Movie City News Archive for November, 2018

Gurus o’ Gold Speak Best Picture, Foreign Language, Doc Feature

A Star is Born, Roma, Green Book and The Favourite and Black Panther sentiment shifts slightly, from Guru to Guru. Extra love for Mary Poppins Returns as screenings accelerate, and First Reformed after nods from the New York Film Critics Circle.

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Chris Lee Erects Spoilers For Every Bared Penis In Awards-Contending Motion Pictures; Imagine The Jolly Office Banter

Chris Lee Erects Spoilers Bared Penises Brandished In Awards-Contending Motion Pictures; Imagine The Jolly Office Banter

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The Complete Paul Schrader BAFTA Screenwriter Lecture

The Complete Paul Schrader BAFTA Screenwriter Lecture 

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Ebiri Head Full Of Honey

There’s a movie called HEAD FULL OF HONEY opening today, and it might legitimately be one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. https://t.co/cle4aY9xDK — Bilge Ebiri (@BilgeEbiri) November 30, 2018

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Obst on Oscar Prognosticators

I’ve found that the explosion of prognosticators has changed the race in the way the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle operates- disturbing what it is observing. I think the branches may rebel a bit against determined consensus & everything is thrown into chaotic array. 😄 — Lynda Obst (@LyndaObst) November 30, 2018

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“Environmental Horror” Takes Place Of “Moby Dick” On Lynne Ramsay Slate

“Environmental Horror” Takes Place Of “Moby Dick” On Lynne Ramsay Slate

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Dana Stevens End of Filmstruck

I was on @FilmStruck tonight watching my last movie–It ended up being Vera Chytilová’s Daisies plus a Harold Lloyd short–& got sad all over again. There was so much there still to explore. If only they cared about film & film lovers. @WarnerMediaGrp @ATT — Dana Stevens (@thehighsign) November 30, 2018

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Rookie No More

Tavi Gavinson’s Essential, 5,800-Word Closing Editor’s Letter: “22-year-old me has enough” “One woman venture capitalist told us, after hearing my very nervous pitch, “I hate to say this because I hate that it’s true, but men who come in here pitch the company they’re going to build, while women pitch the company they’ve already built.” The men…

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Happy 75th, Terrence Malick

Happy 75th, Mother… Father… Terrence Malick

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Bahr on male pull-quotes

Let’s just say I notice when screeners/posters/ads only feature quotes from male critics — Lindsey Bahr (@ldbahr) November 30, 2018

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Nick Nolte Joins Star Wars Teevee Series

Nick Nolte Joins Star Wars Teevee Series

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Buchanan on Cute Promo

This is cute… to emphasize the love story of IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, they’re throwing a special screening hosted by Hollywood couples pic.twitter.com/ZzSlTrvHsK — Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) November 30, 2018

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The DVD Wrapup: Gauguin, Blindspotting, Skate Kitchen, Wobble Palace, Third Murder, Outrage Coda, Nelly, Luciferina, MDMA, Heavy Trip, Agony, Family I Had … More

The movie sidesteps Gauguin’s assertion in his memoir that Tehura was 13 years old, not 17, when she was offered to him in marriage. In her first appearance in a movie, Adams isn’t asked to do much more than look exotic, pose well and provide companionship, all of which she does very well.

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SLAMDANCE ANNOUNCES 2019 FEATURE FILM COMPETITION LINEUP 

  11 Narrative and 9 Documentary Features To Be Showcased in Competition During 25th Annual Festival, Including 18 World, North American, and U.S. Premieres Festival Also Announces Inaugural Breakouts Section Lineup NOVEMBER 26, 2018 (Los Angeles)– The Slamdance Film Festival  today announced the Narrative and Documentary Feature Film Competition programs, as well as the lineup for its…

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“The MPAA’s possible sanctions — revoking The House That Jack Built’s ‘R’ rating, halting the rating process for other IFC films, or banning the distributor from the ratings process for 90 days — represent a kind of nuclear option for the trade association. It almost never imposes such punishments on movie companies for violating what is essentially a voluntary agreement to have the association rate their films. So if IFC is facing those consequences, the MPAA must be seriously concerned.”

“The MPAA’s possible sanctions — revoking The House That Jack Built’s ‘R’ rating, halting the rating process for other IFC films, or banning the distributor from the ratings process for 90 days — represent a kind of nuclear option for the trade association. It almost never imposes such punishments on movie companies for violating what is essentially…

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NYFCC

NYFCC: Roma: Film, Director, Cinematography Ethan Hawke, First Reformed Regina Hall, Support The Girls Supporting: Richard E. Grant, Regina King Best Nonfiction Film: Minding the Gap Best Foreign-Language: Cold War Animated: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

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Mic Cut

Mic Cut

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Sorrentino On Bertolucci

“Bertolucci was an extremely curious man, sweet and sincere, cultured and unpredictable, and, I repeat, frighteningly intelligent. His was a free and razor-sharp intelligence, like that of a great jazz musician. He knew how to make people feel welcome, even the silly and the indolent. He would not fight them, but would study them. After…

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Gloria Katz, American Graffiti Co-Writer, Star Wars Script Doctor, Was 76

Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia “can take command; she doesn’t take any shit instead of just a beautiful woman that schlepped along to be saved.” Gloria Katz, American Graffiti Co-Writer,  Star Wars Script Doctor, Was 76

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Bilge Ebiri

“I’ve often tried to put into words what I felt after that initial viewing, and I’ve come up with some different formulations over the years. But recently it occurred to me that the answer is quite simple: The Conformist was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. It was beautiful not just in the…

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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