MCN Columnists
Kim Voynar

Voynar By Kim VoynarVoynar@moviecitynews.com

Considering the Best Picture Oscar Contenders

Published under Oscar Outsider. How does a Hollywood outsider evaluate the Oscar contenders? I live in Seattle, outside the allure and glare of Tinseltown, and we generally get press screenings a couple weeks after the movie-world hubs of LA and New York; thus, I’ve only seen half the films on the Gurus o’ Gold Best…

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Twilight: Sometimes a Sexual Fantasy is Just a Sexual Fantasy

Twilight may or may not be more than just a teen vampire movie targeting the latent sexual fantasies of teenage girls, but it opened this weekend to just over $72.7 million, and suddenly male film journalists are sitting up and taking notice. The Los Angeles Times has a piece up by Richard Verrier about how shocking it…

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Consider the Source: Simon Beaufoy’s Adaptation of Slumdog Millionaire

Published under Oscar Outsider. Picture this: A very white, very British screenwriter has been hanging out in the slums of Bombay (also known as Mumbai) doing research for a screenplay he’s adapting from an Indian novel. He’s been haunting little chai shops, listening to the tales of the locals, absorbing as much as he can…

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Prop 8 Boycotts: Witch Hunt or Right?

Does the gay film community have an obligation to continue to support a festival and an organization whose head has been publicly called out for financially supporting a proposition that took away their right to marry? You’d never know it by reading a lot of the trades, who seem by their silence to wish the…

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Oscar and the Absence of Femme Films

Published under Oscar Outsider. The box office success (and relatively high profit margins) of femme-focused films like Sex and the City, Mamma Mia! and, presumably, the upcoming Twilight (assuming it does well enough at the box office to make back Summit’s $37 million investment and justify a sequel, which I think it most certainly will) may well have…

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Female Nudity in Films: Art or Exploitation?

The issue of nudity in art has been an issue for as long as there has been art, artists, and people to judge their work. When it comes to nudity in film, though, what relevance does the context of the nudity within the storyline or overall thematic elements have in determining whether the nudity is…

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Of Kings and Queen: Why Can’t More Films Be This Good?

My first night in LA for AFI Fest, I went to a screening of A Christmas Tale director Arnaud Desplechin‘s 2004 film, Kings and Queen, which was one of those films that’s been on my “geez, I need to see that” list for a while now; the opportunity to catch it on a big screen, with Desplechin in…

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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