Movie City News Archive for November, 2014

Friday Box Office Estimates

Mockingjay continues to rule the roost and is now looking to catch up to the domestic gross of the first Hunger Games, but not the second (which it is still behind by 24%). It’s now past $400m worldwide. newcomer/spinoff The Penguins of Madagascar is looking soft, due for a Saturday uptick, but not close to Big Hero Six opening numbers, even if you adjust expectations because of the Wednesday launch. Interstellar had an uptick this weekend, even as it dropped more than 10% of its screens. And newcomer/sequel Horrible Bosses 2 is no Horrible Bosses… but how different they really are at the box office won’t be known until the end of next weekend, once we’ve digested Thanksgiving.

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In First Interview Since Hitler Remarks, Lars Von Trier Claims He’s Quit Drugs And Alcohol And Thinks Only “Shitty Films” Are In The Offing

“There is no creative expression of artistic value that has ever been produced by ex-drunkards and ex-drug addicts. All the artists I have respected the most have also wallowed in all sorts of mind-expanding drugs.” In First Interview Since Hitler Remarks, Lars Von Trier Claims He’s Quit Drugs And Alcohol; Sez “Shitty Films” Are In…

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Alice Hines On How Mike Nichols’ Working Girl Holds Up

Alice Hines On How Mike Nichols’ Working Girl Holds Up

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Maclean’s Magazine Says After CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi, Canada Will Change How It Treats Sexual Assault

Maclean’s Magazine Says After CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi, Canada Will Change How It Treats Sexual Assault

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Matt Singer Offers His Five Surefire Steps To An Award-worthy Biopic

Matt Singer Offers His Five Surefire Steps To An Award-worthy Biopic

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NPR Takes A Gander At The Foot Technology Of Mae West’s Shoes

NPR Takes A Gander At The Foot Technology Of Mae West’s Shoes

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“What Exodus could learn from Noah, Lincoln and Jeffrey Katzenberg”

“What Exodus could learn from Noah, Lincoln and Jeffrey Katzenberg”

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Restoring Alan Turing’s Estate

Restoring Alan Turing’s Estate

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It’s Ten Years For The 20,000-Film Chicago Film Archives

It’s Ten Years For The 20,000-Film Chicago Film Archives

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Jordan Hoffman Circles Regal’s Union Square 14 And The Tease For SW:TFA

“When he intoned: ‘There has been an awakening,’ I began to weep like Malakili the Rancor Keeper. It was a fast 88 seconds.” Jordan Hoffman Circles Regal’s Union Square 14 And The Tease For SW:TFA

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Ryan Gilbey On 50 Years Of The Mockumentary

Ryan Gilbey On 50 Years Of The Mockumentary

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A. O. Scott Considers Whether Art Is Failing Us In Hard Times

A. O. Scott Assembles Voices Considers Whether Art Is Failing Us In Hard Times

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Next Wave Of Brutal Fiscal Contraction At BBC: $630 Million By 2017

Next Wave Of Brutal Fiscal Contraction At BBC: $630 Million By 2017

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TV Writer Ken Levine On The Cosby Work Ethic

“To have a star just arbitrarily toss out draft after draft and force his staff to write around the clock for seven months is unfair and highly disrespectful.” TV Writer Ken Levine On The Cosby Work Ethic

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The DVD Wrapup: Monte Hellman, Les Blank, Dirty Movies, Lines of Wellington, Drunk History and more

Traditionally, the one sure way to kill a genre film’s commercial appeal is for a critic to label it “existential” or “experimental” or compare it to the films of Antonioni. No matter how much a Western or road picture was embraced by intellectuals, if it didn’t draw a crowd to the drive-in or local bijou, no amount of arthouse revenues could save it or advance the career of the artiste. Monte Hellman broke into the movie business in 1959 with a string of genre films made under the Corman banner: Beast From Haunted Cave, The Terror and a pair of back-to-back collaborations with Jack Nicholson, Back Door to Hell and Flight to Fury and The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Five years would pass before Universal attempted to tap into the counterculture market with his “existential road movie,” Two-Lane Blacktop. Forty years later, this unqualified financial disaster would enter the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, where The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind someday may find themselves as well.

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How The Nagra Recorder Changed Film Sound

How The Nagra Recorder Changed Film Sound

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On The Floor Of The AFM In Search Of Future Schlock

On The Floor Of The AFM In Search Of Future Schlock

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20 Weeks To Oscar: First Major Event

Guild nominations are rarely outside of the well-established box. It takes a series of those events in coordination to change the game. Critics awards… lovely. But enjoy them for what they are, because they may not match nominations, much less winners.

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Godard’s Goodbye To Language Gets 3D Playdates In Santa Monica, Chicago, Seattle

Godard’s Goodbye To Language Gets 3D Playdates In Santa Monica, Chicago, Seattle

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Scott Foundas Has A Brief Audience With Ridley Scott About Exodus, Nonstop Work And Tony Scott

“I miss a friend. I’d go to him even when he was doing his recovery, and I’d say, ‘-— the chemo, have a vodka martini,’ and he and I would go out.” Scott Foundas Has A Brief Audience To Cover-Story Ridley Scott About Exodus, Nonstop Work, Why Movies Have To Have Stars For Finance, And…

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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