Movie City News Archive for June, 2018

Anthony Bourdain Was 61

Anthony Bourdain Was 61

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Jen Yamato On All the Brains Behind Hereditary

“I said, ‘I need a kamikaze performance — I need you to jump off the deep end.’” Jen Yamato On All the Brains Behind Hereditary

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“While Ocean’s 8 is technically a heist movie, it is actually a movie about how men are boring and peripheral and women are fun and should have sex with each other.”

“While Ocean’s 8 is technically a heist movie, it is actually a movie about how men are boring and peripheral and women are fun and should have sex with each other.”

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Bus 2525 from Speed Goes For $102,400

Bus 2525 from Speed Goes For $102,400

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“The Tale”‘s Jennifer Fox

“When you tell people about sexual abuse, they think: “Oh my God! It’s so horrible!” Or they have this perception of a person who is sexually abused as someone crying in a corner, and it’s a big drama. For me, as a survivor, it’s not like that. You live with something in a very, again,…

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Elisabeth Subrin and Jennifer Fox On The Tale

Elisabeth Subrin and Jennifer Fox On The Tale

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“European Cinema Embraces the Vagina – What’s Taken Hollywood So Long?” Asks Anne Billson

“European Cinema Embraces the Vagina – What’s Taken Hollywood So Long?” Asks Anne Billson

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Original “West Side Story” Cast Member George Marcy Was 87

Original “West Side Story” Cast Member George Marcy Was 87

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Soviet-Era Film Director Alexander Askoldov, 85, Whose Banned The Commissar Was Rediscovered

Soviet-Era Film Director Alexander Askoldov, 85, Whose Banned The Commissar Was Rediscovered

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Ukraine’s Great Director Kira Muratova Was 83

Ukraine’s Great Director Kira Muratova Was 83

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Ghosted

David Ellis wrote it. https://t.co/s1Hf82OFju — Sarah Weinman (@sarahw) June 7, 2018

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Eddie Murphy Returns in Rudy Ray Moore Biopic For Netflix

Eddie Murphy Returns in Rudy Ray Moore Biopic For Netflix

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Colin Trevorrow

“Good things can come from idiot men saying stupid shit and everyone reacting accordingly.” Colin Trevorrow

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The DVD Wrapup: Wrinkle in Time, Peter Pan, Hurricane Heist, Oh Lucy!, Freak Show, Great Silence, Smash Palace, Satellite Girl and more

The fact that Ava DuVernay’s highly ambitious, if too frequently inert adaptation went unseen by so many of the book’s admirers speaks volumes.

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Brit Producers Respond, Largely Anonymously, To BFI Doc Finance Changes

Brit Producers Respond, Largely Anonymously, To BFI Doc Finance Changes

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UK Regulators Conditionally Clear Offer For Sky; Murdoch Must Offload Sky News To Get Greenlight; Comcast Buy Of News OK’ed

UK Regulators Conditionally Clear Offer For Sky; Murdoch Must Offload Sky News To Get Greenlight; Comcast Buy Of News OK’ed

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“Stacey Snider Walks Fox Tightrope While Stuck in Disney Limbo”

“Stacey Snider Walks Fox Tightrope While Stuck in Disney Limbo”

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B. Ruby Rich On Film Quarterly Turning 60

“It’s time to start financing women and people of color who are directors, producers, and screenwriters with big money—and the rest will follow. Decades of talk have not moved the Hollywood gauge. It’s time for action.” B. Ruby Rich On Film Quarterly Turning 60

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“The cancellation came the first day when ‘Roseanne’ writers and other staff had reconvened to plan the second season. Many shows have already staffed up for the upcoming TV season, which could make it difficult for laid-off crew members to find replacement work.”

“The cancellation came the first day when ‘Roseanne’ writers and other staff had reconvened to plan the second season. Many shows have already staffed up for the upcoming TV season, which could make it difficult for laid-off crew members to find replacement work.”

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Jerry Maren, 98, Last Living “Munchkin”

Jerry Maren, 98, Last Living “Munchkin” 

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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?

Quote Unquotesee all »

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