Movie City News Archive for September, 2017

Monty Hall, 96, Host of “Let’s Make a Deal”

Monty Hall, 96, Host of “Let’s Make a Deal”

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Friday Estimates

American Made is a fine measure of where Tom Cruise is right now. He can still open movies, even though people love to talk about no one being able to open movies. But he can only do so much on his own. The weekend probably ends up around $17 million, which, given how soft the sell on the film was, shouldn’t disappoint. It will be headlined as though it is. Flatliners is a head-scratcher. The cast is good… but nostalgia for that movie has a lot to do with the stars of the original who were all on the cusp of exploding. Magnolia finds a nice audience for Harry Dean Stanton in Lucky on one screen while Searchlight can’t get the ball over the net with any velocity with Battle of the Sexes now that warm-ups are over.

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Ty Burr On The Texas Terrors Of Austin Film Scene, But Also About The Best Female Writers On Film Online

Ty Burr On The Texas Terrors Of Austin Film Scene, But Also About The Best Female Writers On Film Online

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WSJ Abruptly Ends European, Asian Print Editions As NewsCorp Burns Through $643 Million In Past Fiscal Year

WSJ Abruptly Ends European, Asian Print Editions As NewsCorp Burns Through $643 Million In Past Fiscal Year

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Failed Screenwriter Steve Bannon Potshots The Industry That Wouldn’t Have Him

“You’ve got to understand something: These actors and actresses, they’re all dumb as ticks — and they’re all lazy. Right, they’re like pieces of furniture. They’re all dumb as ticks. By the way, that’s why movie attendance is down, people are tired of it. That’s why they’re not watching the National Football League, cutting the…

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Abbey Bender On When Fashion Designers Become Filmmakers

Abbey Bender On When Fashion Designers Become Filmmakers

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Review-ish, Blade Runner 2049 (no spoilers)

Don’t think about it too much. Try not to read too many reviews or articles about the film. And while you watch… and just after you watch… deep breaths. Let it bloom in your mind and your heart.

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“Everything really is a spoiler. It’s true. Every. Damn. Thing…. Stopped reading? Good. Then you won’t see me declare that Denis Villeneuve is the Stanley Kubrick of our time, and he just made his 2001: A Space Odyssey. Except it’s a 35-years-later studio sequel with a lot of plot, which is awkward and risky to write, I know. I know.”

“Everything really is a spoiler. It’s true. Every. Damn. Thing…. Stopped reading? Good. Then you won’t see me declare that Denis Villeneuve is the Stanley Kubrick of our time, and he just made his 2001: A Space Odyssey. Except it’s a 35-years-later studio sequel with a lot of plot, which is awkward and risky to…

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“We meet the grizzled blade runner of yore, Harrison Ford, who reminds us that these movies were always about the most human of inventions, love, even if manufactured by machines. It’s a unicorn in the fog.”

“We meet the grizzled blade runner of yore, Harrison Ford, who reminds us that these movies were always about the most human of inventions, love, even if manufactured by machines. It’s a unicorn in the fog.”

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“A rugged vulnerability that hints at the anguish that awaited Deckard after the first film’s enigmatic ending.”

“A rugged vulnerability that hints at the anguish that awaited Deckard after the first film’s enigmatic ending.”

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“I mean, when you cast Tom Cruise in your movie, I’m acutely aware he’s Tom Cruise and all the baggage that comes with that. And I love using that. I loved in Edge of Tomorrow making him a total coward and I’m sort of making fun of Mission: Impossible Tom Cruise. Or in American Made, I’m going to make fun of the Maverick, Top Gun Tom Cruise.”

“I mean, when you cast Tom Cruise in your movie, I’m acutely aware he’s Tom Cruise and all the baggage that comes with that. And I love using that. I loved in Edge of Tomorrow making him a total coward and I’m sort of making fun of Mission: Impossible Tom Cruise. Or in American Made, I’m going to make fun…

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George Englund, 91, Editor-Producer-Director-Actor-Husband Of Cloris Leachman

George Englund, 91, Editor-Producer-Director-Actor-Husband Of Cloris Leachman

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The DVD Wrapup: Transformers, Lynch’s Art, Piano Teacher, Ruby, Sarno, Jesús, Devil’s Candy and more

For a movie that cost an estimated $217 million to make and God knows how much more to market, Transformers: The Last Knight shouldn’t have had to rely on the overseas marketplace to save to save its ass.

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Record Bid For Audrey Hepburn’s Working Script Of Breakfast At Tiffany’s Is From… Tiffany’s

Record Bid For Audrey Hepburn’s Working Script Of Breakfast At Tiffany’s Is From… Tiffany’s

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Kent Jones On All Manner Of Things Cinematic

“The cinema is very, very young, but many of the people who write about it treat it as if it were very, very old. When you really stop to think about it, the idea is ridiculous. Poetry and painting developed over a few thousand years, but the cinema zipped its way up to speed because…

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An Eye-Stingingly Good Profile Of The Great New Yorker Writer John McPhee

An Eye-Stingingly Good Profile Of The Great New Yorker Writer John McPhee, By Sam Anderson

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Newcity’s Fifth Annual “Film 50,” By Ray Pride, Covers Chicago’s Thriving Film Community In 20,000 Words (But Fifty-Two Small Bites); Dozens Of Portraits By Joe Mazza

Newcity’s Fifth Annual “Film 50,” By Ray Pride, Covers Chicago’s Thriving Film Community In 20,000 Words (But Fifty-Two Small Bites); Dozens Of Portraits By Joe Mazza

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“Hugh Hefner To Be Buried Next To Marilyn Monroe, Whose Photos Were Used To Launch Playboy Without Her Consent”

“Hugh Hefner To Be Buried Next To Marilyn Monroe, Whose Photos Were Used To Launch Playboy Without Her Consent”

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Choire Sicha On “Pajama Man” And His Influence On Sloppy Man Garb

“In the daytime, Hugh Hefner wore custom-made silk — not satin, satin made him slip off the bedsheets, he said — in a shade he liked to call “gunfighter black.” At night he would transition into rich colors. Of an evening, he would add a bathrobe. For company, he’d put on a smoking jacket. Mr….

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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