Movie City News Archive for August, 2014

M. Phillips Takes On How A Couple Of “M———er”s Got Love Is Strange Its “R” Rating; He Means The Word, Not The Raters

“No matter how discreet and clothed its depictions, Love Is Strange is apparently just too gay for a PG-13.” M. Phillips Takes On A Couple Of “M———er”s That Got Love Is Strange Its “R” Rating; He Means The Word, Not The Raters

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On Popul Vuh’s Soundtracks For Werner Herzog

On Popul Vuh’s Soundtracks For Werner Herzog

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Frederick Wiseman To Adapt Titicut Follies Into Ballet

Frederick Wiseman To Adapt Titicut Follies Into Ballet And – Wong Kar-wai Will 3D-ize The Grandmaster

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The Weekend Report

Traditionally one of the industry’s slowest sessions, the Labor Day weekend provided the usual summer’s end blahs with two new genre pics. The horror yarn As Above/So Below opened in fourth spot with an estimated $.8.3 million (all figures represent the 3-day portion of the weekend) and the spy thriller The November Man was a jot behind at $7.6 million.

The frames top grosser were Guardians of the Galaxy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with respectively $16.3 million and $11.7 million.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

Guardians of the Galaxy, now the top domestic grosser for the summer, returns to the top of the box office chart in one of the weakest movie weekends of the year. And the newcomers assure that status will remain with two sub-$9m 3-day openings. On the indie side, Cantinflas will crack the Top Ten for the weekend with around $6k per-screen on 382 screens.

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Robert Greene On Teaching Nonfiction And Getting Schooled Via Skype By Frederick Wiseman

Robert Greene On Teaching Nonfiction And Getting Schooled Via Skype By Frederick Wiseman

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A Tribute To The Matte Paintings Of The Classic H’wd Era

A Tribute To The Matte Paintings Of The Classic H’wd Era

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Annnnddddd we seem to be back

Annnnddddd we seem to be back

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David Lynch? He Still Says “I Prefer Not To.”

“I’m really loving painting these days. So there’s nothin’ on the burner right now.” David Lynch? He Still Says “I Prefer Not To.”

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TIFF Programmers Suggest 15 “Must-Sees” At Toronto

TIFF Programmers Suggest 15 “Must-Sees” At Toronto

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Richard Linklater Shouts Out Some Came Running, If, The 400 Blows, Nashville And Sullivan’s Travels

Richard Linklater Shouts Out Some Came Running, If, The 400 Blows, Nashville And Sullivan’s Travels

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Awards Contenders Descend On Telluride

Awards Contenders Descend On Telluride

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Harmin’ Armond Limns Semi-Coherent Anti-Lib Listicle

Harmin’ Armond Limns Semi-Coherent Anti-Lib Listicle, “A Corrupt, Carelessly Politicized Canon”

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Why The U.S. Has Some Of The Slowest Internet Speeds On Earth: Corporations Opposing City-Run Broadband

Why The U.S. Has Some Of The Slowest Internet Speeds On Earth: Corporations Opposing City-Run Broadband

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Bill And Stella Pence Talk About Telluride’s Beginnings

Bill And Stella Pence Talk Telluride’s Beginnings

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A. O. Scott Anticipates The Opening Of “Interfestival Skirmishing” Season

“Telluride may not have Toronto’s red-carpet galas, but at a time when reactions to a movie can be instantly shared with the world, the distinction between a big and a small festival hardly matters.” A. O. Scott Anticipates The Opening Of “Interfestival Skirmishing” Season

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Academy Extends Governors Awards To Belafonte, O’Hara, Miyazaki, Carrière

HARRY BELAFONTE, JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIÈRE, HAYAO MIYAZAKI AND MAUREEN O’HARA TO RECEIVE ACADEMY’S GOVERNORS AWARDS   LOS ANGELES, CA — The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted Tuesday night (August 26) to present Honorary Awards to Jean-Claude Carrière, Hayao Miyazaki and Maureen O’Hara, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award…

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A Leaked Draft Of Oz Film Industry Copyright Proposal Would Be Bad For Users And ISPs

A Leaked Draft Of Oz Film Industry Copyright Proposal Would Be Bad For Users And ISPs pdf

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“Just trust me when I say that The Brown Bunny is a comfort when you’ve been maimed and drugged, and I mean that as a compliment.”

“Just trust me when I say that The Brown Bunny is a comfort when you’ve been maimed and drugged, and I mean that as a compliment.”

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“Hw’d’s Big-Money YouTube Hit Factory”

“Hw’d’s Big-Money YouTube Hit Factory”

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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