MCN Originals Archive for May, 2014

Wilmington on Movies: A Million Ways to Die in the West

Hate to admit it, but I laughed fairly hard at parts of Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in The West, a sexed-up comedy Western with a foul-mouthed script and few inhibitions. Forgive me, John Ford. Forgive me, Howard Hawks. Forgive me, Sergio Leone. For that matter, forgive me, Mel Brooks.

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The DVD Wrapup

The People vs. Paul Crump, Claire Is Dead, Broken Side of Time, Run & Jump, Color of Lies, Cimarron Strip, Your Dragon and more.

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Weekend Box Office Analysis

A quick look at the numbers.

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Weekend Report Will Return In WR 23

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Cannes 67 Wrap-Up

Cannes 67 – c’est fini.
After dozens of screenings, predictions, and an endless series of queue debates, we have a Palme d’Or.

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No Friday Estimates This Week

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On Jean-Luc Godard / ADIEU AU LANGAGE / GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D

AH DIEUX // AH GOD(ARD)S

That is a pun

2014

Cannes Film Festival

But

Can film

Can film actually festival?

???

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Cannes Review: Clouds of Sils Maria

I kinda love Clouds of Sils Maria. At its best, it is a female version of My Dinner With Andre. At its weakest, it is still interesting. The premise is pretty basic.

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Cannes Competition Review: Leviathan

There’s never a scene where Kolya doesn’t have a myriad of issues weighing on his mind, and these are visible in Serebryakov’s pained, tired facial expressions and believable portrayal of alcoholism (to be sure, Leviathan is boozier than two or three Hong Sang-soo films combined).

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Cannes: The Daily Buzz – Hot Topics

Hot Topics Roundtable at Cannes Film Festival with Eric Kohn, Anne Thompson, Marian Masone, Alison Willmore, and Jordan Hoffman.

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The DVD Wrapup

Monuments Men, 3 Days to Kill, Like Someone in Love, Nosferatu, LA Law, Krackoon and more.

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Cannes Un Certain Regard Review: Lost River

If Lost River is the film Ryan Gosling wanted to debut as his first film—and you only get one first film—then I’ll be the first to admit that I had him pegged (as an artist, anyway) as someone entirely different.

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Cannes Review: The Salvation

Yeah, this film rocks.

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Cannes Competition Review: Maps To The Stars

Because Bruce Wagner’s script calls for actors to do and say depraved things with a straight face, the film couldn’t have been made—in this current form, anyway—without Cronenberg’s history of directing violence and dissecting the psycho-bizarre.

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No Weekend Report Today

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Friday Estimates

Godzilla does the monster smash with $38.4 million expected from almost 4,000 Friday roars. Neighbors shares another cup of mixed greens at $8.4 million, while your friendly neighborhood web-slinger settles for a kind-hearted $4.5 mil. Million Dollar Arm eggs on Hamm with $3.4 million of so-so-so pitching power.

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Cannes Competition Review: Wild Tales

Argentine Szifrón, known for his career in comedy television, aims high with his biggest budget to date: Wild Tales intertwines six separate narratives, and the film is primarily successful in finding humor in its theme of ordinary people pushed to their limit.

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Cannes Competition Review: The Captive

The blurring of truth and fiction is a fairly standard theme throughout the director’s filmography, and much of Egoyan’s career is recalled in The Captive.

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Cannes Review: Mr. Turner

Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner is a movie about an artist who is past his moment of greatest glory. A biopic only in that it rests on a historic figure in art, this is not a film about Turner’s inspiration or his method or his history. It is about the other side of the mountain, the apex of which Turner reached before the first shot of this film.

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MCN Originals

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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