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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

BYOB Lives!

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15 Responses to “BYOB Lives!”

  1. bmcintire says:

    Dave, for the love of all that is good in the world, PLEASE change the picture on The Hot Button page. The writers strike? Still?
    Kidding aside, your welcome page is looking a little negelcted. That Stoppard quote is getting dusty as well.

  2. seanwithaw says:

    i saw my first Paul Mazursky film last night.
    Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
    I enjoyed it. 3/5
    Especially the scene in the bedroom between Ted and Alice. And Alice’s therapy session!
    I’ve just added more Mazursky!
    Thoughts on this film, and Mazursky…Which film of his should I see next.

  3. Noah says:

    You have to see Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Next Stop, Greenwich Village. I always had a soft spot for Moscow on the Hudson too.

  4. LexG says:

    This Friday = DOOMSDAY, BITCH.
    Aka, YEAR 10 of the awesome RHONA MITRA trying to break through as a star… we’ll see if the Jovovichian approach works.
    For someone who’s worked so consistently for so long and in so many big movies and who is so ridiculously beautiful, Rhona just seems to be perennially stuck in “Who????”/C-list status. Even people in the know, when I try to talk her up, have no idea who she is, even if they’ve seen her dozens of time. The closest I get to a glimmer of recognition is “The naked chick from HOLLOW MAN.”
    Speaking of THE HOTNESS, what does everyone think of McAdams’ coif in that Brosnan movie? Usually she’s SMOKING, and usually I like the fake-platinum thing on brunettes (Hathaway, Jolie, Alba) but somehow it just looks weird and aging on McAdams.

  5. Jimmy the Gent says:

    Alix in wonderland is pretty much forgotten. ( don’t think its available on DVD.)
    An Unmarried Woman is still a vital movie.
    blume in Love is great.
    If memory serves, Down and Out in Beverly Hills came out the same week as Hannah and Her sisters. Talk about a great weekend in February.
    Mazersky and Blake Edwards did soome of the most underrated comic-dramatic movies of the ’70s and ’80s.

  6. chris says:

    I agree that it doesn’t look great on her, but I think it’s supposed to be “aging.” McAdams is too young for the role she plays in “Married Life.”

  7. christian says:

    Go rent I LOVE YOU ALICE B. TOKLAS, written by Mazursky. Uninspired direction by Hy Endfield (who he?) but the script is perceptive and not so obvious as you might think. Plus an underrated Peter Sellers performance. Plus, one of the top five getting high scenes of all time.
    ALEX IN WONDERLAND is on VHS if you have one sitting around. Pretty intresting and Mazursky’s bit is hilarious.
    HARRY AND TONTO is a typically low-key 70’s film with sterling work from Art Carney (Best Actor for this) and even Larry Hagman.

  8. christian says:

    Go rent I LOVE YOU ALICE B. TOKLAS, written by Mazursky. Uninspired direction by Hy Endfield (who he?) but the script is perceptive and not so obvious as you might think. Plus an underrated Peter Sellers performance. Plus, one of the top five getting high scenes of all time.
    ALEX IN WONDERLAND is on VHS if you have one sitting around. Pretty intresting and Mazursky’s bit is hilarious.
    HARRY AND TONTO is a typically low-key 70’s film with sterling work from Art Carney (Best Actor for this) and even Larry Hagman.

  9. scooterzz says:

    i’ve always loved ‘tempest’…..sappy, i know…but what a great cast…

  10. IOIOIOI says:

    Noah; much dap to you for the Moscow on the Hudson love. SOLID.

  11. Joe Leydon says:

    Scooterzz: One of my favorite scenes from an ’80s movie: “Come on, show me the magic.”

  12. movieman says:

    Don’t forget Mazursky’s last great film, 1989’s “Enemies, a Love Story.”
    But the other recommendations (“Blume,” “Unmarried Woman,” “Down and Out,” “Moscow,” “Next Stop,” “H&T”) are all terrific, and I’ve got a lot of affection for “lesser” Mazursky like “Alex in Wonderland” (a great early performance by Ellen Burstyn, plus a fabulous Fellini cameo) and “The Tempest” (with a stunningly poised performance by a pre-John Hughes Molly Ringwald).
    And yes, “Alice B. Toklas” is definitely worth checking out for the sharp, Mazursky co-written script and Peter Sellers (Jo Van Fleet is
    pretty awesome, too).

  13. Joe Leydon says:

    You want to know how MGM mishandled Alex in Wonderland? When it opened first-run in New Orleans, it premiered at a bunch of drive-ins on a double bill with — no, I’m not making this up — Get Carter (also first-run). A local art-house brought them both back a couple weeks later, but…
    See, when us graybeards start rhapsodizing about the great cinema of the ’70s, we sometimes neglect to mention that, even back then, studios often dumped worthy films.

  14. movieman says:

    I’ve got an even crazier MGM double-bill for you from that same era, Joe:
    By the time Altman’s “Brewster McCloud” finally hit northeastern Ohio in March of ’71, it opened at the only remaining downtown theater–an old “movie palace:” remember those?–on a double feature with “House of Dark Shadows.”
    Since “Brewster McC” had flopped on the coasts three months earlier, MGM clearly didn’t have a burning desire to give it anything more than a quick, one-week-and-out burn-off.
    “Brewster” remains one of my all-time favorite Altman movies to this day. Hope somebody releases it on dvd before I die.

  15. OddDuck says:

    It looks like Obama’s now claiming that he had not personally heard any of Wright’s more inflammatory statements until the beginning of his presidential campaing, and did not leave the church at that time becuase he knew Wright was soon retiring, and out of loyalty to other people in the church.
    If true, that assuages my own concerns somewhat. On the other hand, I’m not sure I believe him. This guy Wright has blamed America for creating AIDS and more recently given an award to Farrakhan. I find it hard to believe that in twenty years of membership in his church, that Obama didn’t get a better sense of how crazy this guy is.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon