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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

The Best Of Summer Poll: Round 1, Group 1




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One Response to “The Best Of Summer Poll: Round 1, Group 1”

  1. Triple Option says:

    X-Men was the best film I saw this summer. I’m kinda surprised I’ve only seen 3 of the comedies. Monte Carlo and Something Borrowed were never going to happen but some I’d be curious to see just to see. Friends w/Bennies and The Change Up aren’t too appealing to me on paper but I could be talked into seeing either.

    Mathematically, and I know this is just a small, informal poll, but how do you quantify the gap between Bridesmaids and Hor Boss? Both of which I saw and would say Bridesmaids was head & shoulders above. I guess you’d need this to be more weighted like Heisman voting to get a sense how much more people liked one film over another but then a two point gap would have to be considered rather substantial.

    I just saw 30 Mins or Less and it was just a collection of random elements. I really fear a trend of movies throwing things in to be all things to all people, filling requirements off a checklist as opposed to going with more of a unified voice, if you will. I don’t mind blending genres but when I think of films like Prince of Persia or Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it’s like they didn’t care about “being” anything. I know Disney has expectations to meet 4 quads and all of that but Pixar hasn’t succeeded based on “take a lit’l of dis and summa dat.” How to Train Your Dragon had a broad appeal but it didn’t feel like it was throwing in something for dad and making one character bigger for mom, etc.

    I’ve been hearing lately the cry through development depts now is “It’s gotta have something to appeal to int’l audiences. It’s gotta play overseas.” Well, yeah, I get it but can anyone say for sure what appeals to people overseas? That’s specifically lacking in films that do well over here? “Hey, we were just going over the latest draft of Superman and we felt it’d be important that Clark Kent be a star on his high school soccer team. He won’t take a job working for a newspaper but instead will work at a customer service call center. His grandparents will live upstairs from him and he’ll have paternal twin brother and sister. One who wants to be a singer while the other will be into banking…or marketing. Just be sure to add a high tech heist and car chase in some tight European streets or South American market center.”

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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