Movie City News Archive for March, 2017

Morgan Freeman Says Make Hay While The Sun Shines

Morgan Freeman Says Make Hay While The Sun Shines

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Fate Of The Furious Gets Competition In Russia From Nationalist Space Epic Produced By Timur Bekmambetov

Fate Of The Furious Gets Competition In Russia From Nationalist Space Epic Produced By Timur Bekmambetov

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Richard Kelly Muses Beyond Donnie Darko

“It’s remarkable to think how our political process has just deteriorated into this grotesque reality television spectacle. I feel a responsibility to really create as much resistance art as possible, given our current political reality, and to not be afraid of making some political statement with my art. It’s always been a part of my…

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Broadband Providers Verizon, Comcast Claim They Won’t Sell Individual Browsing History Even Though GOP Passed Law To Let Them

Broadband Providers Verizon, Comcast Claim They Won’t Sell Individual Browsing History Even Though GOP Passed Law To Let Them

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WETA Workshoppers On Making Ghost In The Shell’s Robotic Psycho Geisha Girls

“We experimented a lot with facial features where we might try an Asian eye with an African arm. It was really difficult to get all that stuff working in harmony in a concise character that doesn’t just look like some hodgepodge that’s been thrown together.” WETA Workshoppers On Making Ghost In The Shell‘s Robotic Psycho…

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The Most Surprising Performer In Ghost In The Shell, Kaori Momoi, Is Also A Director

The Most Surprising Performer In Ghost In The Shell, Kaori Momoi, Is Also A Director

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Some Approaches To Writing About Acting, Prompted By The Death of Louis XIV

Some Approaches To Writing About Acting, Prompted By The Death of Louis XIV

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“‘I would rather you take notes than record me,’ he said, and his smile started to fade. ‘Okay, no problem,’ I replied, then slipped my recording device into my pocket without stopping it. This one needed to go on the record. Some part of Léaud had to understand that.”

“‘I would rather you take notes than record me,’ he said, and his smile started to fade. ‘Okay, no problem,’ I replied, then slipped my recording device into my pocket without stopping it. This one needed to go on the record. Some part of Léaud had to understand that.”

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“Empathy” Ceremony In Chicago For Roger Ebert On April 4

“Empathy” Ceremony In Chicago For Roger Ebert On April 4

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Gael García Bernal

“Oh, man. Thank you for this question. As a football supporter, I feel Mexican. But my true self is completely Latin American. Mexico is my cocina, my kitchen. It is where I hang, where I talk to my mother. But Latin America is my home. If you travel through Latin America, you see we are…

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Seth Rogen Legal Team Tells Screenwriters To Cease Fraudulent Submissions Under Rogen & Goldberg’s Names

Seth Rogen Legal Team Tells Screenwriters To Cease Fraudulent Submissions Under Rogen & Goldberg’s Names

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Ghost In The Shell Likely Far From Last Manga Transposition To Big Screen

Ghost In The Shell Likely Far From Last Manga Transposition To Big Screen

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U. S. Music Sales Up 11% In 2016; 51% Is Streaming; First Time Since 1986 That Fewer Than 100 Million CDs Shifted

U. S. Music Sales Up 11% In 2016; 51% Is Streaming; First Time Since 1986 That Fewer Than 100 Million CDs Shifted

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“ Americans Everywhere Benefit From The NEA And NEH”

“ Americans Everywhere Benefit From The NEA And NEH”

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Walter Hill On Genre

“I see movies all the time where I question why the hell they even made them, because the animus is so clearly nonfilmic. I don’t mean that you need to have thundering herds or raging gunfights as opposed to ideas, but I think certain things are more filmic than others. Genre filmmaking does supply a…

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Christopher Nolan, Tom Rothman And Sofia Coppola At CinemaCon

“The only platform I’m interested in talking about is theatrical exhibition.” “Netflix, my ass.” “I hope people see it in the theatre, where it was meant to be seen.” Christopher Nolan, Tom Rothman And Sofia Coppola At CinemaCon

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Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin Sends Apology For Promoting His Production, Lego Batman

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin Sends Apology For Promoting His Production, Lego Batman

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Buffeted China Conglom LeEco Raises $2.2 Billion In Funding, Buys Up A Smaller Film ProdCo

Buffeted China Conglom LeEco Raises $2.2 Billion In Funding, Buys Up A Smaller Film ProdCo

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Amazon Studios Still Supports Theatrical Window

“I think we proved to you that we really believe in the theatrical experience by fully supporting the theatrical window for our releases.” Amazon Studios On Supporting Theatrical Window

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T2 Trainspotting’s Irvine Welsh In The Modern World

“These days, there’s also a continuing crisis in masculinity that’s tied up with deindustrialization and the rise of feminism and cultural equality.” T2 Trainspotting‘s Irvine Welsh In The Modern World

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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