MCN Originals Archive for June, 2015

The Weekend Report

By Leonard Klady - Sunday, June 7th, 2015

It was a close race between the week’s newcomers with action-comedy Spy pulling ahead with an estimated $29.8 million to horror franchise Insidious Chapter 3 grossing $22.9 million. The third national newbie, Entourage, got a jump start on the weekend with a Wednesday launch that generated a sturdy $7.4 million two-day tally but lost steam going forward with an additional $10.4 million box office. Opening in modest release, the unconventional Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy bowed to $2.1 million.

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Wilmington on Movies: Entourage

By Mike Wilmington - Sunday, June 7th, 2015

I never caught any of TV’s “Entourage” — the hit Hollywood-set comedy-satire about a movie star from Queens and the three hometown buddies who get dragged along (like Elvis’ Memphis Mafia) in the wake of his rise to fame and riches. But it always struck me, from its rep and reviews, as a show I might enjoy, just as the movie that‘s now been inspired by that TV series, struck me as something that might hand me a laugh or two (or even three). Which just goes to show how gullible I can be.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

By Leonard Klady - Saturday, June 6th, 2015

There was a lot of outraged buzz about Entourage this week, but after putting $7.4 million in the coffers on Wednesday and Thursday, the party seems over. Vinny and the boys will challenge Aloha for title of Worst 3-Day Opening Of The Summer (So Far). Almost three times as many people went to go see Melissa McCarthy in Spy on Friday, as the film likely wins the weekend with a Saturday bump and the best legs in the weekend’s Top 4. Friday’s #1 is Insidious 3, which opened to about half of what Insidious 2 did, but should manage an impressive $20m-25m for the weekend. Testament of Youth is the only new indie with a shot at $5k or better per screen this weekend.

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The DVD Wrapup: McFarland USA, Scarecrows, Mickey Rourke, Justified, Rectify and more

By Gary Dretzka - Thursday, June 4th, 2015

Kevin Costner is typically effective as the high school football coach who’s fired for throwing a shoe at the starting quarterback – the wiseass deserved worse – and forced to look for work elsewhere. He finds it in a predominantly Mexican-American school in the Central Valley of California. As beneficiaries of the unionization of farm workers, led by Cesar Chavez, the families no longer are migratory and some have found ways to control their own livelihoods. They are still poor, however, and many of their kids are required to split their days between work in the fields and school, with little or no hope of going on to college.

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Wilmington on Movies: The Apu Trilogy

By Mike Wilmington - Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015

The film, as much as any that I’ve seen in decades of watching movies, becomes an overwhelming experience. It stays with you, always: a work of art in the same vein and genre and of the same high quality as John Ford’s Depression America masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath and Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist Italian classic Bicycle Thieves (both among Ray‘s inspirations for his own films). In some ways, it is superior to either of them.

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DVD Geek: Jamaica Inn

By Douglas Pratt - Monday, June 1st, 2015

Alfred Hitchcock himself would often speak disparagingly in interviews about his 1939 adaptation of the Daphne Du Maurier novel,Jamaica Inn, complaining about the star, Charles Laughton, and about costume films in general. Critics, taking his lead, also speak dismissively of the film, but it is actually a very enjoyable effort.

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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