Movie City News Archive for November, 2014

20 Weeks To Oscar: The Trouble With Biopics

We’re close to an all-biopic Oscar season. Maybe that’s why it’s such a blur right now. The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Selma, Unbroken, Foxcatcher, Mr. Turner, Big Eyes, and American Sniper are all specifically biopics. Boyhood and Birdman are fiction, but have major biographical elements driving them. Lots of bios.

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Alex Clark Likes Listening To Annette Bening’s Laugh

Alex Clark Likes Listening To Annette Bening’s Laugh

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Two Shia LaBeouf Collaborators On The Skywriting Plagiarist’s Alleged Rape During His Performance Art

Two Shia LaBeouf Collaborators On The Skywriting Plagiarist’s Alleged Rape During His Performance Art

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SW7 Trailer Recast As Lego

SW7 Trailer Recast As Lego

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Lower Revenues But Higher Profits Predicted For Australian Cinemas

Lower Revenues But Higher Profits Predicted For Australian Cinemas 

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Critical Elder David Thomson Cites Stanley Kauffman, Trashes Manny Farber And Sighs That The Newly-Restored Hiroshima Mon Amour Is “On Its Way To Being Forgotten”

Critical Elder David Thomson Cites Stanley Kauffman, Trashes Manny Farber And Sighs That The Newly-Restored Hiroshima Mon Amour Is “On Its Way To Being Forgotten”

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Bill Irwin Talks Some More About Miming The Kit-Kat Robot In Interstellar

“We never used the word puppetry, we never used the word robot. “ Bill Irwin Talks Some More About Miming The Kit-Kat Robot In Interstellar

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Robert Mays Consumes The All-You-Can-Eat Interstellar Pass For 15 Hours

“Entering as a blank slate allowed the craziness that comes with 15 relentless hours of Nolan world-layering and time-shifting to wash over me unimpeded, but it also meant I’d have about six minutes between screenings to consider how I felt about the movie, like a normal person.” Robert Mays Consumes The All-You-Can-Eat Interstellar Pass

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Michael Cieply Finds Words For Seth Rogen’s Co-Directed, Co-Written Latest Comedy

“Mr. Rogen, who helped direct The Interview and has a writing credit on its script, has seized the country’s displeasure as a publicity tool.” Michael Cieply Redefines Co-Writer-Co-Director-Co-Producer Seth Rogen’s Latest Comedy

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Remembering The Late, Great Production Designer Anton Furst, The Man Who Built Gotham, 25 Years After Batman

Remembering The Late, Great Production Designer Anton Furst, The Man Who Built Gotham, 25 Years After Batman

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Sony Computer Hack Appears To Include Leak Of Awards-Season Screeners

Sony Computer Hack Appears To Include Leak Of Awards-Season Screeners

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The Weekend Report

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 held top spot over the extending Thanksgiving holiday with an estimated $56.9 million. Turkey days featured two new national releases that came up short of expectations. Animated Penguins of Madagascar bowed in second spot with $25.7 million and the sequel of revenge Horrible Bosses 2 ran fifth at $15.5 million. Exclusive newcomers included Oz horror yarn The Babadook with $18,800 from two engagements. The biggest clues were left by Oscar hopeful The Imitation Game, that bowed to $484,000 on just four secret estates.

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Frank Yablans, 79, Headed Paramount In Its 1970s Heyday, Then Became Ventureseome Indie Producer

Frank Yablans, 79, Headed Paramount In Its 1970s Heyday, Then Became Ventureseome Indie Producer

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“Being homeless is better than working for Amazon”

“Being homeless is better than working for Amazon”

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NYT Only Appears To Search For Flaws In Netflix’s Perceived Armor, Including $90 Spend For Weinstein’s “Marco Polo” Ten-Parter

“Netflix is the one that everybody speaks about, but there are lots and lots and lots and lots of others. New streaming services are launching every week.” NYT Only Appears To Search For Flaws In Netflix’s Perceived Armor, Including $90 Spend For Weinstein’s “Marco Polo” Ten-Parter

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WashPost Profiles Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, Doesn’t Even Blush From Its Heights Of Praise

WashPost Profiles Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, Doesn’t Even Blush From Its Heights Of Praise

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With The Interview In The Offing, Sony Pictures Hack Could Be The Handiwork Of North Korean Absolute Leader Kim Jong-Un

With The Interview In The Offing, Sony Pictures Hack Could Be The Handiwork Of North Korean Absolute Leader Kim Jong-Un

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Sight & Sound Crix Top-Ten Linklater, Godard, Zvyagintsev, Costa, Glazer, Anderson, Ceylan, Slaboshpytski, Pawlikowski, Alonso

Sight & Sound Crix Top-Ten Linklater, Godard, Zvyagintsev, Costa, Glazer, Anderson, Ceylan, Slaboshpytski, Pawlikowski, Alonso

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Cahiers Du Cinema Crix Top-Ten Dumont, Godard, Glazer, Cronenberg, Miyazaki, Trier, Dolan, Sachs, Cavalier, Hong

Cahiers Du Cinema Crix Top-Ten Dumont, Godard, Glazer, Cronenberg, Miyazaki, Trier, Dolan, Sachs, Cavalier, Hong

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Max Nelson On James Harvey On Star Presence

Max Nelson On James Harvey On Star Presence

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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