Movie City News Archive for March, 2014

Good Dr. Bordwell Goes Back To The Future Of China

Good Dr. Bordwell Goes Back To The Future Of China

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Hobie Alter, 80, Shaped Surf Culture, Helped Inspire Gidget

Hobie Alter, 80, Shaped Surf Culture, Helped Inspire Gidget

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Sheidlower Makes The Case For U. S. Print Media Using “A Word That Rhymes With ‘Duck,’ ‘Luck,’ And ‘Truck'”

Sheidlower Makes The Case For U. S. Print Media Using “A Word That Rhymes With ‘Duck,’ ‘Luck,’ And ‘Truck’”

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Blogdanovich On Eyman’s New John Wayne Bio

Blogdanovich On Eyman’s New John Wayne Bio

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The Unlikely Rise Of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” As A Worldwide Protest Anthem

The Unlikely Rise Of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” As Worldwide Protest Anthem

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“Almost all of Rumsfeld’s answers are designed to deflect and manipulate. But I think he’s also manipulating himself. Any account of him has to deal with the gobbledygook, the lies, the glibness, the cleverness—but also his emptiness.”

“Almost all of Rumsfeld’s answers are designed to deflect and manipulate. But I think he’s also manipulating himself. Any account of him has to deal with the gobbledygook, the lies, the glibness, the cleverness—but also his emptiness.”

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Supreme Court To Consider Software Patents For First Time Since 1981

Supreme Court To Consider Software Patents For First Time Since 1981

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Jodorowsky Says His Work On “Dune” Is Done

Jodorowsky Says His Work On “Dune” Is Done 

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Film Quarterly Editor B. Ruby Rich On “Film (Sic)”

Film Quarterly Editor B. Ruby Rich On “Film (Sic)”

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Hoberman On DeMille’s Samson & Delilah, New To Blu

Hoberman On DeMille’s Samson & Delilah, New To Blu

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Vulture Editor Moves To Yahoo To Amp Up Entertainment Side Of Struggling Portal

Vulture Editor Moves To Yahoo To Amp Up Entertainment Side Of Struggling Portal

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Ricky Gervais And H’wd’s “Woman Problem”

Ricky Gervais And H’wd’s “Woman Problem”

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The Weekend Report

Is Noah a Divergent? Is God dead? Does The Governator have a need for speed? These questions and more will be answered by The Muppets & Peabody & Sherman when they check into The Grand Budapest Hotel.

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NYC Indonesian Expats Learn From The Act Of Killing

NYC Indonesian Expats Learn From The Act Of Killing

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San Francisco’s Le Video’s Latest Attempt To Keep Its Doors Open

San Francisco’s Le Video’s Latest Attempt To Keep Its Doors Open

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Remembering Cinematographer Oswald Morris, Who Was 98

Remembering Cinematographer Oswald Morris, Who Was 98

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Wilmington on Movies: Noah

Will Russell Crowe ever again get a part that so suits his special screen persona and gifts — that natural genius he seems to have for projecting awesome tormented heroics and mad obsessions — as the one he plays in his new film: Noah, the Lord’s visionary servant in Darren Aronofsky’s sometimes crazy and often wonderful version of the biblical story of The Great Flood? Or a film that so stupendously sets those gifts off ?

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“The reason that all the sequels to The Exorcist are rotten chunks of excrement is because they are made by non-believers. And what they all attempt to do is to defrock the story and to send the thing up.”

“The reason that all the sequels to The Exorcist are rotten chunks of excrement is because they are made by non-believers. And what they all attempt to do is to defrock the story and to send the thing up.”

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Wolff Analyzes The Murdoch Family Ascension For The FT

Wolff Analyzes The Murdoch Family Ascension For The FT And – Profiles Lachlan Murdoch For Town & Country

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Warner Bros. CEO Tsujihara Bullish On Big Screen, Barnes Sez After Gentle Sitdown

Warner Bros. CEO Tsujihara Bullish On Big Screen, Barnes Sez After Gentle Sitdown

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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