Movie City News Archive for January, 2017

Michael Phillips Talks About His Relationship With Ebert

Michael Phillips Talks About His Relationship With Ebert

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Toronto Repertory Cinemas Get Feisty

“One of our friends said that going to the Royal back then felt like doing homework. It wasn’t fun. We wanted to reinvigorate it.” Toronto Repertory Cinemas Get Feisty

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Kris Tapley On Lionsgate’s Diverse Approaches Promotion Each Of Their Oscar Nominated Movies

Kris Tapley On Lionsgate’s Diverse Approaches Promotion Each Of Their Oscar Nominated Movies

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Fox Broadcasting Pioneer, Tinder Mogul Billionaire Barry Diller Takes Some Time Out To Trash Modern Media

“I really do think that right now, certainly advertisers and anyone who is involved in any part of the media really does have to question the results of the kind of decades, decades-long sleazy reality TV, radio talk show that goes so over the top, etcetera. I think it is worth thinking about that stuff…

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In Brooklyn, The New Inquiry Will Serve Punch While Screening Clips From Movies With Nazis Getting Punched In The Face

In Brooklyn, The New Inquiry Will Serve Punch While Screening Clips From Movies With Nazis Getting Punched In The Face

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Lola Landekic Credits Trainspotting At Art Of The Title

Lola Landekic Credits Trainspotting At Art Of The Title

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Drew Barrymore Remains Dishy

“I’m a dirty hippie. I love patchouli; I just love it straight. Give me Venice Beach, 1982. I love cedar wood, too. I love woody accords — sandalwood, Nag Champa.” Drew Barrymore Remains Dishy About Beauty

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Lunching With Orson Welles Taking A Big Bite Of Casablanca

Lunching With Orson Welles Taking A Big Bite Of Casablanca

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Filmmaker Anna Broinowski On Being An Extra In A North Korean Propaganda Film

“You bowl, then turn with great joy to your husband, and say: ‘Strike!’” Filmmaker Anna Broinowski On Being An Extra In A North Korean Propaganda Film

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Oscar-Winning Sound Engineer Richard Portman Was 82

Oscar-Winning Sound Engineer Richard Portman Was 82; Won For Deer Hunter; Worked On Star Wars, Nashville, The Godfather, Harold And Maude, Young Frankenstein, The Candidate, California Split, 3 Women, Carnal Knowledge, Body Heat; Also Taught Barry Jenkins

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SXSW Announces Its First 125 Features For 2017

SXSW Announces Its First 125 Features For 2017

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“There’s nothing wrong with seeing Donald Trump in every piece of art you come across (although it’s surely unpleasant), and I understand it may seem silly to suggest critics shouldn’t be telling people what movies to see. Isn’t that their job? But there’s a difference between recommending a film and prescribing it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with seeing Donald Trump in every piece of art you come across (although it’s surely unpleasant), and I understand it may seem silly to suggest critics shouldn’t be telling people what movies to see. Isn’t that their job? But there’s a difference between recommending a film and prescribing it.”

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London Mayor Sadiq Khan Welcomes Filmmakers And Filmmaking Rejected By Trump

London Mayor Sadiq Khan Welcomes Filmmakers And Filmmaking Rejected By Trump

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“The Jerry Maguire Video Store” Stocks Only Jerry Maguire, 14,000 Copies Of Jerry Maguire, Only On VHS

“The Jerry Maguire Video Store” Stocks Only Jerry Maguire, 14,000 Copies Of Jerry Maguire, Only On VHS

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Jonathan Rosenbaum Reprints A 2009 Piece On Sátántangó That Béla Tarr Asked Him To Write For A Hungarian Newspaper On Its 15th Anniversary

Jonathan Rosenbaum Reprints A 2009 Piece On  Sátántangó That Béla Tarr Asked Him To Write For A Hungarian Newspaper On Its 15th Anniversary

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“Netflix is competing not so much with the established Hollywood infrastructure as with its real nemeses: Facebook, Apple, Google and others. There was a time not long ago when tech companies appeared to stay in their lanes, so to speak: Apple made computers; Google engineered search; Microsoft focused on office software. It was all genial enough that the CEO of one tech giant could sit on the board of another. These days, however, the major tech companies are competing viciously for the same thing: your attention.”

“Netflix is competing not so much with the established Hollywood infrastructure as with its real nemeses: Facebook, Apple, Google and others. There was a time not long ago when tech companies appeared to stay in their lanes, so to speak: Apple made computers; Google engineered search; Microsoft focused on office software. It was all genial…

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Canada’s Last Record Store Chain Will Liquidate

Canada’s Last Record Store Chain Will Liquidate

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Stephen Galloway Deifies Irving Thalberg, Craving A Latter-Day Successor

“Like Thalberg, they knew there was a bottom line; but like him, they were sometimes willing to defy it for the love of the movies.” Stephen Galloway Deifies Irving Thalberg, Craving A Latter-Day Successor

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A24 Takes U. S.-China Rights For Yiddish-Language Menashe Out of Sundance

A24 Takes U. S.-China Rights For Yiddish-Language Menashe Out of Sundance

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Latest Tommy O’Haver And Joe Swanberg Joints Direct To Netflix After SXSW Bow

Netflix original films Win It All, from filmmaker Joe Swanberg and starring Jake Johnson, Aislinn Derbez and Keegan-Michael Key, and The Most Hated Woman in America featuring Academy Award® winner Melissa Leo, Adam Scott and Juno Temple, will make their world premieres at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival in March before launching on Netflix. A true-crime biopic about the disappearance of Madalyn Murray O’Hair,…

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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