Movie City News Archive for December, 2017

Rue Saint-Denis’ Le Beverley, Paris’ Last Porn Boîte, Set To Close

Rue Saint-Denis’ Le Beverley, Paris’ Last Porn Boîte, Set To Close

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“China’s film industry received a boost in 2017 after a string of unexpected blockbusters lifted the mainland’s total box office takings 22% year-on-year, up from 2.4% growth in 2016. The buoyant box office takings offered a fillip for a domestic film industry that had until recently been written off as over-funded and under-talented, producing big budget flops that were overshadowed by Hollywood blockbusters.”

“China’s film industry received a boost in 2017 after a string of unexpected blockbusters lifted the mainland’s total box office takings 22% year-on-year, up from 2.4% growth in 2016. The buoyant box office takings offered a fillip for a domestic film industry that had until recently been written off as over-funded and under-talented, producing big…

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Caleb Landry Jones On The Fear Of Frances McDormand

Caleb Landry Jones On The Fear Of Frances McDormand

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Across The Hall With Ava DuVernay And Ryan Coogler

Across The Hall With Ava DuVernay And Ryan Coogler

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Tracy Letts

“I’m in an enviable position as an actor, because I’m a playwright. Some of the roles I would’ve jumped at as a younger man because I was broke, trying to make a living — I don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t have to be a guy in a suit in Geostorm.” Tracy Letts

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Hungarian Theater After the Right-Wing Gov’t Crackdown

Hungarian Theater After the Right-Wing Gov’t Crackdown

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While The U. S. No Longer Allows Copyrighted Work To Pass Into Public Domain, The E.U. And Canada Tomorrow Get “Catch-22,” “Stranger in a Strange Land,””The Soft Machine,” “The Phantom Tollbooth,””Franny & Zooey,””Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” West Side Story, And Works By René Magritte, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker And Others

While The U. S. No Longer Allows Copyrighted Work To Pass Into Public Domain, The E.U. And Canada Tomorrow Get “Catch-22,” “Stranger in a Strange Land,””The Soft Machine,” “The Phantom Tollbooth,””Franny & Zooey,””Breakfast at Tiffany’s” And Works By René Magritte, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker And Others

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“On the Friday afternoon before Christmas, Talbot even dropped by Lincoln Plaza to catch a movie. ‘He watched the Haneke film. And he asked how business was.'”

“On the Friday afternoon before Christmas, Talbot even dropped by Lincoln Plaza to catch a movie. ‘He watched the Haneke film. And he asked how business was.’”

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The Weekend Report

The final weekend of 2017 was a horse race between Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle with the former grossing an estimated $52.7 million and the latter close behind with $50.9 million. There were no new national releases but All the Money in the World and Molly’s Game had their first full weekends, with the poker opus surprisingly strong in its limited wide exposure.

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San Francisco’s Once-Endangered Roxie, The Oldest Continuously-Operating Movie Theater in the United States, Now Thrives

San Francisco’s Once-Endangered Roxie, Oldest Continuously-Operating Movie Theater in the U. S., Now Thrives

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Ryan Gilbey Career-Profiles Gary Oldman For The Observer

Ryan Gilbey Career-Profiles Gary Oldman For The Observer

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“Black Mirror”‘s Charlie Brooker

“I thought I was totally fucked. I was basically stoned the whole time in the 1990s. I would just lie on the sofa, watching TV. [Later], it became harder for me to maintain the persona of an average viewer saying, fuck everyone on TV, this is all shit. You’d meet people, and think, ‘Oh, they’re just…

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Owen Gleiberman Engages Bret Easton Ellis To Help Multiply Misunderstand The Post

“The Post proves that even a director who’s as much of a technological virtuoso as Spielberg can’t necessarily get the wigs and the cigarette smoke right.” … “Obviously, I’m not implying I have the answer; no one does. But the point is that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.” Owen Gleiberman Engages Bret Easton Ellis To…

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Jo Ellison Has A Fit On “Consensus”

“It matters not at all what I think, because the consensus view has already been decided: that the film is an unmissable tour de force. And when the consensus view is decreed, we must all agree. Dinner parties must be hushed with awed appreciation; Twitter must become a tide of praise and hashtags and commendation;…

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India Censors Clear Padmavati On Five Conditions, Including Changing Title to “Padmavat” And Rewriting A Song’s Lyrics

India Censors Clear Padmavati On Five Conditions, Including Changing Title to “Padmavat” And Rewriting A Song’s Lyrics

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“The irony in Ingmar Bergman, the humour in him is absolutely lost on Swedes. Even at his apparently most brooding and depressing, there is almost always a streak of black comedy in there which I think the British recognise and the Swedes don’t.”

“The irony in Ingmar Bergman, the humour in him is absolutely lost on Swedes. Even at his apparently most brooding and depressing, there is almost always a streak of black comedy in there which I think the British recognise and the Swedes don’t.”

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Makers Offer Rationale For Including R. Kelly Song In Pitch Perfect 3; Blurry On Whether The Long-Accused Performer Will Profit Financially

“That’s a tough one. I’m glad we’re having this discussion about what’s happening in the world right now. Nobody gets a free pass on that. At the same time, it was a song, and I feel like in the moment, the Bellas would have come up with it — based on how a riff-off works,…

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Alex Jones Critiques Last Of The Jedi

“They want atomized, broken up, sharecropper-slaves that owe that soul to the modern company store. It’s feudalism — modern, high-tech feudalism and they admit that.” Alex Jones Critiques Last Of The Jedi

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Road Rage Puts Alleged Goodfellas Mobster Vincent Asaro Behind Bars At Last, At The Age of 82

Road Rage Puts Alleged Goodfellas Mobster Vincent Asaro Behind Bars At Last, At The Age of 82

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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