\u00a0 It’s probably longer than it needs to be, but let\u2019s pretend the length is thematic, you know, because of excess or something. Scarface<\/a> is like inverted Goodfellas, and while Goodfellas is a better movie, Scarface out cools it just a tad.\u00a0 It’s the flashy colors and beach babes that do it. For me, the cool factor of Scarface can defined by one shot.\u00a0 In its most horrific scene, Tony is about to have his arms cut off with a chainsaw.\u00a0 Where is his friend who’s supposed to be helping?\u00a0 He’s off flirting!\u00a0 A lesser filmmaker would simply cut to the friend.\u00a0 Not De Palma.\u00a0 De Palma wants you to feel the time, to be on the edge of your seat, to be nervous as fuck.\u00a0 So instead of just cutting to the friend, he uses a brilliantly slow and majestic crane shot to go all the way from the upstairs window down to the car across the street.\u00a0 It’s a shot like this that proves somebody’s filmmaking IQ.\u00a0 It’s a shot like this that proves a director wants the audience to feel something authentic, rather than merely impress them with flashy style. Shots like that are fucking cool.\u00a0<\/i> \u00a0 \"buff\"<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0 Buffalo \u201966<\/a> | Dir. Vincent Gallo<\/b><\/p>\n

Vincent Gallo is a fucking maniac.\u00a0 And with Buffalo \u201866<\/a>, he certainly did a good job of recreating what it’s probably like to hang out with him for a day.\u00a0 And what he really did was make one of the most fun, crazy, hilarious \u2018art films\u2019 of all time. Buffalo \u201866 reeks of an indie stench that would make a lesser film unbearably pretentious.\u00a0 Gallo shot on 35mm color reversal stock so that he could achieve the gritty, washed out, 70\u2018s look he wanted.\u00a0 The film stock is long out of print and so unpredictable and difficult to process that the movie almost could\u2019ve not existed at all.\u00a0 Using it was a total dice roll.\u00a0 It doesn’t get any more pretentious than that. Gallo is an obnoxious guy, but therein lies his genius.\u00a0 His unabashed and unapologetic desire to be stylistic, matched with his propensity to say hilarious things, like \u2018I drive luxury cars, my cars shift themselves\u2019, is where Buffalo \u201866 finds it’s heart. Underneath all the craziness, it’s actually a very human and emotional story about relationships and falling in love.\u00a0 But what makes it so cool is Gallo’s way of forcing you, and Christina Ricci, to follow him through his world of nonsense.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \"norton\"<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0 American History X<\/a> | Dir. Tony Kaye<\/b><\/p>\n

Here’s a movie everyone talked about when I was in middle school, nd why not? It\u2019s got \u2018badass\u2019 violence and racism coming out of its ears. There’s something about American History X<\/a> that just feels right though.\u00a0 Maybe it’s the wide lenses that really put you in Edward Furlong’s room.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s the casting.\u00a0 Everyone from Ethan Suplee to Elliott Gould to Fairuza Balk are wonderful.\u00a0 And maybe it’s just the way the style tempers the melodrama.\u00a0 It enhances the reality instead of making it an after school special. Apparently, Tony Kaye wanted to take an Alan Smithee credit for some reason.\u00a0 Strange. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"matrix\" 4.\u00a0 The Matrix<\/a> | Dirs. Lana & Andy Wachowski<\/b><\/p>\n

I’m glad even Quentin Tarantino agrees that to talk about The Matrix<\/a>, you have to ignore its sequels. The Matrix took everybody by surprise.\u00a0 All of sudden there was this movie with Keanu Reeves that had this whole new idea about living in virtual reality.\u00a0 It was all very edgy and topical as the internet was on the cusp of becoming the most normal thing ever and Y2K was steadily approaching. The ultimate achievement of The Matrix is that it is aware of itself just enough to get away with all the stylistic cyberpunk junk.\u00a0 Without the little nods to the camera (for instance, when Neo says \u201cI know Kung-Fu\u201d) the movie might not be cool at all. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"paradise\"<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills<\/a> and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations<\/a> | Dirs. Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky<\/b><\/p>\n

