Movie City News Archive for January, 2018

Harvey Weinstein Lawyers Say He’s Not A Human Trafficker

Harvey Weinstein Lawyers Say He’s Not A Human Trafficker

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SXSW Announces 2018 Features

SXSW Announces 2018 Features

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Ray Pride On Dave Kehr’s “Movies That Mattered”

“Clarity is the abiding virtue.” Ray Pride On Dave Kehr’s “Movies That Mattered”

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“An ode to the audio jack as an engineering marvel”

“An ode to the audio jack as an engineering marvel”

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“Is it the long-term enmity showing itself again? He’s not a kid. He’s a gray eminence by now,” said Lester D. Friedman, emeritus professor of cinema at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the author of “Citizen Spielberg,” which examines the filmmaker’s career. “I just think it hit the wrong note in the wrong historical period.”

“Is it the long-term enmity showing itself again? He’s not a kid. He’s a gray eminence by now,” said Lester D. Friedman, emeritus professor of cinema at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the author of “Citizen Spielberg,” which examines the filmmaker’s career. “I just think it hit the wrong note in the wrong historical…

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Bruce Handy’s Eulogy for New York City’s Lincoln Plaza Cinemas

Bruce Handy‘s Eulogy for New York City’s Lincoln Plaza Cinemas

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A. O. Scott On The Case Of Woody Allen

“A sensibility that seemed sweet, skeptical and self-scrutinizing may have been cruel, cynical and self-justifying all along.” A. O. Scott On The Case Of Woody Allen And – Times Creates Allen-Farrow-Farrow Timeline

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Edinburgh Fringe Festival Among Arts Defunded By Gov’t

Edinburgh Fringe Festival Among Arts Defunded By Gov’t

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Harvey Weinstein Says Stuff About Rose McGowan And Published It Is

“As a general matter, Harvey Weinstein and his attorneys have refrained from publicly criticizing any of the women who have made allegations of sexual assault against Mr. Weinstein…” From His Sanctuary, Harvey Weinstein Via Spokeslawyer

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“An Afternoon with Jerry Lewis: Jerry Lewis interviewed by members of the Documentary Film Group of the University of Chicago, January 26, 1971”

“An Afternoon with Jerry Lewis:  Jerry Lewis interviewed by members of the Documentary Film Group of the University of Chicago, January 26, 1971”

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Wim Wenders, Photographer vid

Wim Wenders, Photographer vid

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Falling Lottery Proceeds Lead To Slashes In British Arts Funding

Falling Lottery Proceeds Lead To Slashes In British Arts Funding

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The iPad Lost Years for Apple’s Media Partners The iPhone maker took newspaper and magazine companies on a detour to a boondoggle.

“The iPad Lost Years for Apple’s Media Partners: How The iPhone Maker Took Newspaper and Magazine Companies on a Detour to a Boondoggle”

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Eric Shorter, 88, Telegraph Critic and Obituarist

Eric Shorter, 88, Telegraph Critic and Obituarist

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Guardian Explainer Of The Day: Roman Polanski

Guardian Explainer Of The Day: Roman Polanski

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DOJ Close to Okaying Sinclair-Tribune Media Merger

DOJ Close to Okaying Sinclair-Tribune Media Merger

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Previewing Rose McGowan’s “Brave”

“I felt so dirty. I had been so violated and I was sad to the core of my being. I kept thinking about how he’d been sitting behind me in the theater the night before it happened. Which made it – not my responsibility, exactly, but – like I had had a hand in tempting…

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WV’s Charleston Gazette-Mail, Pulitzer Winner for Pioneering Portrait of Opioid Crisis, Declares Bankruptcy

WV’s Charleston Gazette-Mail, Pulitzer Winner for Pioneering Portrait of Small-Town Opioid Crisis, Declares Bankruptcy “Follow the pills and you’ll find the overdose deaths. The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone…

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Sundance Director of Programmer Trevor Groth Joins 30WEST

[pr] 30WEST HIRES SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL PROGRAMMING CHIEF TREVOR GROTH LOS ANGELES (January 29, 2018) – 30WEST has hired the Director of Programming of the Sundance Film Festival, Trevor Groth, who will join the company in February. Groth first joined the programming staff of the Sundance Film Festival in 1993, was named Senior Programmer in 2003 and Director in…

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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