MCN Originals Archive for January, 2013

Sundance Review: Doc Wrap-Up

We understand these events to be troubling, but Rowley spends far too long lingering on the way life has changed for Scahill and the way these wars have had a negative impact on his mood. It is a film that is dirtied by its own lead, despite Scahill being definitively insightful and knowledgeable about the regions. The man is a brilliant journalist—there is no doubt about that—but the documentary sags when it should ignite.

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Wilmington on DVDs: Ivan’s Childhood

We remember young Ivan’s face as we remember the faces of the two tragic friends in Shoeshine, of the street kids in Rome: Open City, of the little boy in Bicycle Thieves—of all art film children caught in the crucibles of war and social injustice.

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DP/30 Sneak Peek: Alex Gibney on Zero Dark Thirty @ Sundance 2013

I sat down to chat with Alex Gibney about his new documentary, WikiLeaks: We Steal Secrets. But we eventually got into Alex’s public position on the movie Zero Dark Thirty in this Sneak Peek.

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Gurus o’ Gold: 8 Days Before Final Oscar Voting Begins

Lincoln still leads the Best Picture race according to The Gurus, with only one Guru voting Lincoln or Argo as anything other than #1 or #2 in the race.

Otherwise, the races haven’t changed much at all since we last saw you. The biggest move is Tarantino’s screenplay for Django Unchained up from #4 to #2 in that race.

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The DVD Wrapup

7 Psychopaths, Tin Drum, Imposter, Perfect Ending, How Green Was My Valley, Downton Abbey, Tales of the Night … and more.

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20W2O: 27 Days To Oscar – The Racial Thing

The movie about slavery has no Black nominees. The movie about the abolition of slavery has no Black nominees. The movie about Gulf coasters devastated by Katrina has a little girl as its only nominee. And the movie about a young Indian man has 1 Indian nominee, who happened to write lyrics for a song.

I have never felt like racial politics and The Academy Awards go together well. But I also don’t see any step forward in this year’s nominations from any other year.

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20W2O: 4 Weeks To Go – Quid Pro Quo, Clarice

I would argue – and have forever – that these groups are following the same bouncing ball as everyone else during the award season. There are years when consensus winners are quite close to undeniable. But there are usually 2 to 3 contenders who would not really be shocking winners of awards. Except for the issue of every award as a stepping stone to the next.

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Wrapping Up Sundance, Pt 1: The Not-Docs

Sundance is still easily the most important film festival in the world for American independents. It is pretty well run. They have pretty good taste. And even the swag shite that journalists love to mock as they try to figure out how to snag a pair of jeans that will make their ass look like J-Lo’s and their chests look like either Scarlett Johansson or Taylor Whomever is not nearly as rampant as it once was.

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Sundance Reviews: Cutie and the Boxer, Fallen City

There is vividness of color here, and contrast between the pair’s struggles in the real world and the way in which they express themselves artistically. Like all artists, including no doubt many of the filmmakers with films at Sundance, for Ushio and Noriko the financial struggles of an artist being able to survive while still creating are a constant source of tension, but there’s never a time when either of them says, well, we’re not getting rich of this, so we should give it up and get a steady job to pay the bills. They fight and they struggle, but the art and being able to keep creating it remains at the forefront of their relationship through it all.

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The Weekend Report

If not quite happily ever after, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters bowed at the top of the charts with an estimated $18.5 million. The session’s other debuting national releases proved less potent. The tough guy antics of Parker was fifth in the lineup with $6.8 million while Movie 43 was a notch below with $4.8 million. In the niches, a couple of films from the Indian diasporas had strong openings. Hindi Race 2 sped to $832,000 at 153 venues and Tamil Vishwaroopam scored $659,000 from 84 locations. A handful of exclusive openings also stepped out with encouraging results.

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Sundance Review: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer

The performance footage is most engaging, when we see the girls of Pussy Riot rehearsing and performing; it’s guerrilla activism, shot guerrilla style, and it’s just great that it was even captured for historical purposes, given that the Pussy Riot collective has become a big enough deal to be of note as one of the more relevant and effective activist groups of our time, along with Occupy. Interviews with the girls’ parents round things out nicely, giving us a broader perspective on who these young women are.

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Wilmington on DVDs: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

  PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC  THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (Also Blu-ray) (Four Stars) U. K.: Alfred Hitchcock, 1934 (Criterion) Peter Lorre. He had the face of a chubby little morphine addict (which he was), the lush lips of a child looking for a lollipop, a languorous voice seething with malicious amusement or fright,…

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Friday Estimates

Newcomers Hansel & Gretel & corsets & crossbows will take the weekend… but without much force. Also opening to limp numbers, Parker and the movie famously forgotten by its own cast, Movie 43 In the battle of Oscar nominees, Silver Lining Playbookpasses Zero Dark Thirty for Friday while ZD30 has the domestic-gross edge. But the race is close enough that it could go either way. Django Unchained closes in on $145m while Les Misérables will pass $135m.

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Wilmington on Movies: Parker

Have you seen the great film neo-noir Point Blank, with Lee Marvin as a vengeful killer named Walker? That’s Parker. Have you seen—and there’s no reason you should—Mel Gibson in Payback, as a bad-mouthed, vengeful hard guy named Porter? That’s Parker too. (Stark, or Westlake, didn’t like his character’s name being over-used.)

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Sundance Review: Upstream Color

The patterns of nature and mathematics – and the breaking of those patterns which in turn make new patterns – are heavily threaded throughout the structure of this film, and the complexity of the ideas it explores and the way in which it inevitably requires the audience to actively participate in seeking to understand it is very much like a cinematic Socratic Circle. Socrates taught that all thinking derives from asking questions; the aim therefore is not to arrive at one right answer, but that asking one question should lead to further questions, and from this collective back-and-forth we construct meaning and answers.

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Sundance Review: Before Midnight

It’s not every January—so early in the awards season—that we see one of the likely best films of the year.

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Wilmington on DVDs: For a Good Time, Call….

  FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL… (Two Disc Combo Pack: Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy/UV (One and a Half Stars)  U.S.: Jamie Travis, 2012 (Universal) For a Good Time, Call…was no good time for me. It’s a romantic comedy about two Manhattan roommates who collaborate on a phone sex service, and discover the joys of talking dirty for fun…

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The DVD Wrap

Ivan’s Childhood, Pina, Sugar Man, Dead Sushi, Hard Romanticker, Birders, Officer Down, Hara-Kiri … and more.

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Gurus o’ Gold: A Month To Go

These votes have been sitting around for almost a week… but here we go with the latest Gurus votes for Picture and Director. Argo is the big mover.

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Sundance Review: Blood Brother

Perhaps it was some deeper spiritual call, a desire to strip away the typically materialistic Western values with which he’d been raised, to find the purity in a life of giving to others rather than taking from them. Or perhaps Rocky simply found in the children of that orphanage the closeness of family and unconditional love that he lacked at home. Whatever the case, he also found he didn’t want to leave. These kids needed him, and perhaps he needed them as well.

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MCN Originals

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