Movie City News Archive for December, 2013

20 Weeks To Oscar: Why Amy Adams Deserves To a Win Best Actress This Year (Spoilers)

American Hustle is about the human condition. And almost everyone in the film is on some kind of con. At the center of the emotional parallelogram of the film is Sydney Prosser, played by Amy Adams. She is not a good girl. She is perfectly willing to play the game… whatever game will get her where she needs to get right now.

Read the full article » 18 Comments »

Best Of 2013: Features

The twenty-five films that follow all possess a “wow” factor. There’s a wealth of disparate, eye-widening goodness. Movies, large and small alike, are going interesting places. Then, alphabetically, thirty-four more samples of 2013’s bounty.

Read the full article »

The Top Ten Lists: 2013

With more than 70 lists, there are 146 films on the scorecard. There’s a lot of agreement in the top spots, with Gravity still leading the lists, but a few are climbing the chart. Dallas Buyers Club and Short Term 12 break the top 20.

Read the full article »

Tim Gray Sez There Are Dangers In The Oscar Ballot

Tim Gray Sez There Are Dangers In The Oscar Ballot

Read the full article »

Ted Hope On Movie Profits And Hw’d’s Definition Of “Backend”

Ted Hope On Movie Profits And Hw’d’s Definition Of “Backend”

Read the full article »

New York Man Has 10,607 Video Games In His Basement

New York Man Has 10,607 Video Games In His Basement

Read the full article »

“What Jerry Lewis discovered is what Chaplin knew: comedy and pathos must come from the same place: character.”

“What Jerry Lewis discovered is what Chaplin knew: comedy and pathos must come from the same place: character.”

Read the full article »

Dull Plagiarist Continues To Plagiarize Apologies

Dull Plagiarist Continues To Plagiarize Apologies

Read the full article »

From Forbes: Roula Khalaf’s October 14, 1991 Jordan Belfort Profile, “Steaks, Stocks — What’s The Difference?”

From Forbes: Roula Khalaf‘s October 14, 1991 Jordan Belfort Profile, “Steaks, Stocks—What’s The Difference?”

Read the full article »

The DVD Wrapup

Una Noche, Sweetwater, Berlin File, Bellman Equation, Love Marilyn, Zombie Hamlet, Hell Baby, Wolfblood and so much more.

Read the full article »

The Top 25 Toronto Movies

The Top 25 Toronto Movies

Read the full article »

The Costumes Of The Year 2013

The Costumes Of The Year 2013 And – Suiting Elliott Gould In The Long Goodbye

Read the full article »

So Maybe The Cat Is Llewyn Davis?

So Maybe The Cat Is Llewyn Davis?

Read the full article »

Hope Lists His 2013 Indie “Brave Thinkers And Doers”

Hope Lists His 2013 Indie “Brave Thinkers And Doers”

Read the full article »

“No, they pushed me to be nastier and scream louder and say more swear words. I was completely relaxed. It was so cathartic, especially coming off Gatsby, the only film where I’ve played a character who’s meant to be pretty. So to come off that film and just put on a big black dark wig, no makeup and march around was great. It was like stomping around in the mud after being in a pretty dress, which was exactly what I wanted to do.”

“No, they pushed me to be nastier and scream louder and say more swear words. I was completely relaxed. It was so cathartic, especially coming off Gatsby, the only film where I’ve played a character who’s meant to be pretty. So to come off that film and just put on a big black dark wig, no…

Read the full article »

On The Imminent Death Of Net Neutrality And How It Will Change The Internet As We Know It

On The Imminent Death Of Net Neutrality And How It Will Change The Internet As We Know It

Read the full article »

Upon His Retirement At 80, Observer Critic Gets One-Of-A-Kind Gift From 97-Year-Old Reader

Upon His Retirement At 80, Observer Critic Gets One-Of-A-Kind Gift From 97-Year-Old Reader

Read the full article »

A Smorgasbord Of Cinematographic Know-How From Roger Deakins

A Smorgasbord Of Cinematographic Know-How From Roger Deakins

Read the full article »

Andrew Tracy Appreciates Late Critic Stanley Kauffman

“A writer who has refined his craft, sharpened his perceptions, and through them broadened his range of response and feeling discovering an artist whose work validates what he knows the medium to be capable of but so seldom is.” Andrew Tracy Appreciates Late Critic Stanley Kauffman

Read the full article »

Brian Newman Makes 10 Predictions For Media In 2014

“6. Direct distribution will make someone a millionaire this year.” Brian Newman Makes 10 Predictions For Media In 2014

Read the full article »

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