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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

BYOB Horror Show

When it drizzles in LA, the world stops… or in this case, my internet stopped. Yeah, it’s fiber optic from ATT… and a half inch of rain killed it. Oy.

Meanwhile, DP/30s piling up… hard to compose on the iPad… and the town is shutting down…

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39 Responses to “BYOB Horror Show”

  1. mutinyco says:

    Happy holidays and stuff… http://mutinycompany.com/bigfade.html

  2. LexG says:

    True Grit
    Somewhere (LITTLE ELLE POWER)
    Fockers
    Country Strong

    Tomorrow is the SINGLE GREATEST DAY OF NEW RELEASES in the history of cinema. Yet for 30 years, I’ve never understood why people go to the movies ON CHRISTMAS.

    SOMEWHERE in particular seems like it’s going to be BRUTAL to endure, even at the prestige venues, amidst a sea of sweater-wearing, gravy-stuffed turkey-induced-snoring Yentas, hipsters and buffalos catching a movie in between their shopping sprees.

  3. sloaner says:

    Somwhere is the most disappointing movie of the year. For me at least.

  4. Kevin says:

    Somewhere is a disappointment, that’s for sure…

  5. chris says:

    Most disappointing of the year? Wow. I didn’t love it, but I think there are great moments in it.

  6. Joe Leydon says:

    Sounds like Houston, David. Seriously: About 3 or 4 times a year, there’s a power outage in my neighborhood (anywhere from a few minutes to several hours) during a rainstorm. And sometimes as often as twice a year — a power outage for no apparent reason whatsoever.

  7. berg says:

    do you want some smegma to go with that wine? Somewhere is nowhere, if you want cutting edge indie cinema with a femme viewpoint see Tiny Furniture

  8. sanj_2 says:

    We need a DP/30 with Eddie Murphy

    It could be on the NORBIT DVD.

    Also DP should interview Art Metrano

    And ask him about Malibu Express for the Police Academy 2 DVD.

  9. sanj says:

    i saw Charlie St.Cloud – didn’t like it – story got boring
    and confusing at 45 minutes and didn’t care what happened
    by the end – it wasn’t the typical teen movie but the
    story could have been way better

    the DP/30 of Black Swan belong on the BluRay – there are
    like 5 of them … with millions of dvds sold – DP/30 can
    be more famous

  10. sanj says:

    David Jr has lots of celebrity interviews

    most are less than 10 minutes and the locations
    are all different places

    http://davidjr.com/celebrity/

  11. anghus says:

    my wife wants to see country strong.

    help.

  12. Eric says:

    Saw “The Fighter” yesterday and enjoyed it quite a bit. Was struck by it being the second movie in the last few months, after “The Town,” to be about the urgent need to get out of shit hole Massachusetts.

  13. Rob says:

    @Eric

    Speaking from Boston, it’s a weird thing…on the one hand, it’s nice that people find the area visually interesting and fertile for compelling stories. On the other it’s like, wait a second…I’ve lived here ten years and never met an Irish mobster.

    Massachusetts is an expensive place to live, and education and income levels are among the highest in the country. You just have to accept that Movie Boston has virtually nothing to do with Actual Boston, which might work better as a setting for a movie about married gay Cape Verdean immigrants working in biotech.

  14. Eric says:

    Rob: Yeah, I don’t take The Fighter or The Town to be representative of Boston or Massachusetts as a whole. The stories just needed a lower working class setting and actors like doing the Boston accent.

  15. torpid bunny says:

    I used to live in Somerville around the corner from a Paul Sorvino type guy who was always having confabs on the sidewalk with other wiseguy types, sometimes there was a pristine late model cadillac or corvette pulled up on the sidewalk. Very nice guy too, always said hi.

  16. Joe Leydon says:

    I have a very dear friend who’s from the Charlestown area of Boston. When she brought her father to see Monument Ave. a few years back, he thought it was a documentary. I can only wonder what, were he still alive, he’d make of The Town.

  17. hcat says:

    Saw a 10 AM of True Grit this morning and absolutly loved it. We often talk about watching films that take us back to the giddy excitement of youth and this one really nailed it for me. It is a rousing adventure tale, something like The Count of Monte Cristo or Treasure Island.

