Movie City Indie Archive for November, 2010

Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES: LEGACY

Julia Roberts Goes Lavazza

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_8I7NnJV4&feature=player_embedded

Chris Morris introduces FOUR LIONS

Clever lad!

[Via Alamo Drafthouse’s Bad-Ass Digest. The UK trailer is below.]
Read the full article »

Peter Greenaway Minces No Words

Peter Greenway, from a New York Observer Q&A by Alexandra Peers on the occasion of his multimedia recreation of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in New York: “There’s a phrase that says that to the young, there is no painting before Jackson Pollock and no cinema before Quentin Tarantino. I’m addressing questions of visual literacy. I take a missionary stance. I sincerely believe most people are visually illiterate. They do not know what they are looking at… Cinema is now wasted. Scorsese still makes the same film as Griffith’s.”

French Cinematheque Takes Rivette’s Complete Archive

The French Cinematheque has Jacques Rivette’s complete archives. This image of Anna Karina from The Nun? Nice start!

“It Gets Better, Love, Pixar”

8,070 likes, 176 dislikes: dare we dip into the YouTube comments?

Spammers Leave Lagos, Stalk Soho!

The spammers have left Lagos and now they’re stalking Soho! The slightly eccentric first sample I’ve seen of Hollywood-centric email spam.

20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century House
31-32 Soho Square
London
W1V 6AP

JOIN THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION.

The Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation was founded as the result of a merger of two entities, Fox Film Corporation founded by William Fox, and Twentieth Century Pictures, founded by Darryl F. Zanuck.

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded 2010 final draws of 20th Century Fox 100th Anniversary promo. 20th Century Fox 100th anniversary promo was conducted from an exclusive list of e-mail addresses of individual and corporate bodies. The selection process was carried out through random selection in our computerized email selection machine from a database of over 2,500,000 email addresses drawn from all the continents of the world. Emails were provided by the entire register domain. Read the full article »

Chris Petit On Excavating The Present

Critic-filmmaker-novelist Chris Petit talks about the changes in production and perception since Radio On in 1979 and Content thirty years later. [Some notes on Radio On here.] Driving is a constant, tracing “the stone dream” of highways, in a phrase Petit cites from J. G. Ballard. And in trusting to find the film within all the… content.

The Opening 5:15 Of Doc Shortlisted EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

Preview: Ophuls’ Hotel Terminus: The Life And Times Of Klaus Barbie

While news figures are bandying “Nazis… Nazi… Nazism” around, Marcel Ophuls’ Hotel Terminus: The Life And Times Of Klaus Barbie, a documentary Oscar-winner, is out on DVD. Here’s a preview.

The Academy’s Documentary Feature Shortlist…

Links to shortlisted features’ websites are below. Most of them have trailers and other materials, including press kits.

Beverly Hills, CA – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that 15 films in the Documentary Feature category will advance in the voting process for the 83rd Academy Awards®. One hundred-one pictures had qualified in the category.

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Alex Gibney, director (ES Productions LLC)

Enemies of the People, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, directors (Old Street Films)

Exit through the Gift Shop, Banksy, director (Paranoid Pictures)

Gasland, Josh Fox, director (Gasland Productions, LLC)

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont, directors (White Pine Pictures)

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson, director (Representational Pictures) (download PDF script)

The Lottery, Madeleine Sackler, director (Great Curve Films)

Precious Life, Shlomi Eldar, director (Origami Productions)

Quest for Honor, Mary Ann Smothers Bruni, director (Smothers Bruni Productions)

Restrepo, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, directors (Outpost Films)

This Way of Life, Thomas Burstyn, director (Cloud South Films)

The Tillman Story, Amir Bar-Lev, director (Passion Pictures/Axis Films)

Waiting for ‘Superman’, Davis Guggenheim, director (Electric Kinney Films)

Waste Land, Lucy Walker, director (Almega Projects)

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, directors (Disturbing the Universe LLC)

The Documentary Branch Screening Committee viewed all the eligible documentaries for the preliminary round of voting. Documentary Branch members will now select the five nominees from among the 15 titles on the shortlist.
Read the full article »

Video: Bernard Sumner, Hot Chip and Hot City’s”Didn’t Know What Love Was” for Converse

A little deadpan nonsense.

Scripting Awards Season: The First Screenplays

Screenplays for award contenders are posted for download to circumvent a rule: if anyone from the public can download them, no one at the Academy can say they were intended only to influence Oscar voters. Among the first PDFs, Sony Pictures Classics’ roster includes Animal Kingdom; Barney’s Version; Get Low; Inside Job; Made in Dagenham; Mother and Child and Please Give. Overture Films’ front door is here. Scripts include Let Me In; Jack Goes Boating and Stone. Overture also features, from Anchor Bay, City Island and Solitary Man (forthcoming).

Ray Harryhausen Talks Career, Technique; Plays With Toys

From the Bradford Animation Festival, “John Landis talks to Ray Harryhausen about his career, animation technique and the making of Jason and the Argonauts.”

1 Comment »

Movie City Indie

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