Movie City News Archive for January, 2014

Gyllenhaal And Villeneuve: Born Enemy

Gyllenhaal And Villeneuve: Born Enemy

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Ralph Fiennes On Evil And Intimacy

Ralph Fiennes On Evil And Intimacy

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On Scarlett Johansson’s Complicated Job As “Brand Ambassador”

On Scarlett Johansson’s Complicated Job As “Brand Ambassador”

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Producer Cassian Elwes On Tom Sherak’s Support

Producer Cassian Elwes On Tom Sherak’s Support

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Sundance 2014 Last Call

As a documentarian, Balmès shows more than tells; his work tends to curate moments that strike him as meaningful into a largely abstract tapestry and let you make of them what you will. Consequently, Happiness is not a neatly delineated picture of narrative storytelling, nor is it quite traditionally structured documentary. True to form, the director’s work here tends toward the languid and fluid; we float gently along the placid life rhythm of this small village on a faraway mountaintop as the camera captures the subtle – and sometimes not so subtle – shifts in the cultural and social landscape wrought by the march of technological progress.

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Tim Gray Pooh-Poohs Academy’s Foreign-Language Film Voting Process

Tim Gray Pooh-Poohs Academy’s Foreign-Language Film Voting Process

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Listening To Gravity

Listening To Gravity

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Behind The Work Of The Nicholas Ray Foundation

Behind The Work Of The Nicholas Ray Foundation

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Times Discovers “Saturday Night Live” After-Party

Times Discovers “Saturday Night Live” After-Party

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Beauty And The Beasts And Guillermo Del Toro

Beauty And The Beasts And Guillermo Del Toro

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Getting Perspective With 11-Time Oscar Nominee Roger Deakins

Getting Perspective With 11-Time Oscar Nominee Roger Deakins

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20 Years To Dallas Buyers Club

20 Years To Dallas Buyers Club

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HUNGARIAN DIRECTOR MIKLOS JANCSO WAS 92

HUNGARIAN DIRECTOR MIKLÓS JANCSÓ  WAS 92

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Setoodeh, Best Known For Saying Gays Can’t Play Straight, Sez Jesse Eisenberg Is No Lex Luthor In His Superheroverse

Setoodeh, Best Known For Saying Gays Can’t Play Straight, Sez Jesse Eisenberg Is No Lex Luthor In His Superheroverse

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Toon Titan Arthur Rankin, Jr. Was 89

Toon Titan Arthur Rankin, Jr. Was 89

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Sean Burns Celebrates In The Worst Way

“A movie like this is cause for celebration. With a solemnity so inflated it defies all logic, common sense and presumably several of God’s holy commandments, this is a spectacularly awful film. Breathtaking to behold as it barrels from one terrible artistic decision to another, it’s so histrionically abysmal that it makes you realize how lazy and complacent…

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Ebiri Longs For Longer Trailers

Ebiri Longs For Longer Trailers

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Seltzer And Friedberg Speak!

“I think the first movie, you’re always surprised, like, ‘Oh, wow, we’re not getting a 100 Rotten Tomatoes score?’ And then you go, ‘It’s not a critic’s cup of tea,’ and some people don’t like it and then you move on. Otherwise, you go crazy.” Seltzer And Friedberg Speak!

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“Are there other ways to think of a digital-era Film Society of Lincoln Center?”

“Are there other ways to think of a digital-era Film Society of Lincoln Center?” With – Dargis On Bringing The Youth And – Scott Sez “The Film Society is literally, physically alienated from its audience.”

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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