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
Truth be told, I’m shocked that Fox greenlit “Big Year” in the first place.
It’s the type of film that should have probably been done indie style, and for a fraction of the ($60-million-plus?) cost.
I liked “BY:” it’s a sweet, charming, gentle movie that might very well pick up a devoted cult audience once it hits dvd. (And Jack Black gives his best “quiet,” i.e. non-manic, performance to date.)
But as a major studio, 2000+ print type release, it makes zero business sense.
I guess Fox should content themselves with the fact that at least their ad budget was nil. I’m guessing that the average moviegoer had no idea it was even opening since the marketing campaign was virtually non-existent.
No numbers for Trespass? I caught it this morning, it’s a totally generic, early ’90s-style exercise that totally makes sense for DTV/VOD. Bizarre watching Nicole Kidman in something like this.
Oh, and can we call a moratorium on CGI fire?
THE THING(2011) is decent, appropriately bleak, and far from the disaster that online critics painted it as. It’s well-made and nicely performed. M.E.W. is pretty great (and adorable) as the Ripley-esq lead, Edgerton rocks, and it’s extermely reverent to the Carpenter film. It’s a much louder and obvious film from the original (Carpenter, not Hawks…) but it is suspensful and has a few gross-out moments of body horror that I was fitfully tickled and disgusted by. I think if a horror fan can detach their expectations based on the original movie and go into it knowing that it’s a genuine riff/tribute, they’ll have a fine, gory time. I thought the monster-designs were great, and the ending is terrific and tonally dead-on. I really liked it.
Just for you, David, a (mostly) complete Almodovar Mojo page: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/people/chart/?view=Director&id=pedroalmodovar.htm
The Carpenter THING is one of my all-time favorites, iconic to me, one of my most rewatch ever, just immortal…
…and I pretty much loved the new one. I know the Geek Brigade just HAS to hate these things, I know a guy like Harry Knowles HAS to compare it to a load of shit or whatnot, but I had a BLAST; Loved that it looked like the predecessor, loved that until the CG in the last reel it pretty much played fair in terms of looking like it could’ve been made in 1982; Enjoyed the Norwegian actors and thought Edgerton RULED (should’ve had a quick scene of Edgerton drinking Budweiser with MacReady at some chopper pilot bar)… the last 10 minutes were sort of brilliant.
And, wow, did I enjoy Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who was somehow totally convincing holding her own opposite rooms full of creepy Norwegian guys and some flamethrower dude named Lars who looked like Oleg Taktarov, convincing as a scientist, SUPER HOT by being natural and sexy in her LITTLE HATS AND PARKAS; After the annoying likes of Scott Pilgrim and Grindhouse, back to thinking THE M-E-W is terrific.
Wish it were doing a little better, but mostly wish the always-fussy horror fans were giving it a fairer shake.
‘
It rocks.
$60 million budget for “Big Year?” That can’t be possible….but what is Fox hoarding its ad dollars for? The campaign for “In Time” has been uninspired to say the least, and they have nothing coming out in November….
Not sure how the BY ad buy is “nil” – I have been seeing TV ads for this pretty constantly for a couple of weeks. Yeah, they’re on cable, but that can’t be too too cheap. I also do not understand movies like this at this budget level, but then again I never have.
Excellent, Ray.
I thank you. My mother thanks you. And Sony Classics thanks you.
Is anyone else a little disturbed – not quite offended – by the glowy spin on Jewish Holocaust tattoos in the In Time materials? When I see that glowing forearm of numbers in the Fairfax District, I wince a little. (Dark-haired Amanda Seyfried scares me a little too)
Wow, Women on the Verge made a hell of a lot of money for a foreign film in the late ’80s.
Don’t know about “nil,” Gus, but very late start, not a huge concentration of spots, and no build at all. Meanwhile, U was running stuff for Tower Heist in September.
“The Carpenter THING is one of my all-time favorites, iconic to me, one of my most rewatch ever, just immortal…”
Same here, Lex. Top 10 all time. But I’m a Carpenter devotee (Halloween is my all time favorite movie, hands down).My current ringtone is a snippet from Morricone’s Golden Raspberry nominated (WTF?????) score.
You convinced me to see this. And you’re spot-on in regards to Knowles, et al. Which is why I haven’t read him or his site in almost 2 years. He’s a child.
never once made the holocaust connection to In Time.
