Movie City News Archive for October, 2014

“Even the horses were afraid of Steve Carell.”

NYT Sunday Profiles Go For Neat Ledes “Even the horses were afraid of Steve Carell.” “Here’s how much of a bookworm Reese Witherspoon is.”

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Mark Harris On “The Curse of Crash: The Narratives That Doom Oscar Movies”

Mark Harris On “The Curse of Crash: The Narratives That Doom Oscar Movies”

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Stan Lee Media Barred From Asserting “Spider-Man” Rights Claim

Stan Lee Media Barred From Asserting “Spider-Man” Rights Claim

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No Love Lost Between Literary Agent Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie And Amazon

“With the restored health of the publishing industry and having some sense of where this sort of Isis-like distribution channel, Amazon, is going to be buried and in which plot of sand they will be stuck, publishers will be able to raise the author’s digital royalty to 40% or 50%. Writers will begin to make…

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“Six Ways Franchises Go Terminal”

“Six Ways Franchises Go Terminal”

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“Jacques Tati, Historian”

“Jacques Tati, Historian”

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Wilmington on Movies: Gone Girl

Even if you’ve never read the book or seen the movie (which may well be the case), you probably think you sort of know what’s going to happen next. But you probably don’t. Gone Girl, which Flynn has cunningly imagined and craftily, stunningly wrote, and which Fincher has visualized with all the eerie expertise which usually marks his high-style crime movies (including Fight Club, Se7en, The Game, Zodiac, Panic Room, and even The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), is, like many another thriller of its type, dependent on how far we’re willing to suspend disbelief. But, in the realms of bestseller-turned-moviedom, Gone Girl is a cut or two above and definitely better than most — full of not always guessable tricks and twists, told in a tense, taut, racy, mostly engrossing style and boasting a lot of tangy, sharply drawn characters, very well played by a very good cast.

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Filmmaker David Barker Goes For Godard’s Gaga

“The use of 3D with this explosion of images is what makes this film by an 83-year-old seem so much younger and freer than most films by directors in their twenties.” Filmmaker David Barker Goes For Godard’s Gaga

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Ridley Scott’s RSA Film and Wild Card Launch “Next Generation Marketing” For Global Audiences

RSA FILMS AND WILD CARD DEBUT JOINT MARKETING VENTURE: 3AM Supported by Ridley Scott’s RSA Films and Wild Card, New Creative Consultancy Offers Studios Next Generation Marketing LOS ANGELES, CA, Oct. 30, 2014 – Wild Card, an industry leader in theatrical advertising, and RSA Films, Ridley Scott’s award-winning commercial production company, have launched 3AM, a new venture geared towards the…

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Bilge Ebiri On Jennifer Lawrence And What It Means To Be The Biggest Female Star

Bilge Ebiri On Jennifer Lawrence And What It Means To Be The Biggest Female Star And – Debra Granik On Finding Lawrence And Life After Winter’s Bone

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NATO And MPAA Set “Zero Tolerance” For Google Glass And Other Wearable Recording Devices

Today, the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Theatre Owners announced an update to their joint policy to prevent film theft in theaters.  The update was made to fully integrate wearable tech into the rules following a joint meeting of NATO and MPAA theatrical anti-piracy teams at ShowEast, the annual industry…

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VICE Media To Launch $100 Million 24-Hour Channel In Canada

VICE Media To Launch $100 Million 24-Hour Channel In Canada

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On The “Profound Unprofitability” Of Facebook’s $21.8 Billion-Valued WhatsApp

On The “Profound Unprofitability” Of Facebook’s $21.8 Billion-Valued WhatsApp

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Apple CEO Tim Cook Writes, “I’m Proud To Be Gay”

Apple CEO Tim Cook Writes, “I’m Proud To Be Gay”

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Moscow Film Museum Endangered Again

Moscow Film Museum Endangered Again

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After NYFF, Stuart Klawans Ponders, What Are Movies Good For?

After NYFF, Stuart Klawans Ponders, What Are Movies Good For?

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Feds Find “Midnight Rider” Producers Didn’t Warn Crew Of Denial Of Permission To Shoot On Railroad Tracks

Feds Find “Midnight Rider” Producers Didn’t Warn Crew Of Denial Of Permission To Shoot On Railroad Tracks

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Hw’d & Fine Talks Hope For Fine Movies With Tony Gilroy

“Really, comic-book movies have destroyed the foreign sales market. But the people want it; it’s an efficient market. That’s why I wish something like The Matrix would come out now–that was an extraordinary film. We need something like that to remind people that they can have a big movie that’s also smart and exciting.” Hw’d…

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Haley Joel Osment, Grown Up

Haley Joel Osment, Grown Up

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Isabella Rossellini Looks Back On The Sex Lives Of Animals

Isabella Rossellini Looks Back On The Sex Lives Of Animals

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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