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You know, I just may go on a Hoffman marathon later this week. There's a few of his flicks I haven't seen.
*SIGH*
*SIGH*
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A movie that is coming out. Nymphomaniac.Woah more info on the shia stuff?
What I'm plotting, too.You know, I just may go on a Hoffman marathon later this week. There's a few of his flicks I haven't seen.
*SIGH*
For those who passed along kind words about my work over the weekend, just want to say that I've just gotten word that I've been credentialed to cover this years Tribeca Film Festival again. So thanks to those of you who follow my work and visit the site from time to time.
10 Movies Roger Ebert Really Hated
1. Armageddon, one star. OK, say you do succeed in blowing up an asteroid the size of Texas. What if a piece the size of Dallas is left? Wouldn't that be big enough to destroy life on Earth? What about a piece the size of Austin? Let's face it: Even an object the size of that big Wal-Mart outside Abilene would pretty much clean us out, if you count the parking lot.
2. The Brown Bunny, zero stars. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.
When the movie’s director responded by mocking Ebert’s weight, Ebert said, “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny."
3. Jason X, half star. "This sucks on so many levels." Dialogue from "Jason X"; rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. "Jason X" sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought.
4. Mad Dog Time, zero stars. "Mad Dog Time" is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching "Mad Dog Time" is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.... "Mad Dog Time" should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor.
5. The Usual Suspects, one-and-a-half stars. Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care." It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the movie to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests.
6. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, zero stars. [The title character] makes a living prostituting himself. How much he charges I'm not sure, but the price is worth it if it keeps him off the streets and out of another movie. "Deuce Bigalow" is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes.... Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.
7. North, zero stars. I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
8. Spice World, half star. Spice World is obviously intended as a ripoff of A Hard Day's Night which gave The Beatles to the movies...the huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented--while, let's face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of 30 standing in line at Dunkin' Donuts.
9. Good Luck Chuck, one star. There is a word for this movie, and that word is: Ick.
10. Freddy Got Fingered, zero stars. This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.
i seen this in the movie theater with my dad.3. Jason X, half star. "This sucks on so many levels." Dialogue from "Jason X"; rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. "Jason X" sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought.
Speaking of George Clooney films...
The Monuments Men is not receiving very favorable reviews right now...
That's a shame.
Was looking forward to that ensemble of actors.
Ima still check it out but from the sound of it, Clooney may of officially made his first dud as a director/writer.
Still, he will forever be Sandy Lyle to me. Every single scene. |I
Speaking of George Clooney films...
The Monuments Men is not receiving very favorable reviews right now...
That's a shame.
Was looking forward to that ensemble of actors.
Ima still check it out but from the sound of it, Clooney may of officially made his first dud as a director/writer.
Real.An Actor Whose Unhappiness Brought Joy
By A.O. SCOTT FEB. 3, 2014
It was clear, at least since he won the Oscar in 2006 for “Capote,” that Philip Seymour Hoffman was an unusually fine actor. Really though, it was clear long before that, depending on when and where you started paying attention.
Maybe it was when he and John C. Reilly burned up the stage at the Circle in the Square in the 2000 revival of Sam Shepard’s “True West.” Or maybe it was even earlier, in the wrenching telephone scene in “Magnolia,” the disturbing telephone scenes in “Happiness,” the sad self-loathing of “Boogie Nights” or the smug self-possession of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” that brought the news of his special combination of talent, discipline and fearlessness.
Further evidence is not hard to find. Mr. Hoffman worked a lot over the past 15 years or so — in ambitious independent movies, Hollywood blockbusters and theater productions on and beyond Broadway — and nearly always did something memorable. (If you remember anything about the 2004 romantic comedy “Along Came Polly,” for instance, it is likely to be Mr. Hoffman’s terrible basketball skills and the equally dubious romantic advice he gives to Ben Stiller in that film.)
His dramatic roles in middle-sized movies (“Capote,” “25th Hour,” “Doubt,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “The Savages” and “Synecdoche, New York,” to keep the list at a manageable half-dozen for now) were distinguished by how far he was willing to go into the souls of flawed, even detestable characters. As the heavy, the weird friend or the volatile co-worker in a big commercial movie he could offer not only comic relief but also the specific pleasure that comes from encountering an actor who takes his art seriously no matter the project. He may have specialized in unhappiness, but you were always glad to see him.