It’s very hard for me to discuss these films in a few short paragraphs.\u00a0 They are the best movies ever made, and being the best movies ever made, they demand more respect.\u00a0 What I will say is this\u2014the end credits sequence of Paradise Lost 2<\/a> is the coolest sequence in movie history.\u00a0 The way the sound bites are punctuated by The Call of Ktulu by Metallica is bar none the coolest thing ever edited and printed to film. There is a third installment that is equally as good and completes the trilogy.\u00a0 The three combined are perhaps the highest achievement in cinematic history, not only for their artistic craftsmanship but also their real world effect\u2014which only a small handful of movies ever made can lay claim to. However, since this is a list about being cool, I left off the third one since it is much more clinical by design.\u00a0 Which, it should be.\u00a0 But basically makes it less \u2018cool\u2019. If you haven’t seen these go watch them immediately. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"first\"<\/p>\n

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2.\u00a0First Blood<\/a> | Dir. Ted Kotcheff<\/b> I avoided First Blood<\/a> for a very long time.\u00a0 Everybody knows what Rambo is, and you definitely don’t have to see any Rambo movies to know.\u00a0 When I say Rambo you think a jungle, machine guns, a flame thrower, and refugees in need of rescuing. Since all that shit is boring, I assumed First Blood was too.\u00a0 Finally, one day, I popped it in on a lark\u2014one of the best decisions of my life.\u00a0 It started and I was on-board early on.\u00a0 All the while I kept thinking ‘when is it going to turn boring and cheesy?’.\u00a0 I figured at any point the governor was going to call and say \u2018get me Rambo!\u2019 and he’d be whisked away to some jungle to save a baby.\u00a0 It never happened.\u00a0 Instead, the action escalated, and what unraveled was a very dark, interesting action drama with intense but low-key violence and a very human conflict. First Blood is an intelligent character piece about prejudice and misunderstanding.\u00a0 The sequels that follow are exactly what you think of when you hear Rambo\u2014they suck.\u00a0 Except for the 2008 one, that one wasn’t bad.\u00a0 Way better than those god awful Expendables<\/a> movies. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"shot\" 1. Pulp Fiction<\/a> (1994) | Dir. Quentin Tarantino<\/b><\/p>\n

