Movie City News Archive for June, 2017

Sofia Coppola Narrates A Scene From The Beguiled And – Choreographing Chase Scenes In Baby Driver

Sofia Coppola Narrates A Scene From The Beguiled And – Choreographing Chase Scenes In Baby Driver

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Jonnie Rosenbaum On “Paranoia Rising,” The Origins And Legacy Of The Conspiracy Thriller

Jonnie Rosenbaum On “Paranoia Rising,” The Origins And Legacy Of The Conspiracy Thriller

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Jason Bailey Chats Up The “Delightful” Errol Morris

“It happened really quickly and we started editing immediately, and it started growing in length – every time we shot, we would add more, and then more, and then it was close to 80 minutes in length and we thought, This is a film. We’ll stop now.” Jason Bailey Chats Up The “Delightful” Errol Morris

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Zoe Kazan As Screen Presence And Public Intellectual

Zoe Kazan As Screen Presence And Public Intellectual

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San Francisco Film Fest Moves Annual Gala To Awards Season

San Francisco Film Fest Moves Annual Gala To Awards Season

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“At times, Bong’s gaze feels pitiless. He is as quick to skewer activists as he is toadying company men and morally abstract upper management. His depictions of meat processing spare no one. Okja may well hold a message for film studios too: despite their displeasure, the ovation the film received at Cannes lasted several minutes.”

“At times, Bong’s gaze feels pitiless. He is as quick to skewer activists as he is toadying company men and morally abstract upper management. His depictions of meat processing spare no one. Okja may well hold a message for film studios too: despite their displeasure, the ovation the film received at Cannes lasted several minutes.”

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What Went Wrong With The MTV News Experiment?

“A high-visibility legacy brand bankrolled by Viacom would publish quality work across various platforms at a time when the industry seemed to be moving towards inane, disposable video content.” What Went Wrong With The MTV News Experiment?

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Murdoch Sky Takeover Bid Referred To British Competition Authorities

Murdoch Sky Takeover Bid Referred To British Competition Authorities

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Producer-Executive E. O. “Doc” Erickson Was 93; Worked On Rear Window, Vertigo, Chintown, Blade Runner, Groundhog Day, The Misfits, Popeye

Producer-Executive E. O. “Doc” Erickson, 93, Worked On Rear Window, Vertigo, Chinatown, Blade Runner, Groundhog Day, The Misfits, Popeye  

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“The New York Times now has more than 2 million digital subscribers, and this new revenue source—$223 million last year—helped turn the company’s fortunes around after it had to be rescued in 2009 by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. While Slim still owns 17% of one class of stock, the company is controlled by another class, owned by the heirs of Adolph Ochs, who bought the paper in 1896.”

“The New  York Times now has more than 2 million digital subscribers, and this new revenue source—$223 million last year—helped turn the company’s fortunes around after it had to be rescued in 2009 by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. While Slim still owns 17% of one class of stock, the company is controlled by another class, owned…

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Kim Morgan On Videodrome

Kim Morgan Gets Into Videodrome

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Hannibal Buress Pays Impostor To Attend Spider-Man Premiere

Hannibal Buress Pays Impostor To Attend Spider-Man Premiere

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Self-Portraiture By Audrey Tautou

Self-Portraiture By Audrey Tautou

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Academy Elects New Board Of Governors

Academy Adds New Governors, Including Whoopi Goldberg, Mandy Walker, Kimberly Peirce,  David Linde, Larry Karaszewski

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Jim Jarmusch On Showing Godard’s Contempt Outdoors In Brooklyn

Jim Jarmusch On Showing Godard’s Contempt Outdoors In Brooklyn

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Edgar Wright, Once More, On Soundtracking Baby Driver

Edgar Wright, Once More, On Soundtracking Baby Driver

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Cinematographer Lyle Vincent On Shooting Bad Batch In Desert Wilds

Cinematographer Lyle Vincent On Shooting Bad Batch In Desert Wilds

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MSNBC Fires Fox News Hire Greta Susteren

MSNBC Fires Fox News Hire Greta Susteren

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Lana Wachowski Announces Finale Episode Of “Sense8”

Lana Wachowski Announces Finale Episode Of “Sense8”

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Trump Intends To Add GOP Lawyer To FCC Vacancy

Trump Intends To Add GOP Lawyer To FCC Vacancy

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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