Movie City News Archive for January, 2019

BuzzFeed Quizzes

BuzzFeed’s director of quizzes, who was laid off: https://t.co/jEfFUleTCv pic.twitter.com/NL4tGRUQ18 — Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) January 28, 2019

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Amazon Flows $14 Million To Scott Z. Burns’ Starry The Report, Depicting Bush-Cheney Torture Program

Amazon Flows $14 Million To Scott Z. Burns’ Starry The Report, Depicting Bush-Cheney Torture Program

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Original Mary Poppins Called Out For Blackface, As Well As A Convoluted Allusion In Mary Poppins Returns

Original Mary Poppins Called Out For Blackface, As Well As A Convoluted Allusion In Mary Poppins Returns

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“Comedy Central Is Advertising With Every Comedian’s Worst Enemy”

“There’s something about advertising on an Instagram account that got successful for posting stolen jokes—and spending ad money to run sponsored posts stylized like stolen jokes, no less—that feels antithetical to everything Comedy Central stands for.” “Comedy Central Is Advertising With Every Comedian’s Worst Enemy”

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Cinematography on air

If @TheAcademy doesn't air Best Cinematography I won't be watching the Oscars, and I hope my fellow DPs won't be either. I also stand in solidarity with the other below the line folks whose work is disregarded. Film is a collaborate medium. Directors are nothing without the crew. — Elle Schneider (@elleschneider) January 28, 2019

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Mark Harris on deadline and Roma

Deadline has long had an unacknowledged right-wing lean, but this take, positing that Roma is by definition a political vote cast by "virtue signalers" that will "split and diminish" the Oscar audience, is another low in a very low season. pic.twitter.com/luDm0tRO6B — Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) January 28, 2019

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Catching Up To The Brute, Bloody Output Of Dallas’ Cinestate

“I didn’t even vote for the guy. I don’t necessarily crave a conservative audience, but that may be an outcome, and it wouldn’t surprise me. I understand that audience deeply. But it’s not a mission statement.” Catching Up To The Brute, Bloody Output Of Dallas’ Cinestate

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Once Upon a Time in Finance; QT Pie Boosted By China Bona Film

Once Upon a Time in Finance; QT Pie Boosted By China Bona Film 

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Cinematography

Seriously though, I couldn't care less about cutting the songs, they were usually excruciating and cinema ain't Broadway. But you know what cinema is? CINEMATOGRAPHY. — Jessica Kiang (@jessicakiang) January 28, 2019

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Harris On Oscar

As we move closer to one of the most misbegotten "reconceptions" of the Oscars ever, a thread with a scoop–they're not showing Best Cinematography this year. Stupid, wrong, won't help what needs helping, will hurt what doesn't need hurting. https://t.co/02yNP0hJlQ — Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) January 28, 2019

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Oscar

There's potentially a world where they get shamed out of this. Potentially. Just FYI. pic.twitter.com/Akf6lMtp4r — Kristopher Tapley (@kristapley) January 27, 2019

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Debruge

Couldn’t agree more. I like to think I was put on this earth to champion the risk-takers. It’s the complacent, color-by-numbers movies that get the hatchet. #Sundance2019 @ Sundance Film… https://t.co/Wo1A3CzFgk — Peter Debruge (@AskDebruge) January 28, 2019

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Brody on Celluloid

The appeal and potential of film aren’t lost on me; but few who use celluloid (the term has a pompous vanity of technical authority) do anything original with it—rather, it often gets used like a declaration of nostalgic fidelity, a ready-made excuse for non-originality. — Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) January 28, 2019

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Dargis On Mekas

“I make home movies, therefore I live, I live, therefore I make home movies.” Only recently, while rewatching Walden, did I finally grasp the full implications of his use of ‘home movies,’ and how for him these two words had become inseparable.” Dargis On Mekas

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A24 Throws $6 Million Farewell Party; Native Son And Share Shift To HBO Films

A24 Throws $6 Million Farewell Party; Native Son And Share Shift To HBO Films

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Miyazaki

Je peux témoigner, miyazaki pere et fils sont au travail. 2 nouvelles productions des studios ghibli sont en cours et les dessins sont in-cro-ya-bles ! Tres grosse emotion — VINCENT MARAVAL 🇲🇨 (@MARAVALV) January 21, 2019

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John Fordham Remembers Michel Legrand

John Fordham Remembers Michel Legrand

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Burning Director Lee Chang-Dong

“In a mystery the problems are all hidden, just as they are in life now. People don’t know how to feel about their anger or even what they are feeling angry about.” Burning Director Lee Chang-Dong

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“Biopic”

Please delete the word (and concept) "biopic." — Jay Babcock (@jaywbabcock) January 27, 2019

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Kaling Amazon

Great Mindy Kaling line about distribution deal for her @Sundance hit "Late Night:" "I have spent a fortune on Amazon, so its nice to see them reciprocate." — Kenneth Turan (@KennethTuran) January 27, 2019

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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