Movie City News Archive for July, 2015

Jim Hemphill Chats Chris McQuarrie

“With a film like this, you just have to keep your head down and take it a step at a time, trusting that it will all come out right in the end.” Jim Hemphill Walks Through The Production Process With Chris McQuarrie

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David Byrne Reasons For Opening The “Black Box” Of Music Industry Deals

“I myself am doing O.K., but my concern is for the artists coming up: How will they make a life in music?” David Byrne Reasons For Opening The “Black Box” Of Music Industry Deals

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Picturing Indian Movie Palaces

Picturing Indian Movie Palaces

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“Like a long line of great directors before him, Joshua Oppenheimer is asking us to look into the present and see the past; he is challenging us to stare into the eyes of killers and see our own reflection.”

“Like a long line of great directors before him, Joshua Oppenheimer is asking us to look into the present and see the past; he is challenging us to stare into the eyes of killers and see our own reflection.”

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Regal Rejects Paramount Short-Stick Theatrical Window Deal

Regal Rejects Paramount Short-Stick Theatrical Window Deal

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Joe Swanberg And Kris Swanberg Talk Unexpected

Joe Swanberg And Kris Swanberg Talk Unexpected 39’09” podcast

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What If Blockbusters Forsook The Plot?

What If Blockbusters Forsook The Plot?

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The DVD Wrapup: Unfriended, Water Diviner, Reckless, Life on the Reef, Lost Soul and more

Unfriended isn’t for the casual users of the Internet. The multi-image presentation, which is extremely sophisticated, requires far more work on the part of the viewer than the typical narrative feature. The more experience one has in the world of cyber-communication, the scarier Unfriended will be.

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Charles Mudede On What The Matrix Tells Us About The Tragedy In Greece

Charles Mudede On What The Matrix Tells Us About The Tragedy In Greece

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With Toronto Int’l At 40, Piers Handling Sez It All Started With One Piece Of Paper

With Toronto Int’l At 40, Piers Handling Sez It All Started With One Piece Of Paper

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Relativity Scratches Up $9.5 Million Of $45 Million Requested To Keep Doors Open

Relativity Scratches Up $9.5 Million Of $45 Million Requested To Keep Doors Open

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Noel Murray On “Lego-izing, Theorizing And Problematizing: How We Process Movies in 2015”

Noel Murray On “Lego-izing, Theorizing And Problematizing: How We Process Movies in 2015”

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Kim Voynar, Mark Rabinowitz Named Programmers Of Oxford Film Fest

The Oxford Film Festival today appointed long-time staff member Melanie Addington as its Executive Director and named its programming team for the 2016 edition, to be lead by veteran industry fixtures Mark Rabinowitz and Kim Voynar as documentary and narrative feature head programmers, respectively. The 13th edition of the festival is set to unspool February…

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“How National Lampoon Went From Making Jokes To Becoming One”

“How National Lampoon Went From Making Jokes To Becoming One”

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For TCM, Martin Scorsese Looks Over Gene Tierney, Olivia De Havilland, Teresa Wright

For TCM, Martin Scorsese Looks Over Gene Tierney, Olivia De Havilland, Teresa Wright

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Roddy Piper Was 61

Roddy Piper Was 61

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Spy Expert Says Spy Movies Are Not Documentaries

Spy Expert Says Spy Movies Are Not Documentaries

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Taking Tilda Swinton’s Cartoon Of A Boss In Trainwreck As “One-Dimensional” Seems To Miss The Point

Taking Tilda Swinton’s Cartoon Of A Boss In Trainwreck As “One-Dimensional” Seems To Miss The Point

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Sotheby’s Values David Foster Wallace

“He speaks to a millennial generation. As an intern at the University of Texas told the curator when they were thinking of acquiring the Foster Wallace archive a few yeas ago, ‘you have to do this, he’s our James Joyce.’” Sotheby’s Values David Foster Wallace

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Anne Thompson Adds More Voices to The End Of The Tour Conversation

Anne Thompson Adds More Voices to The End Of The Tour Conversation

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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?

Quote Unquotesee all »

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