Mr. Hoffman’s gifts were widely celebrated while he was alive. But the shock of his death on Sunday revealed, too soon and too late, the astonishing scale of his greatness and the solidity of his achievement. We did not lose just a very good actor. We may have lost the best one we had. He was only 46, and his death, apparently from a drug overdose, foreshortened a career that was already monumental.
We will be denied his Lear, his Prospero, his James Tyrone in another “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” (He was the son Jamie in a 2003 production of that play.) But he had already, in the last few years, begun to shift from troubled adults to tragic patriarchs. His Willy Loman in the 2012 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” was a scalding, operatic depiction of vanity, self-delusion and raw emotional need, conveyed with force and delicacy sufficient both to deliver the play’s message and to overcome its sentimentality.
What he did in “The Master,” his fifth film with the writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, was even grander. It may take the world a while to catch up with that journey into dark, uncharted zones of the American character, but once it does it will discover, in Lancaster Dodd, an archetype of corrupted idealism, entrepreneurial zeal and authentic spiritual insight.
But also, as that character likes to say, with ostentatious modesty, of himself: just a man. Dodd is flesh and blood, appetite and imagination, a precisely rendered creature of his place and time. Mr. Hoffman’s diction, his barreling physicality, his displays of Rotarian jollity and earnest intellectualism establish Dodd as an exemplary (if eccentric) postwar American, an expression of the same curious cultural ferment that produced Willy Loman.
Of course “The Master” is after something more than reimagined history. Like Dodd himself, it wants to penetrate the perennial mysteries of the human personality, one specimen at a time. Dodd is a healer, a con artist and a self-proclaimed prophet. He is also, perhaps above all, an actor: a performer, an impromptu singer and stand-up comedian, a man with a Method. He calls it the Cause, but his technique of psychological exploration, based on the excavation of memory and the opening up of barricaded emotional territory, shows clear affinities with the process most stage and screen actors use to find their way into a character.
Mr. Hoffman’s way — not necessarily affiliated with any particular school or ideology, and above all the product of his own restless intelligence and relentless drive — took him further and deeper than most of his colleagues would be willing to venture.
Lancaster Dodd could have been a familiar type: a charming, slippery, charlatan. Mr. Hoffman made him more than that. One of his earliest scenes is an interview — part therapy, part interrogation — with Freddie Quell, a disturbed veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix. The unmistakable rumble of Mr. Hoffman’s voice conveys both sadism and compassion: Dodd’s simultaneous urges to help, to seduce and to dominate his new protégé. Later, when Dodd makes a toast at his daughter’s wedding banquet, we see both his arrogance and his insecurity, and catch a flicker of the loneliness that feeds his insatiable and destructive hunger for love.
Dodd at once invites our judgment — he does terrible things in the service of questionable ends — even as Mr. Hoffman compels our admiration. His goal seemed to be not just the psychological truth that has long been the baseline criterion of post-Method acting, but a moral uncertainty that remains too fraught and frightening for many of us, in art or in life, to engage.
This is not just a matter of seeking out gray areas or mapping ambiguities. Hoffman’s characters exist, more often than not, in a state of ethical and existential torment. They are stuck on the battleground where pride and conscience contend with base and ugly instincts.
Lancaster Dodd sacrifices his intelligence on the altar of his ego. Truman Capote risks his integrity and betrays his friends in pursuit of his literary ambitions, his motives a volatile mixture of compassion and morbid curiosity. The schoolteacher in “25th Hour” and the lonely predator in “Happiness” are both indelibly creepy. The frustrated academic of “The Savages” is merely (if also splendidly) misanthropic, and the grumpy theater artist of “Synecdoche, New York” may be merely (if also baroquely) frustrated. The priest of “Doubt” and the would-be criminal of “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” are potentially much worse.
These are not antiheroes in the cable television, charismatic bad-boy sense of the term. They are, in many cases (and there are more, going all the way back to “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and even the 1992 “Scent of a Woman”), thoroughly awful people: pathetic, repellent, undeserving of sympathy. Mr. Hoffman rescued them from contempt precisely by refusing any easy route to redemption.
He did not care if we liked any of these sad specimens. The point was to make us believe them and to recognize in them — in him — a truth about ourselves that we might otherwise have preferred to avoid. He had a rare ability to illuminate the varieties of human ugliness. No one ever did it so beautifully.
congrats man.For those who passed along kind words about my work over the weekend, just want to say that I've just gotten word that I've been credentialed to cover this years Tribeca Film Festival again. So thanks to those of you who follow my work and visit the site from time to time.
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