Movie City News Archive for August, 2019

Geimer

No, it's not the perfect headline. Using my assault as a teenager 42 YEARS ago, failing to mention the judicial misconduct that has left me to deal with these vulgar tweets, and then using me shit on a man who should be allowed to do his work, is not perfect, it is abusive to ME…

Read the full article »

Mark Harris

It’s a bit like when someone at a film festival (niche or mainstream) introduces a genre movie: My experience has been the quality of the movie is inversely proportionate to the number of fucks or fuckings or motherfuckings dropped during the intro. — Joe Leydon (@JoeLeydon) September 1, 2019

Read the full article »

Dowd on Culture War Static

It’s all culture-war bullshit, and it turns movies into ammunition, rendering the act of actually experiencing them irrelevant. — A.A. Dowd (@AADowd) August 31, 2019

Read the full article »

Koehler and Marks

You are getting personal by constantly going after what I/many who take film seriously do. If Telluride cut out what you dismiss as Oscar bait, the fest would no longer exist to celebrate Varda (who, by the way, was recently nominated for an Oscar and awarded an honorary one). — Scott Feinberg (@ScottFeinberg) August 31,…

Read the full article »

telluride snipe

Nope. Kieslowski represents the Pence-era festival. It’s a different event now. It used to be about the fun that Les Blank would bring. Now it’s about if Peggy Siegal shows up. But more deeply, this is about how it’s covered. The coverage is profoundly different. — Robert Koehler (@bhkoe) August 31, 2019

Read the full article »

marks buttons

Red Buttons took home an Oscar® but not Hitchcock. From Nov. to April it's the same fucking 25 movies clogging multiplexes. Netflix releases films to theatres only to qualify for prizes. Can't we all agree that art shouldn't compete and move on? — Scott Marks (@scottmarks) August 31, 2019

Read the full article »

Venice Joker Ovation Alleged

Venice Joker Ovation Alleged

Read the full article »

It’s The Nineteenth Year For “Chasing The Buzz” With Peter Howell From Toronto

It’s The Nineteenth Year For “Chasing The Buzz” With  Peter Howell From Toronto; Here’s Forty Potential Highlights

Read the full article »

Podcasts

When I was younger I was self-conscious about my diction because I’d learned many of the words I used from books and would say them wrong. Now, listening to podcasts in the age of the internet, I’m pleased to see that no one can correctly pronounce anything. — Simon Barrett (@Simon_Barrett) August 31, 2019

Read the full article »

Peter Bart Takes Trump To The Movies With An Insight That His Mind Might Be Like That Of Chance The Gardener From This Movie From His Era Called Being There

Peter Bart Takes Trump To The Movies With An Insight That His Mind Might Be Like That Of Chance The Gardener From This Movie From His Era Called Being There

Read the full article »

Filmmaker’s Got The 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2019

Filmmaker’s Got 2019’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film 

Read the full article »

Harper

#BREAKING Actress Valerie Harper, known for 'Rhoda," 'Mary Tyler Moore Show," dies at 80, family sayshttps://t.co/ker20tZqPf — ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) August 30, 2019

Read the full article »

Joel Schumacher Speaks

Have you ever guessed the number of partners you’ve had? It would be in the double-digit thousands, but that is not unusual. Double-digit thousands. You mean like 2,000 or 3,000? That’s not double digits, that’s single digits. Oh! So 20,000 or 30,000. Somewhere in there. Or 10, or 20. That’s really amazing. It’s not for…

Read the full article »

Mark Harris on closing Paris Theater

RIP Manhattan's last commercial single-screen moviehouse, and with it, goodbye to a whole mode and era of moviegoing. I understand why it's gone and don't really want it back, but I can still shed a tear. https://t.co/Ne97bbBIzd — Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) August 29, 2019

Read the full article »

Ziegfeld Theater

Wish I had been able to attend the last picture show at the Paris, the way I did for Manhattan's late, great Ziegfeld. I covered that theater's closing night for @YahooEnt, which was also the last time I saw Force Awakens on the big screenhttps://t.co/lO81NJiCWQ — Ethan Alter (@ethanalter) August 30, 2019

Read the full article »

Twitter won’t autoban Nazis because the filters may ban GOP politicians

“Twitter won’t autoban Nazis because the filters may ban GOP politicians”

Read the full article »

RACHEL SYME

i need to stress this: if you live in new york city, you are now a historian, moving through a future lost place; write it down, remember it. it's probably going to outlive you, but it won't stay this way forever, and people will need to look to you to know what it was like…

Read the full article »

Nat Geo Traveler

I'm sad to post the news today the December-January issue of National Geographic Traveler will be its last. Its end, at age 35, is due to the medium through which you are reading these words, but on which Nat Geo… https://t.co/5bGQbu2MVc — Andrew Nelson (@andrewnelson) August 29, 2019

Read the full article »

Saudi Filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour

“No matter what the political situation is,  art should always prevail and be given top priority, because it is what pushes for civilization to grow, what shapes people’s minds and hearts. It’s important not to give up on that.” Saudi Filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour

Read the full article »

Dying Theaters

We’re fully in the era where cinemas as we know them are becoming extinct. Even great movie cities will, in 10-15 years, have only a handful of operating cinemas. https://t.co/x7fG0zd06X — Robert Koehler (@bhkoe) August 30, 2019

Read the full article »

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