#thedissolve

In the bit roles that littered the early years of his career, Hoffman all but lunged for the camera with wild-eyed abandon. But he was brilliant and charismatic enough to ensure that enjoyment was both justly merited and shared by the audience. Take Hoffman’s first collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson in 1996’s Hard Eight. Though billed only as “Young Craps Player,” he delivers the kind of performance that demands attention. Clad in an airbrushed T-shirt of horses prancing in front of lightning, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, his hair done up in a tragically 1990s mullet, Hoffman’s overly confident jackass makes the mistake of taunting Phillip Baker Hall’s Sydney… Forget screen time or lead roles; in his youth, Hoffman didn’t even need for his characters to have names to make them memorable. 

Punk rock in its first form was obsessed with alienation and provocation, with separating true believers outfitted in the official punk uniform of safety pins, hair dye, jeans, and leather jackets from a world of buttoned-up squares who simply did not, and would never, understand what this thrilling new noise was all about. (Or that it was really about anything at all.) One of the pleasures and surprises of Allan Arkush’s joyous 1979 musical comedy Rock ’N’ Roll High School is how wonderfully inclusive it is. It does have its villains, authority figures who simply didn’t understand, most notably in the form of Principal Togar (Warhol scenester turned ubiquitous character actor Mary Woronov) and her sniveling, body-search-loving hall-monitor henchmen. But they are far outnumbered by kids, mice, and even adults who set aside their differences to celebrate the music of the Ramones…

"Clueless accomplishes the formidable feat of making me root for the kind of popular, proudly superficial, image-obsessed cool kids who would be the villains of any other teen movie. Cher and her cohorts are like the mean girls of Mean Girls, only they use their popularity and genius for picking outfits for good, not evil." 

In retrospect, Khan was a bad choice for Star Trek Into Darkness—the character doesn’t look or act like the Khan of “Space Seed” or The Wrath Of Khan—and for its director’s obsession with secrecy. As a reveal, the Khan twist is either unsurprising (to fans who expected it) or confusing (to franchise newcomers who don’t know who Khan is or why they should care about him). The most ironic part of the whole Khan fiasco: If Star Trek Into Darkness has a message, it’s a call for more transparency from government. The ultimate villain is not Khan, but Admiral Marcus, who uses Khan’s terrorist acts as a pretext to instigate a war with the Klingons. The movie is deeply skeptical of people in authority, and their tendency to abuse their power in secret. And yet its entire marketing campaign was based on hiding information from the public. It’s not exactly hypocritical, but, to quote an old Vulcan proverb, it is highly fucking illogical.