Movie City News Archive for January, 2016

Remembering The Best Film Appearances By L. A.’s To-Be-Demolished 6th Street Bridge

Remembering The Best Film Appearances By L. A.’s To-Be-Demolished 6th Street Bridge

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How Does Dealing In “Theater Clearances” Affect What Movies Play Near You? More Than You Probably Know

How Does Dealing In “Theater Clearances” Affect What Movies Play Near You? More Than You Probably Know

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Hulu Buys Streaming Window For All IFC Docs, Including City Of Gold And Weiner

Hulu Buys Streaming Window For All IFC Docs, Including City Of Gold And Weiner

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Behind The Scenes With Sundance-Crasher Concierges

Behind The Scenes With Sundance-Crasher Concierges

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Disney, Fox And Lionsgate Put $50 Million Toward Group Ticketing App

Disney, Fox And Lionsgate Put $50 Million Toward Group Ticketing App

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Read Christine Vachon And Pamela Koffler’s Sundance Fest Producers Lunch Keynote

Read Christine Vachon And Pamela Koffler‘s Sundance Fest Producers Lunch Keynote

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Ellen Page: “Being out became more important than any movie”

Ellen Page: “Being out became more important than any movie”

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Marshall Brickman Looks Back To His Early Days In Comedy, Then Working With Woody Allen

Marshall Brickman Looks Back To His Early Days In Comedy, Then Working With Woody Allen

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A Report From Mark Romanek’s Star-Studded Dr. Strangelove LACMA Live Read

A Report From Mark Romanek’s Star-Studded Dr. Strangelove LACMA Live Read

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Spike Lee On His Latest Michael Jackson Doc

“Game respects game!” Spike Lee On His Latest Michael Jackson Doc

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Spike Lee On Those Who “Want To Rewind The Clock”

Spike Lee On Those Who “Want To Rewind The Clock”

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The Weekend Report

Po was on the go as Kung Fu Panda 3 led session moviegoing with an estimated $40.6 million debut. Three other national openers struggled to get a marketplace hold. The true life heroism of The Finest Hours slotted fourth with $10.2 million while spoofy Fifty Shades of Black entered the scene with $5.9 million. Belated, entangled western Jane Got a Gun barely registered with $790,000.

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HBO, Magnolia In Pink With Sundance Doc Tickled

[PR]  HBO has acquired the U.S. television rights to the shocking Sundance documentary, TICKLED, while MAGNOLIA has picked up North American theatrical rights, and world rights outside of North America excluding Australia and New Zealand.  Co- directed by David Farrier & Dylan Reeve and produced by Carthew Neal, TICKLED is about a journalist who stumbles upon a “competitive endurance tickling” competition….

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Sundance Grand-Juries Birth Of A Nation

Sundance Grand-Juries Birth Of A Nation, Wiener; The Daniels For Directing Swiss Army Man; Birth Also Takes Audience Nod

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The Complete 22nd Annual SAG Awards List

Outstanding Film and Television Performances Honored at the 22nd Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards® LOS ANGELES (Jan. 30, 2016) —The Screen Actors Guild Awards® presented its coveted Actor® statuettes for the outstanding motion picture and primetime television performances of 2015 at the 22nd Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards® held Saturday, Jan. 30 at the Los…

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2016 SAG Awards

Ensemble: Spotlight; Larson, DiCaprio; Supporting: Vikander, Elba; Stunts: Mad Max: Fury Road The Complete 2016 SAG Film Awards List

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Sundance Awards 2016

Sundance Institute tonight announced the prizes in feature filmmaking at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, with top awards going to Between Sea and Land, The Birth of a Nation, First Girl I Loved, Jim: The James Foley Story, Sand Storm, Sonita and Weiner. The Birth of a Nation and Sonita won both the Grand Jury…

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Manohla Dargis Reports From Sundance

“No matter how much the industry and its media minions seem determined to turn Sundance into a snowy exurb of Hollywood, the festival continues to push against the mainstream tide through some of its selections.” Manohla Dargis Reports From Sundance

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Google Shifts Over $40 Billion In Profits From Non-U.S. Sales To Tax-Free Bermuda; Rejects UK Call To Sanction Shelter Nation

Google Shifts Over $40 Billion In Profits From Non-U.S. Sales To Tax-Free Bermuda; Rejects UK Call To Sanction Shelter Nation

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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