Movie City News Archive for March, 2012

Howell On His Titanic Cousin, The Unforgettable “Man Standing In Background Way Behind Bill Paxton”

Howell On His Titanic Cousin, The Unforgettable “Man Standing In Background Way Behind Bill Paxton”

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“James Murdoch ‘on brink’ over BSkyB chairmanship”

“James Murdoch ‘on brink’ over BSkyB chairmanship”

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Producer Of Dr. Uwe Boll Film Wants $1 Million For Dr. Uwe Boll Misspelling Name In Credits

Producer Of Dr. Uwe Boll Film Wants $1 Million For Dr. Uwe Boll Misspelling Name In Credits

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“Often considered mindless, video games, it turns out, are changing the world for the better.”

“Often considered mindless, video games, it turns out, are changing the world for the better.”

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Memoirist Nick Flynn At Length On The Adaptation, Being Flynn

Memoirist Nick Flynn At Length On The Adaptation, Being Flynn

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Val Kilmer Is Mark Twain

Val Kilmer Is Mark Twain

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Behind The $700-Million Man Behind The Miramax Deal

Behind The $700-Million Man Behind The Miramax Deal

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Peter Dinklage On Making The Right Choices

“You can say no. You can not be the object of ridicule.” Peter Dinklage On Making The Right Choices

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Michael Wood Looks Back At The Bad And The Beautiful

Michael Wood Looks Back At The Bad And The Beautiful

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Bollywood’s New Hit Formula

Bollywood’s New Hit Formula

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Jeffrey Katzenberg Says Honoring Employees Is Good Business Strategy

“Jeffrey Katzenberg Says Honoring Employees Is Good Business Strategy”

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D’Angelo Doubles Down Against Those Who Say He Shouldn’t Download Movies Illegally

“If we can’t agree that folks who quietly flouted Prohibition in private (or who smoke weed at home today, for that matter) weren’t (aren’t) evil-enabling scumbags, then there’s just no common ground here.” D’Angelo Doubles Down Against Those Who Say He Shouldn’t Download Movies Illegally

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The One News Of The World Hack Who Remains Untouchable

The One News Of The World Hack Who Remains Untouchable

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“Newsies”: The Pan

“This Disney Theatrical Productions adaptation of the 1992 Disney movie musical is made up largely of numbers that feel like blazing banner headlines. And if none of them quite match the immortal panache of the New York Post classic ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar,’ you have to give their creators points for consistency.” “Newsies”: The Pan

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Piracy, Again? Arrrrrggggh.

When is pirating movies not stealing something you didn’t pay for out of a misguided sense of self-entitlement? According to Mike D’Angelo, it’s not stealing if he does it, at least. Or it is stealing, but he’s entitled to steal it. Or at the very least, hey, stealing’s not bad if you’re only pirating movies you really, really want to watch on Blu-ray but don’t want to buy. Or if you delete it after you watch it, if you don’t like it, or add to your wish list to purchase for when you decide you can afford it. Got it?

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“White Until Proven Black: Race In The Hunger Games”

“White Until Proven Black: Race In The Hunger Games“

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Friday Box Office Estimates: March 30, 2013

“The Hunger Games” is still eating everything in sight, tracking slightly ahead of the best of the “Twilight” numbers, meaning that $300m domestic is still in view. “The Titans” were willing to go up against Katniss’ wrath, but paid a price with less than half the first remake’s opening day numbers. And “Mirror Mirror” fits nicely on Relativity’s wall of mediocre launches.

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Orson Welles’ Unproduced 1939 “Heart Of Darkness” Gets Brit Live-Read Led By Brian Cox As Kurtz And Marlow

Orson Welles’ Unproduced 1939 “Heart Of Darkness” Gets Brit Live-Read Led By Brian Cox As Kurtz And Marlow

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Bogdanovich Takes Traveling Anecdote-And-Cravat Show to Toronto

Bogdanovich Takes Traveling Anecdote-And-Cravat Show to Toronto

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Report: WeinsteinCo Had PG-13 Bully Cut In The Wings All Along For Wider Release April 13

Report: WeinsteinCo Had PG-13 Bully Cut In The Wings All Along For Wider Release April 13

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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?

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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