Movie City News Archive for April, 2011

Bellamy And Howard Go Really, Really, Really Long On The Films Of Wong Kar-Wai

Bellamy And Howard Go Really, Really, Really Long On The Films Of Wong Kar-Wai

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Cannes As Photographed By Generations Of Traversos (Mind That Pool!)

Cannes As Photographed By Generations Of Traversos (Mind That Pool!)

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SAG National Board of Directors Unanimously Establishes Merger Task Force; Adopts Successor Union Mission Statement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Guild Task Force to work directly with AFTRA counterparts to develop formal merger plan for approval by National Boards in January 2012. Los Angeles, (April 30, 2011) – The Screen Actors Guild National Board of Directors today unanimously approved the creation of a Merger Task Force to work with their AFTRA counterparts…

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SAG Nat’l Board Unanimous In Scootch Toward AFTRA Merger

SAG Nat’l Board Unanimous In Scootch Toward AFTRA Merger With – The Complete Statement, Including Merger Text

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Tribeca Audience Award Goes To Give Up Tomorrow

Tribeca Audience Award Goes To Give Up Tomorrow

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2011 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES HEINEKEN AUDIENCE AWARD WINNER – GIVE UP TOMORROW

New York, NY [April 30, 2011] – The 10th annual Tribeca Film Festival (TFF), co-founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, and presented by founding sponsor American Express, announced the winner of the Heineken Audience Award – Give Up Tomorrow – tonight at Eye Beam in New York City. The film’s director,…

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Atlas Shrugged Producer Shifts Back Into Optimistic Mode

Atlas Shrugged Producer Shifts Back Into Optimistic Mode

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Digital Foraging: The More Starbucks Any City Like New York Gets, The More Thieves Quietly Walk Off With iPads, Laptops, iPhones, BlackBerrys…

Digital Foraging: The More Starbucks Any City Like New York Gets, The More Thieves Quietly Walk Off With iPads, Laptops, iPhones, BlackBerrys…

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William Campbell, 83, Was In Coppola’s Dementia 13; Sang With Elvis In Love Me Tender; Remembered For Early “Star Trek” Episodes

William Campbell, 83, Was In Coppola’s Dementia 13; Sang With Elvis In Love Me Tender; Remembered For Early “Star Trek” Episodes

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Bryan Singer On The Challenge Of Writing Credits

Bryan Singer On The Challenge Of Writing Credits

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Remembering Canadian Film Pioneer Gerald Pratley, Who Died Last Month At 87

Remembering Canadian Film Pioneer Gerald Pratley, Who Died Last Month At 87; CBC’s First Film Critic, Founder Ontario Film Institute (Now TIFF Cinematheque), Historian, Teacher And – Was “One Of The Real Guys” Was – “The Godfather Of The Cinematheque”

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Limited Edition Mars Needs Moms Pins Still Available!

Limited Edition Mars Needs Moms Pins Still Available!

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NZ Approves Showing Of LA Zombie, Gay Horror Banned In Australia

NZ Approves Showing Of LA Zombie, Gay Horror Banned In Australia

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Ebert Pages His Fest Bloggers

Ebert Pages His Fest Bloggers

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On Director Kelly Reichardt As Taskmaster

On Director Kelly Reichardt As Taskmaster

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On The Brilliance Of W. C. Fields’ Line Readings

On The Brilliance Of W. C. Fields’ Line Readings

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Thompson Gets QT Project Confirmation; Includes Spoiler-ish Synopsis

Thompson Gets QT Project Confirmation; Includes Spoiler-ish Synopsis

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Adam Thirlwell On My Dog Tulip

Adam Thirlwell On My Dog Tulip

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Kenny On Moderating Scorsese And Cissé

Kenny On Moderating Scorsese And Cissé

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Hawaii Asked For Tax Credits To Support Kavanaugh, Bing Studios

Hawaii Asked For Tax Credits To Support Kavanaugh, Bing Studios

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Movie City News

“I don’t think it’s cruel to say this, because John himself would undoubtedly have turned it into a gleeful anecdote: When he had the stroke that killed him, he was at a local dinner theater. Hell of a review.”

“I am inclined to aver that every activity needs its critics, from narcissists bloviating in Washington to exhibitors of knee holes in their blue jeans by way of following a fad. So, too, tennis players and others wearing their caps backward. There is, to be sure, only fairly innocuous folly in puncturing pants or reversing caps, but for political or artistic or religious twisting of thought or harboring holes in the head there is rather less excuse. I have always inveighed against the bleary journalism practiced by newspaper reviewers, as opposed to the real criticism performed by, well, critics.”

“I often felt a twinge of grief at the idea that John Simon had devoted his life to a method of work that could only make him increasingly unhappy. Here was a man, elegant, articulate, and vastly knowledgeable, fluent in at least half a dozen languages, whose gifts of mind gave nothing back to the arts he wrote about except a few unkind remarks that made fun of someone’s performance, ethnicity, physical attributes, or, with a pun, on his target’s name. (“If this is Norman Wisdom, I’ll take Saxon folly.”) Other theatre critics keep such darts in their rucksacks for occasional use; John lived by them.”

“One person’s critic is another person’s crackpot. That they are not united in their opinions is ascribable to the Latin saying: quot homines, tot sententiae. I myself prefer being considered a creep, but that is what you get for having what Vladimir Nabokov called ‘Strong Opinions.’ It is odd that in a country so wallowing in negativity, starting with mass shootings and climaxing with Trump, such an unimportant matter as theater criticism should generate so much hostility. The only target patently more important is lead in the drinking water.”

Review: Little Women (no spoilers)

The DVD Wrapup: Cold War, Betty Blue, Official Secrets, Demons, Olivia, American Dreamer, Land of Yik Yak

20 Weeks To Oscar: Cinema, Trump, and Oscar

E. Scott Weinberg On Youthful Fangoria Encounters

Rome Bookstore Closes

With a Grauniad-Alleged $300 Million Budget, Could The Yet-Unseen But Surely Weird Cats Pass A Billion Dollars at The Box Office?

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