Hoffman Film Fest, Day Four

During my college years, there were a few movies that we just watched over and over and over.  Some we watched hundreds of times. When I say “we” I refer to a changing cast of characters, different roommates and friends and acquaintances who maybe only crossed paths with me for a few months, or maybe, like Paul, were there for most of the college years.  With Paul, we had two or three movies we watched endlessly: “Friday” and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”, and to a lesser extent, “The Borrowers”.  With other groups or roommates, the movies were different.  I spent countless hours getting wasted while watching “A River Runs Through It” with one set of roommates (things don’t always make sense in college), and a different roommate and I watched the Star Wars trilogy on a virtual repeat for an entire semester.  Another film I watched at least 50 times sometime in my sophomore years was “Scent of a Woman”, which was probably my first exposure to Philip Seymour Hoffman, although I didn’t know it at the time.

It’s not a huge role for him.  He plays the asshole friend.  I didn’t even know he was in it until a few years after I became a big fan of his, and I went back to watch it again and there he was.  It was a very formative time for me, as far as my movie tastes went.  Who watches “A River Runs Through It” and “Scent of a Woman” while getting wasted?  We did.  I think we were getting used to the fact that we might like serious stuff, that we might be into grown-up movies.  But we were college boys.  We liked to party.  The endings of these movies were like rumors to me, barely-remembered dreams.  I was always blackout drunk by the ends, so it wasn’t until I finally stopped drinking that I can rightly say I enjoyed them all the way through.

There isn’t a great clip of Phil in this movie that I can embed on my blog, but you can see probably his best moment in the movie by clicking here.