Movie City News Archive for June, 2012

“A Life Less Ordinary”: How Sam Frears, Stephen’s Son, Made It To 40 Despite Riley-Day Syndrome

“A Life Less Ordinary”: How Sam Frears, Stephen’s Son, Made It To 40 Despite Riley-Day Syndrome

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Variety.Com Editor Moves Over To THR.Com

Variet_y.Com Editor Moves Over To THR.Com

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WSJ Would Have You Think Murdoch Would Like Another Waiver, This Time To Go After The Los Angeles Times

WSJ Would Have You Think Murdoch Would Like Another Waiver, This Time To Go After The Los Angeles Times

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Vangelis Sez Message Of Chariots Of Fire Still Important

Vangelis Sez Message Of Chariots Of Fire Still Important

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Ted Screenwriter Sulkin Peddles Big Book O’ Tweets

Ted Screenwriter Sulkin Peddles Big Book O’ Tweets

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Glenn Kenny, Prompted By A Naysayer Of Beasts Of The Southern Wild, Offers Some New Entries For The “Dictionary Of Received Critical Ideas”

Glenn Kenny, Prompted By A Naysayer Of Beasts Of The Southern Wild, Offers Some New Entries For The “Dictionary Of Received Critical Ideas”

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When Dan Cutforth And Jane Lipsitz Met Katy Perry

When Dan Cutforth And Jane Lipsitz Met Katy Perry

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Rahman Sez “Jai Ho” Still No-Go If B’way Slumdog Tuner Sings Sans Boyle

Rahman Sez “Jai Ho” Still No-Go If B’way Slumdog Tuner Sings Sans Boyle

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Danny Boyle Assures PETA The Olympics Opener Will Be Kind To The Animals

“We are satisfied that the animals won’t now end up in an abattoir and that much more attention is now being paid to their welfare.” Danny Boyle Assures PETA The Olympics Opener Will Be Kind To The Animals

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Lee Siegel Elucidates His Alec Baldwin Issues For The Fashion Section

“Mr. Baldwin possesses what you might call the salutary egotism of avid living, as opposed to the rotten narcissism of amoral grasping and mistreatment of other people.” Lee Siegel Elucidates His Alec Baldwin Issues For The Fashion Section

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A Genial Editor’s Letter From Cinema Scope’s Mark Peranson

“Back to business as usual, which means being crabby about Cannes and printing long articles about filmmakers nobody has heard of.” A Genial Editor’s Letter From Cinema Scope’s Mark Peranson 

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William Friedkin Could’ve Been A Serial Killer

William Friedkin Could’ve Been A Serial Killer

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Sundance Cinemas Sets Up Shop In Seattle

Sundance Cinemas Sets Up Shop In Seattle

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WSJ’s Anna Russell Will Blog Her Way Through The Criterion Collection

WSJ’s Anna Russell Will Blog Her Way Through The Criterion Collection Yes –  Just Like Matthew Dessem Who –  Ebert Wrote About In 2009

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Sarah Polley, Canadian

Sarah Polley, Canadian

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Thelma Adams Talks “Restless Housewife Dance” With Waltz’s Michelle Williams

Thelma Adams Talks “Restless Housewife Dance” With Waltz‘s Michelle Williams

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“I have no idea what my films are about”

Docmaker Nicolas Philibert: “I have no idea what my films are about”

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Friday Estimates: June 30

It’s a stripper and teddy bear weekend! While Merida and her Brave friends will no doubt capture more of the family market, Ted and Magic Mike are at the top of the box office charts on Friday.

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Brave Has Its Very Own Page For Projectionists To Get It Right

Brave Has Its Very Own Page For Projectionists To Get It Right

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Wilmington on Movies: The Graduate

Sometimes a movie comes at exactly the right time. Like The Graduate — director Mike Nichols’ and screenwriters Buck Henry’s and Calder Willingham’s marvelously edgy and arousing romantic comedy about plastics and family affairs and life in California, with one of those heroes, or anti-heroes, who strike a chord: young, nervous, recent college graduate, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), who’s a little worried about his future and also torn between his clandestine affair with a married lover, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and his seemingly genuine open-air love for her beautiful college-age daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).

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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