Hacker Cinema
Smoke
1995 · Film · 112 min
Directed by Wayne Wang
Writer Paul Benjamin is nearly hit by a bus when he leaves Auggie Wren's smoke shop. Stranger Rashid Cole saves his life, and soon middle-aged Paul tells homeless Rashid that he wouldn't mind a short-term housemate. Still grieving over his wife's murder, Paul is moved by both Rashid's quest to reconnect with his father and Auggie's discovery that a woman who might be his daughter is about to give birth.
5 positivefrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
The movie Smoke, which he wrote, is one of my favorites. I've enjoyed several of his novels, but none of those are among my personal canon, for what that's worth.
the movie "Smoke"
especially the scene where Auggie tells his friend (Paul) to... slow down. https://youtu.be/JGV_h36uZ5E
at the time, it felt society was telling me to 'speed up', get this done, achieve that, yayaya.. but I sorta preferred taking the slower route. This scene helped cement that mindset. Tall trees grow slow.
Also, "Smoke" a movie incidentally about a tobacconist with a script by Paul Auster.
Smoke
The Auggie Wren christmas story still gives me goosebumbs and that movie singlehandedly god me into Tom Waits
> I'd say you want an interesting but expect incredible production values
Smoke was an interesting movie, and cost $7M. (It didn't make much more but it wasn't a failure.)
Moon was a fantastic movie, and cost $5M. The little CGI it had was pretty obvious but didn't affect the viewing experience. (It also made near-zero returns.)
Requiem for a Dream was - and remains - an outstanding film. It flopped in box office but must have made pretty penny on home sales.
Dead Man is an interesting movie, and still one of my favourites. It works on the audience for the same reason Apocalypse Now does: episodic films in general are considered "artsy" and hard to chew, but turn them into thoughtful road movies and the audience enjoys the experience.
Pan's Labyrinth is just damn good. It cost €13.5 to make, and grossed $37M. Home sales must have added even more since then.
All the films above are both interesting and, in terms of bloated Hollywood budgets, were cheap to make. I would take any one of them over the perfumed sewage that floods the film theaters. And for reference, I did see Doctor Strange in a cinema so I do have a metric for calibration. My opinion stands.