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Posts Tagged ‘P.S. Hoffman’

Synecdoche, New York

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

tn_synechdocheSYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is the most complex and convoluted movie that worked that I’ve seen in a long time. I loved it and you might too. But there’s also a good chance you’re not on its wavelength, and in that case it will be torture, like me watching WAKING LIFE.

P.S. Hoffman plays Caden, a guy who directs plays. He’s fat, unhappy and uninteresting and his wife (Catherine Keener) is obviously miserable. The opening is so mundane it’s almost hard to translate as a movie: he has trouble getting out of bed, reads the newspaper, mumbles to his wife that Harold Pinter died, they have sort of a conversation but aren’t listening to each other. It’s kind of nice that it begins so uncinematically mired in normal life, because as it goes along it becomes more and more fantastical. (read the rest of this shit…)

Mission: Impossible III

Saturday, May 6th, 2006

I like this “Mission Impossible” series. The first one, by Brian DePalma, is the best, a real tight and stylish twisty thriller with amazingly tense suspense scenes and cinematic tricks and surprises. And the occasional show offy special effects action scene. The perfect combination of Brian DePalma and summer event movie.

The second one, by John Woo, is a horrible piece of shit that finally made America realize what they had done to John Woo. But if you don’t hold it to the standards of “being a good movie” it’s pretty fucking funny. The amazing motorcycle chest bump scene comes to mind. In the John Woo filmography I consider this in the same dumb-action category as HARD TARGET and BLACKJACK. (read the rest of this shit…)

Capote

Wednesday, October 26th, 2005

In the type of acting tour de la force that everybody loves unless they’re some kind of a dick, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote, the famous writer and weirdo. Although the use of only his last name as the movie’s title seems to imply that it will tell the entire story of his life and maybe even the entire story of the life of everybody with the last name Capote, this is actually not a full on biography. The story is narrowed down to the 4 or 5 years when he was working on his famous book IN COLD BLOOD, starring Robert Blake.

The movie starts out with a young girl discovering the dead bodies of a family murdered in a farmhouse. And before you know it Capote and his research assistant Harper Lee (author of the book TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, starring Gregory Peck) are nosing around asking everybody questions. So at first I thought this was gonna be kind of a LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN thing with famous authors going around solving crimes. I bet the Marquis De Sade did these murders. Or Edgar Alan Poe. (read the rest of this shit…)

Happiness

Monday, January 1st, 2001

This is kind of a misleading title because really it is about ugly drooling guys sitting around in their underwear getting drunk and wishing they could have violent sex with neighbors that won’t even talk to them and that kind of business. Which, in my opinion, is not all that happy. You know how Hollywood usually pretties everybody up? Like even the criminal element in motion pictures, most of the time they are a LOT better looking than anybody I ever worked with. And the same goes for stories, if it’s a true story chances are they’re gonna streamline it, water it down a little, gussy it up a little, make it look nice “for dramatic purposes.” But the truth is there are a lot of ugly motherfuckers in this world, and they do a lot of ugly things, like some of them call up women in the phone book and jack off while they talk about “I’m gonna fuck you so hard you’re gonna come out your ears” and what not, and coincidentally that is exactly what this picture is about, Happiness. (read the rest of this shit…)