Pulp Fiction<\/a> is the coolest movie ever made.\u00a0 In fact, it is the only movie in history that is good by virtue of being cool.\u00a0 Similar to Reservoir Dogs<\/a>, Pulp Fiction is about nothing.\u00a0 While there are no character arcs in Dogs, Pulp Fiction has one very shallow one revolving around Jules quitting the biz.\u00a0 However, his arc is so underdone and unimportant to anything else that’s going on that you ultimately forget it’s even happening and don’t really care about it when it does. The movie itself is just a series of extended vignettes that sometimes intersect and are told out of order for literally no reason.\u00a0 If you think I’m picking on it or being reductive, just think about it for a second\u2014I know you’ve seen the movie dozens of times, we all have.\u00a0 It opens with a long winded conversation about TV pilots and cheeseburgers.\u00a0 Two guys get killed and then there’s a gold watch and a boxer, a guy named Zed with a gimp, and some other stuff.\u00a0 Plus, the movie is two and a half hours long! When I say \u2018for a reason\u2019 I’m talking about how when you watch a normal movie like Groundhog Day<\/a> and someone asks you why the day keeps repeating, the obvious answer is, so the main character learns his life lesson.\u00a0 The only thing like that in Pulp Fiction is that guy missing Vince and Jules with his \u2018hand cannon\u2019.\u00a0 It’s so minuscule it barely matters.\u00a0 If you can’t come up with a quick, simple answer to why a movie is doing a thing, the movie is probably awful.\u00a0 Pulp Fiction is the exception to the rule.\u00a0 But like I said, it’s good because it’s cool. Everything that happens is cool, from the soundtrack to the way it’s shot to the meticulously detailed dialogue.\u00a0 It’s the first time that an indie personality met the mainstream in such a powerful way that it changed the entire culture.\u00a0 Pulp Fiction isn’t just cool, it informed<\/i> cool.\u00a0 And again, like most things, the devil is in the details.\u00a0 Minutia is the architect of cool. Before Pulp Fiction, Misirlou was a relatively obscure surf rock song by Dick Dale and the Deltones, a group only liked by forty year olds who wear Hawiian shirts, smoke pot, and really care about Les Paul.\u00a0 Pulp Fiction made the song a cultural phenomenon but not just because it’s in the movie. It’s all about the way it’s presented. Tarantino’s biggest strength is using long winded, wordy dialogue to build tension.\u00a0 The best examples of this are found in Inglourious Basterds<\/a>\u2014its opening scene is one of the best in movie history.\u00a0 The wordiness makes the dialogue feel more authentic, but it also gives time for percolation, which is a key proponent in building tension.\u00a0 The longer it takes to get from point A to point B the more we sweat.\u00a0 And the more the dialogue carries us along that path, the more tension we feel because dialogue sits on top and masks whats underneath. Honey Bunny and Pumpkin seem to talk forever, but the longer they talk the closer they get to deciding to rob the diner they’re in.\u00a0 Their decision to do it caps the scene, which is then punctuated by a freeze frame and the music cue\u2014Misirlou. It’s the freeze frame that does it.\u00a0 Freezing to get you into Misirlou is perhaps the most influential decision in movie history and it solidified the movie’s coolness into eternity.\u00a0 Every kid that saw that freeze frame instantly wanted to be a filmmaker themselves.\u00a0 Whatever followed for the next two and half hours is academic.\u00a0 He had us at hello.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"tarantino\"
\nQuentin Tarantino, director of some actually good ‘cool’ movies.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a companion piece to my 10 Awful Movies People Think Are Cool<\/a> list.\u00a0 Read that one first.\u00a0 Or read this one first.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t really matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,1270],"tags":[1602,1603,1618,1613,843,1621,987,1626,133,1627,1612,1633,1604,1617,1616,1630,1615,1169,65,37,1631,330,1605,1606,1607,322,1625,439,1623,563,1622,564,1628,1632,1610,844,1624,327,383,1167,328,1611,1003,997,876,104,185,769,1629,387,111,1614,137,1619,1620,1608],"class_list":["post-2145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregslists","tag-10-awful-movies-people-think-are-cool","tag-actually-good-movies","tag-alan-smithee","tag-american-history-x","tag-american-movie","tag-andy-wachowski","tag-brian-de-palma","tag-bruce-sinofsky","tag-buffalo-66","tag-call-of-ktulu","tag-christina-ricci","tag-dick-dale","tag-eli-roth","tag-elliott-gould","tag-ethan-suplee","tag-expendables","tag-fairuza-balk","tag-first-blood","tag-goodfellas","tag-greg-deliso","tag-groundhog-day","tag-hostel","tag-hostel-2","tag-hostel-part-ii","tag-hostel-part-2","tag-inglourious-basterds","tag-joe-berlinger","tag-john-goodman","tag-keanu-reeves","tag-kundun","tag-lana-wachowski","tag-martin-scorsese","tag-metallica","tag-misirlou","tag-new-york-new-york","tag-paradise-lost","tag-paradise-lost-2","tag-pulp-fiction","tag-quentin-tarantino","tag-rambo","tag-reservoir-dogs","tag-robert-de-niro","tag-robert-deniro","tag-scarface","tag-scorsese","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-storytelling","tag-ted-kotcheff","tag-the-matrix","tag-todd-solondz","tag-tony-kaye","tag-vincent-gallo","tag-wachowski","tag-wachowski-brothers","tag-welcome-to-the-dollhouse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2145"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7750,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions\/7750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}