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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

BYOB – Return To LA

… and to the blog.

I’ll start vomiting up the rest of the view from the last 10 days as the weekend progresses.

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16 Responses to “BYOB – Return To LA”

  1. mutinyco says:

    If anybody’s interested, this went up earlier in the week… http://filmmakermagazine.com/news/2010/09/mark-romanek-discusses-never-let-me-go/

  2. Joe leydon says:

    Vomit, eh? Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.

  3. Kevin Schoonover says:

    Just caught up with TOY STORY 3. Man, I wish all scripts could be as tight as Pixar’s. I thoroughly enjoyed AVATAR, but how much better would it have been if the writing was just a teensy bit sharper. I’m not hating and I don’t want to start anything with the land down under (I actually have a secret crush on Leah and have written her and many of you into my Oscar acceptance speech…), but the message in AVATAR is great! So why can’t the writing be better? I desperately wanted to get goosebumps and to shed a tear, yet my skin stayed where it was and my ducts were dry. I know, I know, different strokes, yadda, yadda. Just sayin’.

    Also saw Coppola’s TETRO. What a freakin’ beautiful film! Can’t say I was quite as moved as Noah Forrest — whose glowing review convinced me to seek it out — but it is a feast for the eyes. Some individual shots are too derivative of 60s era Italian cinema and they took me out of the film a bit, but each frame of B&W celluloid could easily be framed and hung on a wall. Didn’t hate/didn’t love Gallo. Looking forward to ESSENTIAL KILLING — Stephanie Zacharek’s TIFF review moved that one way up my “can’t wait” list. Maribel Verdú (from PAN’S LABYRINTH and Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN) was wonderful.

    Yes, Leah. SBC as Freddy Mercury should be epic.

  4. Eric says:

    Kevin: I agree with you on Avatar, it wasn’t as tightly written as many of Cameron’s best movies. I read the lengthy summaries of “Project 880” after Avatar was released and it strikes me that the problems in the final script mostly come from condensing and streamlining the original ideas for the movie. Cameron just had too many things he wanted to do and it was apparently a struggle to get the thing down to three hours or so.

    (I still thought the movie was rather spectacular, though, but mostly on the strength of Cameron’s direction.)

  5. LexG says:

    DEFINITELY agree about TETRO.

    Why didn’t that get more buzz??? Finally saw it recently and was blown away by 3/4 of it; Thought that fashion show/film festival nonsense at the end was goofy even by FFC’s operatic standards, but Gallo was great and it was a worthy updating of RUMBLE FISH, one of Coppola’s personal favorites of his own movies, and one I like a lot.

    Actually surprised that Hirsch DiCaprio kid isn’t fielding offers left and right… He was pretty good too.

  6. leahnz says:

    kevin schoonover: glad to hear somebody agrees with me about SBC, he’ll need some good false teeth

    (hey it’s about time i’m mentioned in somebody’s oscar acceptance speech, cheers man)

  7. Foamy Squirrel says:

    You can get mentioned in my oscar speech if you tell Linda at Wingnut to email me the list I asked for. 😉

  8. leahnz says:

    i’m not at camperdown dude. just get on her case, she’ll get back to you if you annoy her enough that’s usually how it works

  9. Foamy Squirrel says:

    Heh… it’s cool. Just had a week of people not doing the things they said they were going to do. 😉

  10. leahnz says:

    i been there. everything is weird right now, maybe it’s the change of seasons or alignment of the planets or something. only 2-3 months of gale-force northerlies and then summer! winter can fuck right off, see ya crabapple frostnipple

  11. Kevin Schoonover says:

    Watched MARY AND MAX last night. Why hasn’t this gotten some traction? I’ve never heard anyone talk about it but I LOVED it! Funny, clever, sad, gorgeous — it hit all the notes I wanted it to, and then found some others to fit in as well. I cried, I laughed, I smiled knowingly.

    Over a freakin’ cartoon, Lex!

    Aspbergers, depression, agoraphobia (referred to as “homophobia” by the 8-year-old protagonist), death, suicide, self-loathing — not really for the kiddies, but not really inappropriate either (it loves its fart jokes as much as SHREK). More TRIPLETS than BASHIR or WAKING LIFE in the current animation pantheon.

    Did it ever get a US release? I can’t believe it would have done any business, but, boy-o-boy, does it deserve to achieve cult status. Somebody, get on that.

    The DVD includes the director’s Oscar-winning short, too.

  12. movieman says:

    Kevin- Totally agree with you re: “M&M.” I watched a screener earlier this year when it played the Cleveland Cinematheque for two, count ’em, showings. It’s easily one of the best animated films I’ve seen in recent
    years–and vastly superior to the narcoleptic “Secret of Kells” which somehow managed to snag an Oscar nomination. I’m pretty sure that “M&M” never received a bona fide “theatrical” release domestically (I know that it’s never been reviewed in the NYT) which is really kind of shocking (and certainly depressing).
    You’re right about the “Hirsch DiCaprio kid” from “Tetro,” Lex. Why HASN’T he been fielding offers left and right this past year? Could it be–eeek!— that he’s not really interested in pursuing an acting career? Stranger things have happened, I suppose.
    P.S.= Howdy, Leah!

  13. leahnz says:

    ‘mary and max’ is wonderfully weird, hilarious, sad, rude, and touching…adam elliot’s stop-mo claymations are really quite brilliant. i hope he keeps it up, the world needs more claymation in the digital age!

    (hey movieman! no TIFF reports from you on the blog this year, did you go or were you ensconced in ‘speed the plow’? how did it go? hope it killed/kills)

  14. movieman says:

    Leah- Sad to say, but this was the first TIFF I missed since the late ’90s.
    We started rehearsals for “Speed” Labor Day weekend (so far so good), and I’ve been so preoccupied with that–plus the usual teaching, writing, etc.–to fake-pretend it (not doing Toronto) didn’t matter. Which doesn’t mean that every TIFF filing, here and elsewhere, hasn’t stung like a jellyfish. I’m especially sad to have missed the world premiere of “Rabbit Hole” (love the play and JCM, and the cast really is a dream, isn’t it?) But since virtually everything of TIFF note seems to have have already found a distributer, at least I’ll be able to see them all….eventually.
    Even if it is one, or even two years from now. Sob, lol.

  15. movieman says:

    P.S. to Leah= Ditto your “M&M” comments. Would it be blasphemous (or at the very least un-American) to admit that I liked it more than “Toy Story 3”?

  16. leahnz says:

    well, take comfort you likely won’t have to wait nearly as long as me to see most stuff out of TIFF…not that that’ll make the wait any less painful of course. and break a leg with your mamet-speak, exciting! (i don’t know, TS 3 seems critically beloved, you might be shunned for preferring the oddball m & m…but hey if you do get shunned/become an outcast, at least you’ll fit right in w/max and mary)

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