    I don’t see it winning best picture, but enjoyed every second of it (it is funny as hell) and can’t wait to watch it over and over for many years.

  18. sanj says:

    i saw Cyrus .. the acting was fine – i figured it was going
    to be a fun revenge movie but it just turned real and 1 hour it just got kinda boring – which is bad cause Marissa Tomei had nothing to do by that point.

    was the only reason the movie got made was because of Tony/Ridley Scott ? did they put up some money for this ..

    this is a small film without any real extra characters or places so it can easily be remade again with a better ending…well last 30 minutes

    i know my review doesn’t mean anything but DP any thoughts ?

  19. Krillian says:

    I just saw Cyrus yesterday. Overall I liked it but because it was subdued. Easily could have been a loud, pratfally thing starring Adam Sandler. I liked how Jonah Hill came off as almost normal but quietly sociopathic. Never really knew what he was going to do. The ending was too easy though.

    They could have done that exact movie but added some ominous scoring and changed the last ten minutes to everyone getting killed and it would be an effective horror flick.

  20. sanj says:

    Cyrus – if the 2 guys out pranked each other to get revenge but ended up hurting Tomei in a real way – this could have
    gotten an oscar ..

    Johan Hill character didn’t seem to have friends at all…

    the ending they have now makes it easy to rerun on cable tv but it could have ended a dozen different ways.

  21. Don R. Lewis says:

    TRUE GRIT is really, really great. Granted, I’m a total sucker for westerns but man…what a fun, exciting, dark blast of old skool western movie fun. I liked that it had flourishes of Coen quirk but still stayed true to the western genre. I haven’t seen the original since I was a kid but it’s on TCM in an hour so I’m pretty excited to see it again.

    I also loved SOMEWHERE and was absolutely ambivalent about RABBIT HOLE. I feel it missed the mark.

  22. leahnz says:

    from the on-line chatter at a few blogs/sites i visit on a regular basis, it sounds like people are digging the grit there in the US, i’m green with envy

    (and from most everything i’ve read so far it sounds like the bros trademark humour is there in spades — just the bit in the trailer where the marshal is talking with maddie as he shuffles out of bed and across the room (smokehouse?) dodging the hanging dead poultry, muttering “damn ducks” as he bats the birds away cracks me up, so i suspect i’m going to find true grit amusing. then again i find ‘no country’ as hilarious as it is a merciless death march across tumble-weed country so it’s no big stretch for me and the coens, their peculiar brand of humour just gets me where i live)

  23. Popcorn slayer says:

    @anghus

    I can do nothing for you son.

    Except to suggest that you bring earplugs and enjoy the visuals of Leighton Meester.

  24. hcat says:

    Leah- Grit is funny as hell, I was belly laughing through the whole thing. But it is the most UnCoenist of all the Coen films. Nothing like the amiable grotesques of Oh Brother or Raising Arizona, there is nothing absurd in the whole film. All the humor comes from the three leads putting each other in their place. And little Maddie consistantly comes out on top.

  25. Don R. Lewis says:

    Nothing absurd in the whole film?

    **SPOILERS***

    Dude in the bear fur costume offering to sell them teeth?
    Rooster, booting little kids?
    Whack-job baddie who only communicates through animal noises?

    c’mon hcat….

  26. movieman says:

    Does anyone know what might have derailed Dominic Sena’s career?
    I loved his first film (“Kalifornia”), and the Bruckheimer-produced “Gone in 60 Seconds” was a favorite guilty pleasure of mine. But after “Swordfish” (which was kind of dull, albeit a modest summertime hit for WB back in 2001), he virtually disappeared.
    Yeah, there was Sena’s beyond-boring flop “Whiteout” from 2008 and–unless Lionsgate yanks it from their release slate again–the upcoming “Season of the Witch” (with Nic Cage seemingly at the peak of his “Wicker Man” thesping powers), but, seriously, what the hell happened? Sena’s former music vid colleagues David Fincher and Spike Jonze went on to auteurist glory, but Sena just kind of fell off the map.

