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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Amenabar/Weisz/Agora

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12 Responses to “Amenabar/Weisz/Agora”

  1. Hallick says:

    For Socrates, it was hemlock. For the box office, a trailer called “Agora”.
    It is as if Rachel Weisz asked herself this question:”How do I make the people who didn’t like The Brothers Bloom realize just how bad an experience they could have had?”.

  2. LexG says:

    Whoa… Weisz is cool and all (and a very good actress)… but did somebody actually bankroll what looks to be a 150-million dollar movie with NO male lead that looks like a “strong female” version of KINGDOM OF HEAVEN?
    This could be reach Cutthroat Island levels of major tankage. (So will that Amelia Earhart movie.)

  3. Hallick says:

    Isn’t this also the movie they run on the 3ABN channel every other night?

  4. LexG says:

    Hallick: TOTALLY.

  5. LYT says:

    I really miss Don LaFontaine.

  6. Eric says:

    Someday I’ll get this movie from Netflix, let it sit by my television for three weeks, then send it back unwatched.

  7. martin says:

    Looks boringly expensive.

  8. They even have character poster sets for this movie (a movie without a distributor, btw). Like… wha? They’ve gone about this movie all wrong, starting with, er, making it (apparently).

  9. yancyskancy says:

    I’d have liked it about 20% better without all the blackouts. God, that’s gotten old.
    But it’s a trailer. And gone are the days when you could count on somebody to cut together a good trailer, regardless of the movie’s quality.

  10. Blackcloud says:

    I’m sure the history’s completely fraudulent. Not that anyone will notice, since no one will be watching this thing.

  11. leahnz says:

    i’ll watch it. because i have a massive girl-crush on rachel, she is the bomb (and luminous from within!)

  12. Yancy, have you watch the trailers for old movies? People talk about trailers today giving away too much, but old trailers actually show you the final scenes and the voice overs tell you exactly what will happen!

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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