Philip Seymour Hoffman c/d?

I never considered him famous in the sense that people would swarm and have their picture taken with him. I always figured he was famous in the sense that you'd see him at a local restaurant and recognize him, and maybe someone might come over for an autograph or something. I guess I'd call that New York famous vs. LA famous.

i saw him on broadway doing "true west" with john c. reilly. it's a two-man show and the two would switch roles every night. i'll always regret not seeing the show twice so that i could see hoffman do both roles. john c. reilly was good but not even in the same league as hoffmann, who dug himself so deeply into this gravel-voiced, obtuse drifter character that i literally couldn't imagine the roles reversed, no matter how i tried.

ha and now googling around for images from this show returns only shots of PSH as the preppy writer. i guess the PR stills were taken on one particular day and they didn't come back for the reversed version.

oh man, you reminded me that i saw that show too. must've been almost 15 years ago now

i saw him on broadway doing "true west" with john c. reilly. it's a two-man show and the two would switch roles every night. i'll always regret not seeing the show twice so that i could see hoffman do both roles. john c. reilly was good but not even in the same league as hoffmann, who dug himself so deeply into this gravel-voiced, obtuse drifter character that i literally couldn't imagine the roles reversed, no matter how i tried.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, February 3, 2014 7:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god i wish i could have seen that.

and man, the skill to do that—just to remember all the lines!—is absolutely unfathomable

(memory lane)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq4qH76O_5I

Ha, just saw on wiki the Quaid Bros did their version too.

what a loss, i had no idea he was that young. 46! could've sworn the guy was at least in 50s. just wanted to share my love for his roles in "Doubt" and "The Savages", i don't think they've been mentioned in this thread yet but he was astonishing in both of those movies. i'll totally miss his acting. so sad.

Richard Brody.

50 bags of heroin in his apartment, CNN's saying.

oh my god
does anyone know what sort of life event could have precipitated a purchase of that magnitude?

good grief

apologies for my ingnorance on this topic, how much is a bag of heroin? does 1 bag = 1 dose?

Had his partner kicked him out of their house recently? He was staying in a nearby apartment.

I think they'd split in recent months, yes.

:(
it's nosy of me to wonder but i wonder why

i really want to stop letting this bum me out so bad too but it just keeps lurking there around the corners of my mind. i feel really sad for him and all of the people who loved him.

"I have no inside information whatsoever but allow me to confidently explain how Hoffman's life could have been saved." (paraphrasing)

http://ideas.time.com/2014/02/02/how-philip-seymour-hoffman-could-have-been-saved/

i really want to stop letting this bum me out so bad too but it just keeps lurking there around the corners of my mind. i feel really sad for him and all of the people who loved him.

every word of this 2nded

xp yea that was totally wrongheaded to frame that story around hoffman. david sheff has researched and written extensively about addiction but it's kind of lame to use this very recent death of someone who has no personal connection to the author as the hook for the story.

apologies for my ingnorance on this topic, how much is a bag of heroin? does 1 bag = 1 dose?

it depends on how big a habit you have going but most people start out at a bag a day. if you are up to needing 2 bags to get high you are going to hurt pretty bad when you stop. if you have 50 bags in your apartment -- I never knew any users who would have that kind of supply on hand, that's way out of my league. but most users don't have enough cash to buy as much as they'd like to have handy.

Nathaniel at The FilmExp:

The Atlantic has a piece on PSH's talent that fascinated me. It's very well written but its thesis is EXACTLY the opposite about how I always felt about him as an actor, claiming that his greatest gift was understatement. I think he almost never understated anything... which is why he thrills people so much in big moments but also why I did not like his performance in Doubt at all (way too bold when that role needs exceptional restraint to cloud the issues, hence the title) and why my three favorite performances of his I consider very atypical because they have these lovely quiet non red-faced & screaming layers and subtle details. But it's a really good read.

http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2014/2/2/links.html

I'd seen Doubt on B'way, and once they cast PSH as the priest in the film, I thought the title shd've been changed to Guilty.

Very moving piece by Lester Bangs' friend and colleague Jaan Uhelszki:

http://www.spin.com/articles/philip-seymour-hoffman-lester-bangs-almost-famous/

The other problem with The Atlantic: Magnolia filled with "great performances."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnON-J8HHaE

^^ first movie i saw him in and loved the shit out of the character

when i get hungry i still say "food" the way he says "food" in this stupid movie even though nobody knows wtf i'm doing

(xpost) I think PSH is great. It's his thread, but I'd also add John C. Reilly, Melinda Dillon, the kid, Tom Cruise (I think so, anyway), Henry Gibson, maybe a couple more. Julianne Moore...acquired taste. Hoffman or Reilly head the list.

I just added a post about that character last week in imdb trivia

Magnolia is, like all PTA films til the last two, pretentious bilge with insufficient compensating perks, but I'll overlook praise for it as long as other ppl are claiming that Before the Devil Knows You're Dead has something to offer.

he's so good in that

No one is. The extras are terrible in it.

lol

Very moving piece by Lester Bangs' friend and colleague Jaan Uhelszki:

http://www.spin.com/articles/philip-seymour-hoffman-lester-bangs-almost-famous/

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, February 3, 2014 6:46 PM (26 minutes ago)

thanks for this -- an incredible read. gave me chills tbh.

clemenza otm about magnolia and yet it's still terrible

almost famous i will always like, and PSH is so great in it. i loved this part in the spin piece:

One of Lester's more annoying habits was that he always talked with food in his mouth — and one that I'd almost forgotten about. That is, until I saw the same behavior in Hoffman.

this has greyed things for me too. i keep thinking about his bouncy arms in lebowski. i didn't think that brody piece was very good.

But I didn't tell Cameron any of those things. I kept the list to stuff like personal hygiene, work ethos, favorite foods, or how when he was excited about something he was prone to grand, wild gestures, making big lavish circles in the air, or how he'd always pace when he talked on the phone. How he watched the soap opera All My Children religiously, owned a hermit crab named Spud, and that when things got bad, he used to say, "I could be selling shoes in El Cajon." But I never told anyone about how he used to talk with his mouth full.

"Lester"

but surely SOMEONE told him Bangs ate that way. PSH being quoted all over the place that acting is work, not magic.

but yeah Before The Devil is disgraceful. I suppose Sidney Lumet didn't wanna die without leaving the world a final movie in which the actors shout all the time, at once, and senselessly.

sorry if i am repeating something already said on this (understandably) lengthy thread, but just wanted to note that my favourite PSH performance is his role as Jude Law's sharp-eyed friend in The Talented Mr Ripley. and RIP.

i don't think it seems like magic is the thing! it seems like excellent intuitive work.

LB does seem like the kind of guy who would talk excitedly while eating.

A good performance we haven't mentioned much: The Savages.

mentioned by morbs and others in this thread: "owning mahowny" is really good. simple and minor, i guess. but he invests a lot of... something into a guy who is almost totally devoid of personality.

He was excellent as Bangs. The key was in not going for the cartoon gonzo Bangs; PSH portrays him as a thoughtful older brother. In the Greil Marcus interview on rockcritics.com, he had some pointed criticisms of the film, but he singled out Hoffman and Billy Crudup for praise--and I'm sure Marcus would have all over Hoffman if the character felt in any way false to his own memories of Bangs.

befor the devil is awesoem

http://entertainment.time.com/2014/02/03/philip-seymour-hoffman-last-photos/

That Edelstein PSH quote way up there gets to some of the heart of his craft:

When you hear about cutting-room fights, it almost always means the star thinks he or she is coming off as too unlikable and wants the director to ratchet up the vulnerability quotient. But Hoffman was arguing to make Capote less attractive—to make him, in fact, thoroughly reprehensible. He said he told Miller, “The way toward empathy is actually to be as hard as possible on this character.”

That, plus being able to play so many characters with different centers of gravity, physicality, all that. Funny how he's done so many movies that we're like..."Oh, wait, right, The Ides of March."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/philip-seymour-hoffman-1967-2014/

Hoffman was a true body-actor. No doubt his athleticism and devotion to sports in his youth helped him toward the remarkable physical control he displays in all his performances. In an era when so many leading men and women seem unable to act at all below the neck, Hoffman’s gestures and stances sear themselves into your memory. I didn’t much care for Capote, but I still remember precise Hoffman postures. One was the too-constrained, too-still way he held himself in, with his large square head tilted uncomfortably back, in those repeated long-held shots of Truman Capote sitting alone in the small airplane to and from his jailhouse visits to the In Cold Blood killers who infatuated him.

lolmillennials i guess @ that whole thing being abt lebowski but it's otm about the moves he makes as that character: so conceptually broad and goofy, this terrified/enraptured toady, but built entirely of little things. near-absurd gestures like the the pantomime grief that article mentions on "mr. lebowski is in seclusion in the west wing" work cuz they seem legitimate as crisis versions of all the little motions he's making all the time. first lady of the nation, yes.

i always think of his weird at-attention stance when he's no longer part of one conversation

yeah i kinda winced at all the smug dismissals of the other movies but i thought it was dead-on for how unusually physical his talents were, whenever i think of PSH in a movie i can instantly recall a certain pose or a gesture, something no one else would've thought to do.