Movie City News Archive for May, 2018

Michael Moore Announces He’s Still Relevant

“I know Roseanne. And I know Trump. And they are about to rue the day they knew me…” Via Twitter, Michael Moore Announces He’s Still Relevant

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Japan PM Snubs Kore-eda

Japan PM Snubs Kore-eda

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Peter Howell In Praise of Caddyshack, the “Glorious Disaster that Endured”

Peter Howell In Praise of Caddyshack, the “Glorious Disaster that Endured”

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Slender Man Producers Gamble Sony Pictures Exit

Slender Man Producers Gamble Sony Pictures Exit

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Rachel Kushner On Sharing Sidney J. Furie’s The Leather Boys With Her Parents

Rachel Kushner On Sharing Sidney J. Furie’s The Leather Boys With Her Parents

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Solo Costume Designers Glynn Dillon and Dave Crossman On Dressing Lando And Han

“Our main influence was more Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, and James Brown. The main concentration was getting Donald looking good in the black cape and the yellow shirt, because the story demanded that was gonna be his main costume throughout.  The whole Lando’s closet thing grew. In the end we made around 30 capes for that…

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Ed Solomon On Building Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (And A Career) From A Succession Of Failures

Ed Solomon On Building Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (And A Career) From A Succession Of Failures

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When Donald Pardoned Dinesh

“Nobody asked me to do it. I read the papers – I see him on television.” When Donald Pardoned Dinesh

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The Ankler Is Skeptical On I. P. Drive

“The whole point of Bob Iger’s great leap forward was supposed to be that once you had these mega-brands they would sell themselves. Apparently not! Marvel’s incredible winning streak remains the exception. The Rule, which has not been repealed, remains defined by DC, Universal Monsters, etc.: A run continues as long as you keep making great…

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The DVD Wrapup: Annihilation, Kaurismäki, Borzage, Sweet Sweetback, Two of Us, Cold Turkey, Weinstein, Jackass and more

Alex Garland is a terrific writer-director who challenges the imagination and rewards viewers, for whom patience a virtue. Garland received sole screenwriter credit on 28 Days Later … (2002), Sunshine (2007), Never Let Me Go (2010) and Dredd (2012), while sharing the writing credit with Tameem Antoniades on the video games and “DmC: Devil May Cry” and “Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.” He also wrote the novels from which The Beach (2000) and The Tesseract (2003), were adapted. None of them enjoyed an easy stroll to the big screen. Those difficulties were a walk in the park compared to the difficulties the London-born author and filmmaker faced getting Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation into theaters. Together, they represent two of the finest examples of Earth-bound science fiction — or, if you prefer, speculative fiction or cutting-edge fiction – to be produced sequentially, in memory.

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For RWF’s 73rd Birthday, Filmmaker Reprints 1997 Remembrances By Everett Lewis, Harmony Korine, Tom Kalin, Lynne Stopkewich, Ira Sachs, Jon Moritsugu, Todd Verow

For RWF’s 73rd Birthday, Filmmaker Reprints 1997 Remembrances By Everett Lewis, Harmony Korine, Tom Kalin, Lynne Stopkewich, Ira Sachs, Jon Moritsugu, Todd Verow

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Jason Bateman Says It’s Time He Gets To Play A Woman

Jason Bateman Says It’s Time He Gets To Play A Woman

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Drew Magary Has Words For The Sainted New York Times Op-Ed Cadres

“This is not a time to calm down. David Brooks has no right to tell people who are mad as hell to stop being mad as hell. He can afford to be calm and collected because he is so wealthy and sequestered that nothing truly awful can happen to him. His civility is a luxury….

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The Star Child Lives

The Star Child Lives

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Dumb on purpose

I don’t like that word and I’m not thrilled my friend and hero used it, but to suggest it’s equivalent to a historic and ugly racist stereotype is dumb on purpose. — John Hodgman (@hodgman) May 31, 2018

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Outrage cycles

There's basically no one left involved in these Fake Outrage games that doesn't know they're fake. Literally everyone involved, on every side, in the media, reading Twitter, everyone knows. It's just become this weird ritual that we all enact over & over. — David Roberts (@drvox) May 31, 2018

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Gideon Resnick

it owns to be completely emotionally dead and worn down by outrage cycles and the cycles of outrage about the outrage cycles and the performative outrage about the outrage around the outrage cycles — Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) May 31, 2018

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I would like to sincerely apologize to Ivanka Trump and to my viewers for using an expletive on my show to describe her last night. It was inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it. — Samantha Bee (@iamsambee) May 31, 2018

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Sally Field In Defense of That Word

Sally Field In Defense of That Word

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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