  27. sanj says:

    weird / funny rap video about wikileaks and reporters

    5 minutes

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXbCwq4ewBU

  28. FYI – Rogue Pictures picked up Season of the Witch. There was a new trailer last night at True Grit, filled with (cheap-looking) mass battle shots that all looked taken from the same one or two scenes likely at the prologue. There are NO such moments in the Lionsgate trailer, which leads me to believe that they were all reshoots, since they don’t match the color scheme and general look of the rest of the film at all.

  29. hcat says:

    Don- Maybe the animal guy, I am not sure if he was from the original novel. But the Bear Skin doctor would not have been out of place in Jeremiah Johnson or Outlaw Josey Wales (I was actually relieved when he rode up and I realized it wasn’t John Goodman). There is quite a bit of latitude for eccentric behavior in westerns once you get away from civilization, so I would count those as eccentricities rather than absurdities.

    As for Rooster booting two kids that were just torturing a Mule, that was a simple way to depict his grumpy nature.

  30. sanj_2 says:

    DP needs to do a DP/30 with Bruce Boxleitner

  31. LexG says:

    Yeah, movieman, but wasn’t Dominic Sena always a weird case? Was in that Propaganda gang of ad/commercial/video guys with the Bay, West, Fuqua, Fincher crew, but worked a lot less frequently– seven years between Kalifornia and Gone in 60 Seconds. He’s also actually considerably older than those other directors, no? I remember assuming he was some brash Bay-style upstart, then on the “60 Seconds” DVD he turns up as this fiftyish Billy Bob type dude, more in the spirit of like Rob Cohen being all 65 years old but still throwing out commentary tracks where he’s all “I LIKE TO GO TO DOPE CLUBS AND DROP PLATES, YO.”

    On a related note: Did Jan de Bont give up on directing? Been over seven years.

  32. Joe Leydon says:

    I was going to ask where IO has been. Then I realized: Poor dude probably is in mourning. Or he’s busy drowning his sorrows.

    http://www.hollywoodnews.com/2010/12/23/how-will-fantastic-four-death-affect-future-films/

  33. leahnz says:

    hcat, whatever the case i’ll take my coens humour any way i can get it! clever wordsmithery is fine with me (someone sent me a link to an interview w/ hailee in which barry pepper is quoted as calling the coen’s grit “american shakespeare”. it looks like i may have to wait more than a full month to find out for myself, WHICH IS KILLING ME)

  34. hcat says:

    I can’t imagine that this will effect future films at all. They will just continue with the same charecters. There are probably only a couple hundred thousand people who read the comic regularly and they could be counted on to see anything remotely resembling it on the big screen. And while they certainly don’t have the same turnover as the Avengers, the FF line up has changed before.

    Oh, and I bet its Sue.

  35. movieman says:

    Lex- Yeah, Sena was in the Propoganda group (he spoke at length about Fincher, Jonze, et al during the 2001 interview I did with him at the time of “Swordfish”‘s release). And yep, he’s probably a good 20 years older than most of those dudes.
    Not really sure what took him so long to direct again after “Kalifornia” (maybe that explains the overall lack of momentum in his career); or why he basically disappeared between ’01 and “Whiteout” (ugh) in ’08. Too bad. Like the other Propo guys, he’s definitely got an eye, and I would’ve loved to seen him work more frequently over the years–and with (much) better material than (apparently) “Witch.”

  36. christian says:

    “Joe you do not get it because you are 150. Nobody DIES in the Marvel U and the fact that you think this makes me in mourning just shows you how much you know. EXCELSIOR!”

    – IO

  37. IOv3 says:

    Oh fuck you Joe 😀 and it’s the 616, Christian. Seriously.

  38. christian says:

    “I never use it, I hate the term pure and simple and agree with Tom’s assessment of it. I can’t remember ever hearing it in the office and only really see it used online for the most part. I think the term really came into vogue when the Ultimate Universe came into prominence, but in my world, the language and distinctions are simple, there is the Marvel Universe and the Ultimate Universe. Anything other than that reeks of all that DC Earth 1, Earth 2, Earth Prime stuff which I’ve never really taken to, but then again, I got into DC when they got rid of all that stuff so it was from and for a different era than my own. ”

    — Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada

    Merry Xmas IO. Seriously.

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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