Movie City News Archive for July, 2017

Ray Pride Condenses Dunkirk

By MCN Editor - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“Elegance of nightmare, essence of terror. We are catapulted to war, in three interleaving but sometimes indistinct timeframes: a week, a day, an hour. Time collapses. There is the presence of fright, the adrenalized now. The soldiers and volunteers in “Dunkirk” fear the unseen, the unspoken. Fear without a face. No politicos, no Jerrys.” Ray…

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Lindsey Bahr Lavishes

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“Tortured, private and transient in both life and career, Shepard was in some ways the quintessential American: Full of restlessness, contradictions, and mysteries — and as handsome as they come.” Lindsey Bahr Lavishes

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Jessica Lange

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“I wouldn’t call Sammy easygoing and funny, but everybody has their dark side, and he always does it with a sense of humor.” Jessica Lange

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Isaac Butler’s Sam Shepard Swoon From Childhood Forward

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“Shepard’s plays mix impulse, a blasted Americana speaking through archetypes like cowboys and noir detectives, a love of the broken places in people, and a willingness to explore and dramatize the unconscious.” Isaac Butler‘s Sam Shepard Swoon From Childhood Forward

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Sam Shepard’s Email Contact Page Is Pretty Much Sam Shepard

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

Sam Shepard’s Email Contact Page Is Pretty Much Sam Shepard

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PBS Chief Expects To Lose Affiliates Under Trump Cuts

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“PBS itself will not go away, but a number of our stations will.” PBS Chief Expects To Lose Affiliates, Especially Rural Ones, Under Trump Cuts

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Jim Windolf On The Style Of Sam Shepard

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

Jim Windolf On The Style Of Sam Shepard

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Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017
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Sam Shepard, “The Art of Theater No. 12”

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius. Somebody told me once that fugue means to flee, so that Bach’s melody lines are like he’s running…

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Richard Brody On Jeanne Moreau

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

Richard Brody On Jeanne Moreau

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Peter Cowie On Jeanne Moreau

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“But once we began sharing stories about Orson Welles, she relaxed, reached for one of her slender, extra-long cigarettes that stood in a bowl on her coffee table, and reminisced about the films she had made and the men she had known and loved.” Peter Cowie On Jeanne Moreau

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Jeanne Moreau

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017
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“Her death was confirmed by the office of President Emmanuel Macron.”

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“Her death was confirmed by the office of President Emmanuel Macron.”

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From 2010, John Lahr On “Sam Shepard And The Struggles Of American Manhood”

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“I just dropped out of nowhere. It was absolute luck that I happened to be there when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting.” From 2010, John Lahr On “Sam Shepard And The Struggles Of American Manhood”

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After Rotten Summer Box Office, China Roadblocking For Two Nationalist Epics

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

After Rotten Summer Box Office, China Roadblocking For Two Nationalist Epics

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Publishers Editing Commercials Into “New” Videos To Shovel As “Content” Onto Facebook

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“Our audience on Facebook loves this content. It’s what works in the news feed where people scroll quickly with the sound off.” Publishers Editing Commercials Into “New” Videos To Shovel As “Content” Onto Facebook

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Traverse City Film Fest At 13 Has Over 120,000 Admissions

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

The 2017 Traverse City Film Festival(TCFF), founded by Michael Moore in 2005, offered 229 screenings of 115 feature films and 66 shorts in its 13th year. The annual celebration of film welcomed over 120,000 admissions across 12 different venues, including 12 film school classes, six free filmmaker panels, seven parties, two live podcasts, and a gaming…

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Michiko Kakutani’s 1984 Interview With Sam Shepard

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

”Personality is everything that is false in a human being. It’s everything that’s been added on to him and contrived. It seems to me that the struggle all the time is between this sense of falseness and the other haunting sense of what’s true – an essential thing that we’re born with and tend to…

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Ginette Vincendeau On Jeanne Moreau

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

“Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud is recognised as a precursor of the French New Wave, partly for its groundbreaking location shooting, but just as important is its moulding of the Moreau character as a new type of sensual heroine, a modern femme fatale without the clichéd trappings of the traditional vamp.” Ginette Vincendeau On Jeanne Moreau

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WETA Begins Digital Effects For Four Avatar Sequels

By Ray Pride - Monday, July 31st, 2017

WETA Begins Digital Effects For Four Avatar Sequels

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“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