Movie City News Archive for October, 2013

Suschitzky On How Cronenberg Composes His Shots

Suschitzky On How Cronenberg Composes His Shots

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Laurie Anderson On Lou Reed’s Last Days

Laurie Anderson On Lou Reed’s Last Days

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Kohn Sez Ender’s Game Is About Edward Snowden, Avant La Lettre

Kohn Sez Ender’s Game Is About Edward Snowden, Avant La Lettre

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20W2O: Choking On The Tea Leaves

In the last week, there have been a series of attacks on the box office potential of 12 Years A Slave, which is “dirty tricks”-speak for “there is something less than great about this movie about the black people you have no responsibility for to which They are trying to force you to give a Best Picture Oscar.” These two stories ran, by the way, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, the day before the film’s first expansion to 123 screens, and then in the New York Times, two days after the film’s first expansion.

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Semley On Cronenberg As “Idea” In TIFF Lightbox Life Exhibition

Semley On Cronenberg As “Idea” In TIFF Lightbox Life Exhibition

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Woody Allen Open-Letters Awards-Givers For Casting Director Juliet Taylor

Woody Allen Open-Letters Awards-Givers For Casting Director Juliet Taylor

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Jodorowsky, At Length

Jodorowsky, At Length

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Wikipedia’s Slow Decline

Wikipedia’s Slow Decline

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Murdoch Lectures: Aussie Media Must Become “Disruptive” To Survive

Murdoch Lectures: Aussie Media Must Become “Disruptive” To Survive with vid

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T-Bone Burnett On Analog And Taking To Silicon Valley With “Pitchforks And Torches”

T-Bone Burnett On Analog And Taking To Silicon Valley With “Pitchforks And Torches”

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Uh-oh, Billy Friedkin’s Done It Again

“The new footage significantly deepens the film’s misogyny. Though that misogyny was already front and center in the original cut of The Exorcist, the new footage gives a much more comprehensive view of the film’s politics, and its particular take on patriarchal hegemony.” Uh-oh, Billy Friedkin’s Done It Again

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Jonnie Rosenbaum On The Life’s Work Of Near-Unknown Filmmaker Peter Thompson

Jonnie Rosenbaum On The Life’s Work Of Near-Unknown Filmmaker Peter Thompson

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“Why Do Film Festivals Reject Good Films?”

“Why Do Film Festivals Reject Good Films?”

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20 Years On, “What We Lost When We Lost River Phoenix”

20 Years On, “What We Lost When We Lost River Phoenix”

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Olivia Wilde On How Drinking Buddies Seems To Have Changed Her Career

Olivia Wilde On How Drinking Buddies Seems To Have Changed Her Career

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Gopnik On How We Look At The JFK Assassination 50 Years On

Gopnik On How We Look At The JFK Assassination 50 Years On

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Torrid Brit Newsroom: News Of The World Phone Hacking Trial Brings Sexual Affairs To Fore Before Actual Crimes

Torrid Brit Newsroom: News Of The World Phone Hacking Trial Brings Sexual Affairs To Fore Before Actual Crimes

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VOICE Sheds Last Vet Journo

VOICE Sheds Last Vet Journo

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Los Angeles TV Protest Group Protests NYC’s IFC Theater Letting Teens Into Blue Is The Warmest Color; It’s What They Do

“We are not setting policy for theaters across the country. We are one theater in the West Village, and we have adopted this policy for this one film.” Los Angeles TV Protest Group Protests NYC’s IFC Theater Letting Teens Into Blue Is The Warmest Color; It’s What They Do

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DVD Geek: Pacific Rim

The 62 minutes of excellent production featurettes that accompany the film reveal how incredibly thorough del Toro was in overseeing the movie’s creation, which is why, boxoffice shortcomings or not, the film is going to be around for a very long time to come. As he explains, “This movie was made by people who love giant monsters and robots, for people who love giant monsters and robots.”

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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