Could Terry Press have saved Lions Gate’s “Labios Rojos”? Has she changed her name to Terry Tyler Perry Press yet? First TP, Tim Palen and now TP, Terry Press…check your initials…ES just doesn’t seem to fit.
Hold tight for the TR/JG December triple header of “The Sitter”, “Chipwrecked”, and “We Bought A Zoo”. What a Fox holiday treat.
Lex, glad to hear you dug THE THING (2011) too. I was kind of feeling like I must have seen a different movie from the one the web was crying and moaning about. It’s so far from a cash grab, and it’s a fitful, reverent companion to the Carpenter. I look forward to watching them back to back.
THE THING SPOILERS ….SPOILERS
The end credits seriously ruled.
END SPOILERS
It’s “uninterested” not “disinterested.”
JKill- Glad to hear that you revere Carpenter’s “Thing” as much as I do.
Ironic how you remarked upon how the current prequel was resoundingly pissed on. The same thing happened when Carpenter’s movie opened.
The “mainstream” press didn’t get it, and there was obviously no fanboy/fanzine internet claque at the time to weigh in, pro or con.
Back then, genre fans had to wait for Cinefantastique to (hopefully) restore the reps of pissed and shat upon horror/sci-fi/fantasy films; and that could take months. By that time, of course, the movie(s) in question had long since left neighborhood bijous, and home video (let alone a concept as downright otherworldly as Netflix) was still a few years away from mass saturation.
Grammar Nazi… pretty sure that would be you defining my meaning, not correcting my grammar.
In fact, I think that “uninterested” would not likely fit someone who spent money for a movie ticket.
Not sure why I’m back on moderation, and this isn’t that important anyway, but:
Seyfried needs to go back to the blonde, stat. Though with Olivia Wilde in the house too, is that the greatest one-two
hottie matchup since The Runaways (or Jennifer’s Body)?
Anyone else see Texas Killing Fields? Mann Jr certainly inherited her dad’s way with intensity, Worthington and Morgan are FANTASTIC, Moretz is heartbreaking, the whole thing stays at a low boil working up a sense of dread that really works… Loved watching it… Then almost the second it ends and the “vibe” is over, you start piecing together the plot, and there are so many holes and red herrings, it sort of punctures the effect pretty quickly. But great style and cast– Jessica Chastain is particularly amusing and bad-ass. Worth seeing, still.
Typed from phone… Almost saw double-feature of Skin I Live In and Killer Joe, but didn’t want to risk Landmark traffic coming home at 4pm. I’ll probably try again on Tuesday since my workload will be lighter, especially on Lex’s recommendation on the latter. As for Footloose, despite the decent reviews, I just couldn’t bring myself to care. There were nearby showtimes nearly every hour from 10am to 3pm, but I kept just thinking ‘Eh, I’ll just finish something else and catch the next one’ until 3pm had come and gone. As for The Thing, I’m sure it plays fine for someone who doesn’t worship the 82 version, but it’s also one my wife will likely enjoy on DVD in four months.
saw ‘in time’ a couple of days ago, the ‘occupy’ group is going to loooooove it….and, yeah, setfried is a bit spooky with the raven colored bob….
“Killer Joe” is already playing in LA, Scott??
I didn’t even realize that it had a distributer yet.
Sorry, meant Texas Killing Fields..
Damn that autocorrect, eh Scott? 😉
Scott- Thanks for clearing that up.
“TKF” is Anchor Bay, isn’t it?
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s on DVD by Xmas. Their theatrical runs seem designed solely to bolster (very) imminent ancillary sales/rentals.
AB’s “Father of Invention” (which also opened yesterday in a few markets) hits DVD on October 25th.
You’re not “back” on moderation, Lex. You have multiple IP addresses and one wasn’t pulled out of the moderation list.
I didn’t even recognize Seyfried with red hair in the “In Time” trailer.
If I hadn’t known she was in the movie, I would have never guessed it was her.
Movieman, I just dug THE THING DVD out of my collection for a viewing either tonight or tomorrow. Not that I need an excuse but it’s great Halloween-seasonal viewing. It’s an all-time favorite and (in my opinion) Carpenter’s masterpiece.
