Cinema Appreciation For The Aficionado Cigar Smoker



Posted: Friday, April 24, 2009

by
CigarFox

With the economy doing what it's doing, more and more people are opting to celebrate that big night out … at home. As the much-hyped, feature-story-subject "staycation" is to the traditional bags-in-the-car-and-on-the-road-at-four-AM "vacation," so is the Chill-At-Home Night to the old-fashioned, expensive date.

So why not line up a premium cigar sampler, buy some decent liquor, and arrange your own one- or two-person film festival? The following films have been recommended time and again to the aficionado cigar smoker as films especially likely to go well with a premium cigar.  
First stop is Fritz Lang's masterpiece of 1931, M. This psychological crime thriller, starring Peter Lorre as a hopelessly insane, tormented child murderer, may seem an odd choice as an aural/visual accompaniment to relaxing with a fine, rich-tasting premium cigar. However, an aspect of this classic overlooked by critics and film scholars (who celebrate it as a pioneering crime and suspense film, made by a great director at the peak of his powers) is that it reflects its origins in a time period when everybody, it seems, smoked cigars. Cigars or cigar paraphernalia seem to pop up in one scene after another of this film. Unlike so many classic Hollywood flicks--in which iconic superstars like Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum light up repeatedly throughout the film, but they're smoking cigarettes (boo!)--this film, made before Fritz Lang's departure for the United States (he was afraid of Hitler, and he was right), reflects a stogie- rather than a cigarette-centric milieu. So, while you're enjoying Peter Lorre's frighteningly intense (and weirdly sympathetic) performance as a monster who can't help himself, you can also wonder at the one-time near-ubiquity of cigar smoking.

Then feats your eyes on Smoke and Blue in the Face, a pair of indie classics made in the 1990s by a collaboration between cult novelist Paul Auster and auteur director Wayne Wang. Smoke takes place in a cigar shop, and studies the little interactions that are fostered in a place where strangers gather together in pursuit of a simple pleasure. It falls into a category popular among innovative filmmakers during the 1990s--the disparate-characters-in-a-single-place genre, which celebrates fleeting or evanescent connections between characters whose lives ordinarily wouldn't touch. For other examples, think of Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon (1992); Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993); Jim Jarmusch's five-short-vignettes-that-take-place-in-cabs drama Night on Earth (1992), with its smoky Tom Waits soundtrack; think Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994); and finally, think of P.T. Anderson's Magnolia (1999), the culmination of this tendency. But whatever you do, don't think of Crash (2005). At any rate, Smoke is a successful example of this formula, and the connections it celebrates are ones that any aficionado cigar smoker will know intimately. With a script by Paul Auster, you can hardly go wrong, and this movie doesn't. Being an aficionado cigar smoker who hasn't seen Smoke is like being a boxer who's never seen Million Dollar Baby.  

Finally, end your film festival with The Big Lebowski (1998), the Coen Brothers' epic of slacking, in which Jeff Bridges spends two hours continually saving the same stump of an already-smoked stogie from the garbage bin. This parody of 1940s crime films absolutely refuses to take itself seriously, just as its hero, the oddly-named The Dude, refuses to take his life seriously. Though he's pursued by crazed German techno fans (with killer marmots!), harassed by hired goons who micturate on his favorite rug, and driven nearly to the brink of insanity by the machinations of the dysfunctional Lebowski family (angry faux-capitalist Jeffrey Lebowski, who even looks like Dick Cheney; sublimely pretentious performance artist Maude, who actually made all the family money), he and his nub of a premium cigar will win the day in the most quotable American film since Casablanca. She kidnapped herself, Dude!

CigarFox provides you the opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest cigars that include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann, Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha and many more. Choose from more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters.  For more information, please visit http://www.CigarFox.com or http://www.qualityfreshcigars.com.


This Article has been viewed 230 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.