Movie City News Archive for November, 2016

The DVD Wrapup: BFG, Pete’s Dragon, Baked in Brooklyn, Weng Weng, T.A.M.I./T.N.T. and more

With great numbers already recorded for Disney’s Moana, it’s difficult to look back at the last two years and imagine studio executives not being completely thrilled about what they’ve accomplished. Several releases have exceeded or threatened to hit the billion-dollar barrier and critical response has generally been friendly, even for those titles with lower financial expectations.

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Former NBC Chairman Grant Tinker Was 90

Former NBC Chairman Grant Tinker Was 90; Co-Founder Of MTM Enterprises Warren Littlefield Remembers His Colleague

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“I am deeply saddened to learn that my former husband and professional mentor Grant Tinker has passed away. I’m forever grateful for and proud of what we achieved together with the creation of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and founding of MTM Enterprises. Grant was a brilliant, driven executive who uniquely understood that the secret to great TV content was freedom for its creators and performing artists. This was manifest in his ‘first be best and then be first’ approach.”

“I am deeply saddened to learn that my former husband and professional mentor Grant Tinker has passed away. I’m forever grateful for and proud of what we achieved together with the creation of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and founding of MTM Enterprises. Grant was a brilliant, driven executive who uniquely understood that the secret…

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Scorsese Meets Pope

Scorsese Meets Pope Scorsese Shows Silence To 400 Jesuits In Rome Did Silence Shooting Conditions Outdo The Revenant?

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Cooper And Groth On How Sundance Selections May Seem More Political After The Presidential Election Results

Cooper And Groth On How Sundance Selections May Seem More Political After The Presidential Election Results

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Melena Ryzik Ponders Whether Television Can Be Fair To Muslims

Melena Ryzik Ponders Whether Television Can Be Fair To Muslims

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DP Natasha Braier On Being A “Flare Hunter” For Nicolas Winding Refn

DP Natasha Braier On Being A “Flare Hunter” For Nicolas Winding Refn

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Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer As “Humanist”

Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer As “Humanist” images nsfw

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Michael Almereyda On The Misfits Of Badlands

Michael Almereyda On The Misfits Of Badlands

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Gilroy Gets Substantial Payday For Rogue One Reshoots

Gilroy Gets Substantial Payday For Rogue One Reshoots 

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Hulu On Hopes For Offline Viewing

Hulu On Hopes For Offline Viewing

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Excerpting Adam Nayman’s “Confusion and Carnage: The Films of Ben Wheatley”

Excerpting Adam Nayman‘s “Confusion and Carnage: The Films of Ben Wheatley”

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Writes Lindy West

“Diverse personal narrative has never been more important than it is in proto-Trump America – in a country where so many are willing to throw away the rights of the “other” for the illusion of safety, storytelling is our most straightforward empathy generator, a humanization machine. Millions of Americans are casually falling in love with…

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Cahiers du Cinema Top 10 Leads With Toni Erdmann, Elle, Neon Demon, Aquarius

Cahiers du Cinema Top 10 Leads With Toni Erdmann, Elle, Neon Demon, Aquarius

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Sundance 2017 Competition And NEXT Announced

Sundance Institute convenes a full slate of provocative and agenda-setting independent films at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, beginning with today’s announcement of the 66 films selected for U.S. Competition, World Competition and NEXT, as well as a slate of environmentally focused programming under the Festival’s New Climate program. The Festival hosts screenings in Park…

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Sundance 2017 Announces 66 Features In Competition And NEXT

Filmmakers Include Eliza Hittman, Alex Ross Perry, Brett Haley, Gillian Robespierre, Marti Noxon, Adam Bhala Lough, Brian Knappenberger, Yance Ford, Marina Zenovich, Cate Shortland, David Lowery, Dustin Guy Defa, koganada Sundance 2017 Announces 66 Features In Competition And NEXT

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Links To FYC Screenplays Up To 29, With Little Men

Links To FYC Screenplays Up To 29, With Little Men

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Owen Gleiberman Canvasses For Rogue One As An “Awards Movie”

“I used to argue, pretty vociferously, that critics’ groups should wait before voting until they’ve had the chance to see every last movie. But that ship, I’m afraid, has sailed.” Owen Gleiberman Canvasses For Rogue One As An “Awards Movie”

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Iggy Pop Talks Danger

“My father, very late in life, said to me, ‘You know, there is humor in what you do.’” Iggy Pop Talks Danger

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Glenn Kenny On Bresson In Print

Glenn Kenny On Bresson In Print

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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