The “curated headline” about “Footloose” bugs me quite a bit because it seems to dismiss the LA Times assessment ( http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2011/10/footloose-reviews-showtimes-movie-wormald-hough-bacon-theaters.html ) that the new version isn’t just friendlier to religion, but the filmmakers essentially made it pro-religion.
“Wormald even said that “we’ve showed [the film] in the Bible Belt; they love it.””…and that doesn’t send shivers down your spine?
You have to wonder if anyone involved in this production actually saw the original. Making a pro-religion “Footloose” is like making a pro-Nazi “Schindler’s List”.
Yeah, I went there.
@Sam: I don’t know about that. It’s been a good 15 years since I saw the original but I just remember it as Lithgow being too stringent and way overboard on the fire & brimstone. He was wrong, not all religion was wrong. I mean it did send a chill over what religion could be like but it wasn’t all encompassing.
I’d think it’d be fairly easy to do a pro-religion, or maybe for the sake of semantics, a pro-faith Footloose movie. The outsider who listens to rap, arms sleeved in tats and dances, yet quite devout, who comes in and challenges the social norms as not being true indications of faith or piety. The posters for the dance being pretty much the modern equivalent to Martin Luther banging his proclamation to the doors of the established church. He wasn’t saying to the people religion was wrong, just slapping a big sign on the leaders: FAIL!
I didn’t write the headline, but I’ll be more direct. The LA Times piece is lazy trend-spinning.
Haven’t seen the new one, but we watched the original a few days ago and Lithgow isn’t as fire & brimstone as I had remembered and others seem to as well. His fear was well motivated – dead child – though the detail of the response was excessive. And he, indeed, leads the community to finally get over that fear.
The film, in my opinion, was not very tough on religion at all. And even rebellious Bacon was respectful of faith. When he cites The Bible, it’s surprisingly unsmirky… a win, but not an attack on faith at all.
Did Par soften the script a bit… maybe. But the idea that Footloose was a tough anti-religious piece is not the movie I just watched.
I expect that they cleaned up the beating of Lori Singer’s character.
“what religion could be like”….
Unfortunately, in the early ’80s there was an awful lot of that spirit in action, proclaiming every new thing the work of Satan while pressing lawmakers to pass discriminatory laws that make “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” look communistic in its leftishness.
My hometown wasn’t quite as bad as the one in the ’84 “Footloose”–they were quite open to Christians of all faiths, even Catholics!
(Minorities of all types pretty much knew to stay away.)
It was that environment plus the obvious lunacy of the Moral Majority that revealed atheism as the only sensible solution, so perhaps the scenes of Kevin Bacon as a freethinker trapped in intellectual purgatory resonated with me.
Slaughterhouse Five?!? Heaven forbid!
I, too, could quote the Bible to point out its flaws and trip up the faithful, so that was another shared aspect with Bacon’s character…whose name is a complete blank to me because it’s been at least 20 years since I saw this. Yet the feeling’s still there that this movie was created expressly to tell Reagan and his minions to shove it.
…which is why it had to be reworked entirely to make the new version palatable to the apostles of St. Ron.
As for adding a racial subtext to the movie–that would be a wooden shoe tossed into the works, since the movie is really about a community so hidebound they can’t even tolerate white people who hold differing views. If a tattooed rapper gets a flat tire in that town, the results wouldn’t be pretty.
Wait… you mean Kevin Bacon’s character WASN’T also named “Kevin Bacon”?!?!?
Random, but just noticed MARGIN CALL comes out next week… Is there any buzz or WOM on that? I thought the trailer ROCKED and the cast is beyond reproach, but it’s another SUPER low-profile “release” that feels more like a dump.
Any word? Spacey, Tucci, Irons, Bettany, Simon Baker is a pretty cool cast… I even like Penn Badgely, but I’ve heard ZERO about this movie.
It’s an all-time favorite and (in my opinion) Carpenter’s masterpiece.
I’ve always felt the same “Thing,” JKill
(pun definitely intended, lol)
reviews on the run on g4 gave the thing 2011 0.5 / 10
If I had to take a guess, I’d say that that Footloose article in question was based from two writers who haven’t watched Footloose since they were very young kids. They get major plot points wrong (they claim there was no car crash in the original and then claim that ‘protecting kids’ is an okay reason to subjugate your own people) and seem to have a half-baked memory of the original. For example, before I watched the Monster Squad DVD back in 2007, I would have told you that the film is really dark and ultra-violent, because that’s how I remembered it from when I saw it back in 1988 when I was eight years old. Amusingly, the comments section is filled with people correctly calling out the article for what it is: sloppy, baseless writing spearheaded to fit a trend that the facts don’t entirely support.
