Festivals Archive for January, 2010

‘Dancing With The Wildman

Sundance – Day 7 “It was weird. But I knocked (on the bathroom door). I think that was a sign that I was polite.” As I was sitting in the theatre waiting for my first screening of the day to begin, my new indie film community nemesis approached me saying, “Hey man, you know I…

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‘Dancing With The Wildman

Sundance – Day 6 “I should’ve known that if a guy like me talked to a girl like that, someone would end up dead.” Before I start with today’s films, here are my thoughts about Gone To The Dogs and Armless which I saw a few days ago but never got around to writing about for one…

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‘Dancing With The Wildman

Sundance – Day 5 “You either Joseph Gordon Love-it, or you Hate it.” Sometimes films at Sundance can either completely miss the mark compared to the expectations people have built up or be so genuinely wrongheaded in their eyes that they literally inspire rage. Such as it was that while waiting with the press to…

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LETTERS FROM LARRY

..Sundance 2010 ..Letters: On the Way ..Letters: Day One ..Letters: Day Two ..Letters: Day Three DEAR DAVID: Brian Poyser’s Lovers of Hate is the kind of tiny brilliant gem that low-budget indie films ought to be and so seldom are. Three no-name actors, (four speaking parts over all) star, half the movie shot on one practical…

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‘Dancing With The Wildman

Sundance: Day 4 ..Sundance 2010 ..Wildman: Day One ..Wildman: Day Two ..Wildman: Day Three “This is an early picture of Michael Jackson. When he was black.” Ran into Ella Taylor as I was finding my seat and she was all about the doc, Long Train Home. And when a critic like Ella is all over a…

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‘Dancing With The Wildman

Sundance – Day 3 – Wild On Slamdance “Brian, you’re project manager. You’re saving the earth.” Sometimes, in the spirit of “things happen,” a day here will take on its own theme. You miss one screening and have to duck into another one, you run into someone at a party or on Main Street and…

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LETTERS FROM LARRY

DEAR DAVID: In case the readers of these posts think I’m a softie who likes everything he ever sees or who is blowing smoke up the ass of the Sundance programming staff let me clarify: LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO PAN ALL THE BAD FILMS There are plenty of weak or ordinary films here this…

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‘Dancing With The Wildman

Sundance – Day 2 “Can we just follow the spandex?!” Fueled by my daily film festival shots of Airborne and Emergen–C (yes, I know they’re both basically placebos high in vitamin C. But it reassures me; therefore it’s doing its placebo best for me). Anyway, I get a quick start to…watch a screener ofDouchebag. DOUCHEBAG…

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LETTERS FROM LARRY

DEAR DAVID: Jack Goes Boating isPhillip Seymour Hoffman’s directorial debut adapted to the screen by Bob Glaudini from his play. It’s a foray into the ordinary- every-day-people- find- true-love genre personified by the Oscar classic, Marty. Hoffman and his superb cast do a wonderful job with it by conveying the obsessive craziness that even “little” people are…

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LETTERS FROM LARRY

DEAR DAVID: If there’s a better film that plays at Sundance 2010, than Jacques Audiar’s thrillingly compelling A Prophet (Un Prophete) I will be surprised. Audiard synthesizes a classic young-gangster-on-the-rise tale akin to Scarface or Public Enemy with a convincing depiction of what it is like to make it in French society as an illiterate teenager of North African…

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‘Dancing With The Wildman

Sundance – Day 1 I drive to Sundance. From L.A. It’s an eleven hour drive that I have become very accustomed to and even when it takes me through crazy rain and snow (and that was just between L.A. and Las Vegas) or the dreaded black ice threatens to send me careening into a snow…

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LETTERS FROM LARRY

DEAR DAVID: Heading up at some ungodly hour to Sundance, tomorrow morning. Have noticed that there are three films playing at the festival this year that I’ve seen already, and I thought all three of them happen to be utterly worth seeing. Sympathy for Delicious is the directorial debut of Mark Ruffalo from a script by…

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David on: Wrapping TIFF 2014

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PatrickP on: 31 Weeks To Oscar: Telluride, Toronto & New York

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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