The NeverEnding Story

I’ve been thinking about Philip Seymour Hoffman a lot over the past couple of days. There’s the obvious reason – the brilliant actor died under sad circumstances over the weekend.

His death led to the thoughts I’ll try to articulate in this post. It’s not about Hoffman’s tragic passing but about his impact on me as a film buff. And all the other actors, directors, and writers that we grow to admire.

Boogie Nights had a profound influence on me when I saw it that almost equaled that of Pulp Fiction. I consider it to be perhaps the second greatest picture after Pulp of the last two decades. There’s another candidate – Almost Famous. What do they have in common? Hoffman. He’s a supporting character in both and both movies give him extremely memorable moments. Same goes for The Big Lebowski. And, of course, his amazing leading man roles in Capote and The Master.

For true blue lovers of the medium, these films and the performers who populate them become part of our makeup. When something like Boogie Nights or Lebowski or Almost Famous is mentioned in this manner – “I haven’t seen it” – it really fills me with a sense of happiness. That’s because (if I know the person I’m talking to loves movies) I know they’ll get to experience it for the first time.

It’s part of what I refer to as the NeverEnding Story of movies. There’s the logical explanation to my term… movies are released every week. There’s always something new to watch and discuss. However, it also refers to the NeverEnding conversations that I’ll have when I meet someone new and discover they loved a movie as much as me. Or if we disagreed – that can require a discussion too.

When I hear a friend is watching the James Bond movies in order for the first time, that sets up a series of 20 plus conversations discussing the merits of the Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig eras.

With the people who make movies – it’s another NeverEnding Story that features as many twists and turns as the product themselves. There’s endless examples, but here’s some recent ones. In the mid 2000s, Matthew McConaughey’s career was flaming out with middling fare like Sahara and by-the-numbers romantic comedies. Now he’s giving performances that place him among the greatest actors of his generation.

When Titanic became the highest grossing picture ever, Leonardo DiCaprio could have coasted on his charm in action flicks and romances. He chose a different path and become Martin Scorsese’s new De Niro. He, too, has easily become among the best of his peers.

Robert Downey Jr.’s career was basically over by the mid 90s after a sad series of drug problems. Now he’s Iron Man. And Sherlock Holmes. And maybe the biggest movie star on the planet.

I write a series of posts on this blog called Movie Perfection. This is where I talk about scenes in movies that, in my mind, are flawless. They’ve included the last scenes of Seven, the “Tiny Dancer” sing-along in Almost Famous, the coffee shop encounter in Heat, and Patrick Bateman’s musings on 80s music in American Psycho, among others. I wrote a whole Movie Perfection post on the work of Quentin Tarantino because it’s all been pretty much perfect to this movie lover.

And here’s the thing: somewhere there’s a young kid just discovering how much he or she loves the world of movies. That kid will study Hitchcock and Kubrick and Spielberg and Scorsese and Quentin. They’ll discover the impeccable work of Brando and De Niro and Pacino and Day-Lewis and Streep and Hepburn and Blanchett and Hackman and DiCaprio and on and on.

They’ll discover Philip Seymour Hoffman. They won’t be inundated by the grisly details of his heroin addiction. They’ll marvel at his ability to disappear into the roles he played. That potential actor/writer/director might see something in a Hoffman performance that influences them. And that is what will matter.

That kid might grow up to direct the finest actors of their generation. Or be one of those actors. Or that kid might write another scene that I consider Movie Perfection and I’ll write about it. This isn’t something that will probably happen. It’s going to happen.

That, my friends, is the NeverEnding Story that I love to follow and write about. That’s why there’s a whole lot of movie bloggers out there. At the end of day, we’re all part of talking about the NeverEnding Story of Cinema. Sometimes it involves hundreds or thousands of posts writing about the subject, like I do.

Or sometimes the conversation goes like this:

“So how was it?”

“Pretty good. You should check it out.”

And whether the conversation in this NeverEnding Story involves a million words or that brief exchange above, we’re all a part of it.