Although the IMDB quote page is desperately in need of a proofreader, it confirms my memories of the ’84 version and makes me wonder how anyone could make the story “Bible-Belt friendly” without completely gutting the point of the original.
I guess the biggest clue that you’re seeing a Newspeak version is the title song being sung by a guy whose latest hit is “God Gave Me You.”
Taking quotes out of context can give you the wrong idea of any movie, SamLowry.
I would say, having just watched it, that the first Footloose is pretty bible-belt friendly… especially in the climate of that time. The Christians who make up the bulk of this country, it seems to me, are not screaming lunatics, but people who would appreciate a tale about losing perspective in pursuit of an honorable goal… in that case, keeping their kids safe.
The LAT piece is saturated in the notion that all Christians are TV Christians we now see representing the insane right. I actually lived through the Reagan 80s, when you could still do cocaine off a table in a public restaurant without fear of being asked to stop, much less arrested or even ending up on TMZ. Just Say No and the Fundamentalist Movement are a long way from being the same. Reagan would be blasted as being too far left these days.
It’s funny how the last couple of years you see a film like Facing the Giants, Fireproof, and Courageous and these are the films that represent ‘Christian moviegoers’. One movie a year comes out and it’s supposed to be the films for the Christian audience.
And you’re absolutely right, people think the Christian movie going audience are made up of Amanda Bynes from Easy A or Bryce Dallas Howard from The Help. These are not real people. They aren’t the lunatic fringe you see presented on television. That element exists as a very small percentage of a very large group.
Hollywood trying to figure out how to appeal to the Christian/Flyover element always strikes me as odd. Because they view them as a sub-set of the average movie goer.
The vast majority of Americans identify themselves as Christian. If these people did nothing but eat, sleep, and breathe christianity then you would see a lot more religion based movies. But the truth is a christian is more likely to see Transformers, Harry Potter, or Batman than Fireproof or Soul Surfer.
I live in the South. I know a lot of Christians. I even know some that are fundamentalist style Bible thumping deep rural Southerners who border on scary. I know the kind of people who buy their kids Christian video games. And most of them know that i’m an aspiring so and so and I spend a lot of time in rural South Carolina with these people during the holidays. So they talk a lot to me about movies.
And never once has anyone brought up a movie that isn’t your typical big budget studio release.
I think actual Christians are very happy with Hollywood not injecting Religion into every movie, because truth be told they don’t want their beliefs dictated by the entertainment industry.
Thinking you can pander to a group that represents two thirds of the country is kind of strange. ‘Christian’ is not a niche. ‘Extreme Fundmantal Christian’, maybe. But how much money is there in that?
I mostly agree, Anghus. What Hollywood is looking for is the Passion of the Christ audience, which doesn’t always come out to the movies. That was a true phenom… as was the first Narnia movie.
So, while the language may be wrong, there is a niche being chased. And there is a lot of money – in human dollars – to make on the “Christian movies” like Fireproof.
It’s not unlike Black, uh, Urban movies. The Black audience is interested in these niche films, but they are a big part of the mainstream martketplace as well. The draw is that you can niche market – meaning spending a lot less on marketing – to these groups, make cheaper movies, and make nice returns… though less so since the DVD drop-off.
From what I remember about the first “Footloose”, the movie was arguing for moderate faith in the face of hysterical faith. When your climactic scene at a city council meeting has the protagonist using a passage from the Bible to make his point that dancing isn’t one of the devil’s tools, you can hardly call it a poster boy for secularism.
The most spiritual remake of “Footloose” was actually “Disturbing Behavior” back in 1998.
I’ve been saying it for YEARS but no one listens….PASSION OF THE CHRIST was a huuuuuge hit in the hispanic market. Almost Tyler Perry-like in fact at least in terms of grabbing a minority audience.
Actually, Don, I’ve said the same thing. Also overlooked: How many folks (Hispanic or otherwise) were repeat customers? Like, multiple repeat customers?