Movie City News Archive for August, 2011

The Atlantic Casts Preemptive Ballot For Andy Serkis

The Atlantic Casts Preemptive Ballot For Andy Serkis

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New Regency Co-Chairmen Parker And Harper Set To Exit By Year-End

New Regency Co-Chairmen Parker And Harper Set To Exit

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Death At 99 Of Seo Mitsuyo, Pioneer Japanese Animator, Reported A Year After

Death At 99 Of Seo Mitsuyo, Pioneer Japanese Animator, Reported A Year Past

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Do Euro Directors Really Not Need H’wd Any More?

Do Euro Directors Really Not Need H’wd Any More?

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Blair Witch, We Have A Problem: NASA Not So High On Apollo 18

Blair Witch, We Have A Problem: NASA Not So High On Apollo 18

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The DVD Wrapup: In a Better World, The Complete Jean Vigo, If …, Orpheus, Cell 211, Phantom Pain, Skateland, Wrecked, True Adolescents …

In a Better World: Blu-ray The winner of the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film poses several interesting challenges for its characters and audiences. First, it tests the convictions of modern-day Christians to live up to lessons taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Beyond that, by setting “In a Better World”…

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Patton Oswalt On Patience And Goodness And The Funny In The Internet Age

Patton Oswalt On Patience And Goodness And The Funny In The Internet Age

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Jonnie Rosenbaum Likes Raul Ruiz’s Camera Moves

Jonnie Rosenbaum Likes Raúl Ruiz’s Camera Moves

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Brit Art Critic Has Doubts About Soderbergh’s Painterly Turn

Brit Art Critic Has Doubts About Soderbergh’s Painterly Turn

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Madonna’s “Sex” Sought

Madonna’s “Sex” Sought

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John Cleese: Grump

John Cleese: Grump

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The Work Of Stanley Kubrick Refined Into Animated “Cinematographs”

The Work Of Stanley Kubrick Refined Into Animated “Cinematographs”

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Broadway Loses Its “Phantom” After 9,382 Perfs

Broadway Loses Its “Phantom” After 9,382 Perfs

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Surveying TIFF Titles Without U. S. Distribution

Surveying TIFF Titles Without U. S. Distribution And – MCN’s Look At Same (With An Oscar Bent) Four Weeks Ago

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Inside Silencio, David Lynch’s Paris Nightclub

Inside Silencio, David Lynch’s Paris Nightclub

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Wilmington on DVDs. Picks of the Week, Classic: Cul-de-sac, An Affair to Remember. New: Police, Adjective

PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC Cul-de-sac (Four Stars) U.K.: Roman Polanski, 1966 (Criterion) Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac — one of the great English-language films of the ‘60s, a classic of neo-noir and of ’60s dark British comedy — begins with a long, still shot of a car on a road in a nearly empty landscape. The…

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TribCo Management Excels Again, Asking Bankruptcy Court For Further $42.5 Million In “Retention” Bonuses For 640 Managers

TribCo Management Excels Again, Asking Bankruptcy Court For Further $42.5 Million In “Retention” Bonuses For 640 Managers

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“My Neighbor, Steve Jobs”

“My Neighbor, Steve Jobs”

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Ebert On His App

Ebert On His App

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Cameron Crowe’s Got Say Anything On His Mind

Cameron Crowe’s Got Say Anything On His Mind

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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