Movie City News Archive for February, 2017

Moonlight Brightens 1,500 Screens This Weekend

Moonlight Brightens 1,500 Screens This Weekend

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Random House Buys Memoirs From Both Obamas

Penguin Random House Buys Memoirs From Both Obamas

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Warren Beatty Wants Cheryl Boone Isaacs To Speak Up

Warren Beatty Wants Cheryl Boone Isaacs To Speak Up

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Five Suitors For Time Inc.

Five Suitors For Time Inc.

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Kim Masters Considers Beatty From Journalistic Experience

“Unlikely as it is, I find myself rising to defend Warren Beatty.” Kim Masters Considers Beatty’s Perplex From Journalistic Experience

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Read Eric Vespe’s Unpublished 2013 Two-Hour Interview With Bill Paxton, Cinephile

Read Eric Vespe‘s Unpublished 2013 Two-Hour Interview With Bill Paxton, Cinephile

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Canadian Filmmaker Bruce LaBruce On His Latest Provocation

For independent cinema there’s no limits except the law. So if you explore certain taboos then it’s a question of legality and morality, depending on where your moral compass leads you. I am trying to make films about provocative subjects but get larger budgets for them, but that’s when you start to realize how deeply…

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Why Asghar Farhadi Sent Two Scientists To Accept Oscar

“As I said last night, once you go away from the Earth and look back at the Earth, you see no borders, no lines separating countries. It is one, whole, beautiful unit.” Why Asghar Farhadi Sent Two Iranian Scientists To Accept Oscar And – Jafar Panahi On Farhadi’s Win

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Indian Film Censors Hard At Work

Indian Film Censors Hard At Work

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On Sunday Night’s Oscar Fracas As Vindication Of Marisa Tomei’s Win

“Sunday’s madness offers a sweet measure of vindication for Marisa Tomei: It demonstrated that, in the case of a miscalled name, show officials are ready and willing to rush out and correct it — no matter how much embarrassment or humiliation might ensue.”

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On Jimmy Kimmel’s Casual Racism At Oscar

“The problem is that unfamiliarity is the punchline. Not Kimmel’s unfamiliarity due to ignorance, mind you, but rather the perceived abnormality or exoticism of the names in question, a perspective that is comes from a limited, geo-centric worldview wherein any name that doesn’t fit America’s Amy/Patrick/Jimmy canon is worthy of derision.” On Jimmy Kimmel’s Casual…

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Zoë Kravitz Says H’wd Still Has A Race Problem

Zoë Kravitz Says H’wd Still Has A Race Problem

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Warren Beatty On His Life Before Sunday Night

Warren Beatty On His Life Before Sunday Night

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Pakistanis Astir; Mahershala Ali’s Faith Not Considered Muslim

“Adherents of the Ahmadiyya faith—Ahmadis—cannot practice it without facing legal prosecution or the wrath of a vigilante mob.” Pakistanis Astir; Mahershala Ali’s Faith Not Considered Muslim

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Jimmy Kimmel’s “Gary From Chicago” Found Religion And Fiancée After 20 Years Serving Sentence

Jimmy Kimmel’s “Gary From Chicago” Found Religion And Fiancée After 20 Years Serving Sentence

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The Academy Statement About PwC Best Picture Failure

“We have spent last night and today investigating the circumstances, and will determine what actions are appropriate going forward. We are unwaveringly committed to upholding the integrity of the Oscars and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.” The Academy Statement About PwC Best Picture Failure

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Ouch.

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Four great success lessons from the spectacular Oscars disaster

“Straight talk is a strong way for both managers and employees to handle a crisis. Radical transparency strengthens teams and confers authority on the managers who use it.” “Four Great Success Lessons From The Spectacular Oscars Disaster”

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Mark Evanier On The Year Laurence Olivier Nearly Had A Warren Beatty Moment

Mark Evanier On The Year Laurence Olivier Nearly Had A Warren Beatty Moment

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Jeffrey Fleishman’s Bristling Backstage Oscar Tick-Tock

“He in sleek tux, she resplendent in white gown, they took the stage. The night was nearly done, a touch of class for the final prize. No one saw or anticipated the iceberg.” Jeffrey Fleishman‘s Bristling Backstage Oscar Tick-Tock

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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