Reviews Archive for September, 2011

Wilmington on Movies: Mozart’s Sister

  (Three and a Half Stars) France: Rene Feret, 2010 Mozart’s Sister, a film often lovely to see and hear, by French writer-director Rene Feret, is the fictionalized semi-biographical tale of a remarkable girl, her extraordinary family and of the beautiful music they all made together. But it’s also a very sad story, as stories…

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Digital Nation: ‘Rescue Me’ From Uninformed Punditry About Hollywood and 9/11 …

In the lead-up to 9/11/11, two unrelated events prompted me to add my thoughts to the national conversation about one of the most disturbing and unconscionable attacks on non-combatants in history. Like most Americans, I’ve been given no deeply personal cause to obsess over the attacks. Neither do I need repeated visual reminders of the…

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Wilmington on Movies: Contagion

 (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Steven Soderbergh, 2011   Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion begins with a cough in the dark — something mundane, and ordinary, if irritating and unhealthy, that soon grows into something else: an explosion of fear, death and hysteria. As the movie proper begins, a title soon informs us that it‘s Day…

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Wilmington on Movies: Warrior

  Warrior (Three  Stars) U.S.: Gavin O’Connor, 2011 Improbabilities won’t necessarily knock out a good fight film, if the feeling and the footwork are there. Warrior is a movie about a high profile, multi-million-dollar TV Mixed Martial Arts tournament in which too long-estranged brothers are both competing, and in which they finally meet in the ring….

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Wilmington on DVDs. Pick of the Week: Box Set. Genius of Britain, The Scientists Who Changed the World/Stephen Hawking and the Theory of Everything

Sir Isaac Newton   Genius of Britain (Three Discs) (Three and a Half Stars) U.K.: Christopher Sykes, Michael Waterhouse & Jonathan Rudd (Series director)/Gary Johnstone, 2010/2007 (Athena/Acorn Media) Science was my weakest subject in high school. And since I didn’t much like what didn’t come easily to me, and really didn’t like passionless, styleless writing, and since most…

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The DVD Wrapup: X-Men: First Class, Hanna, The Arbor, Henry’s Crime, Scarface, Straw Dogs, Madea, Police Story …

X-Men: First Class: Blu-ray Let’s assume that the producers of “X-Men: First Class” had a very good reason for not naming the latest chapter in the franchise “X-Men Origins: First Class.” Like “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” it provides some of today’s most popular superheroes coherent back-stories and new cast members an opportunity to carve niches for…

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Wilmington on DVDs. Pick of the Week: Classics. The Sacrifice/Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

  Four Stars Sweden: Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986 (Kino/Kino Lorber) In the mid-1980s, Andrei Tarkovsky, the greatest Russian cinema artist of the post-war era, traveled to Sweden to make what proved to be his last film, The Sacrifice. He was only in his 50s when he went to Sweden, but Tarkovsky, son of the famous Russian…

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Wilmington on DVDs. Pick of the Week: New. Hanna

(Also Blu-ray) (Three and a Half Stars) U.K.-U.S.: Joe Wright, 2011 (Universal) Hanna, an action film for people who love action movies and also for some who don’t, is Kick-Ass and The Bourne Identity filtered through Pride and Prejudice. And I don’t mean that as a knock. Director Joe Wright, who made the 2005 Keira Knightley…

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Wilmington on Movies: Shark Night 3D

  Shark Night 3D (One Star) U.S.: David R. Ellis, 2011   COMIN’ AT YOU, DUDES! HERE I AM! CHOMP! CHOMP! TEAR! RIP! SCARED YET? YOU WILL BE! YOU WILL BE! AAAAAAAWWW! CHOMP!!    Who the Hell are you? I’m the Big Shark in Shark Night 3D! I’m the guy that rips off everybody‘s heads…

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Wilmington on Movies: Sholem Aleichem Laughing in the Darkness

Sholem Aleichem Laughing in the Darkness (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Joseph Dorman, 2011 Let me tell you about this fellow Sholem Aleichem, or Solomon Rabinowitz, or Rabinovich, or whatever his name is: the very famous Jewish writer of long ago whom this documentary fellow Joseph Dorman just made the movie about. Yes, I’ve seen…

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Wilmington on Movies: A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

  A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (One Star) U.S.: Alex Gregory & Peter Huyck, 2011 I don’t want to come across like a prude, but the new Jason Sudeikis sex comedy A Good Old fashioned Orgy is pretty much a bad, newfangled mess. Try as they might, writer-directors Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck can’t make…

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Reviews

Gary Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Ophelia, Ambition, Werewolf in Girls' Dorm, Byleth, Humble Pie, Good Omens, Yellowstone …More

rohit aggarwal on: The DVD Wrapup: Ophelia, Ambition, Werewolf in Girls' Dorm, Byleth, Humble Pie, Good Omens, Yellowstone …More

https://bestwatches.club/ on: The DVD Wrapup: Diamonds of the Night, School of Life, Red Room, Witch/Hagazussa, Tito & the Birds, Keoma, Andre’s Gospel, Noir

Gary Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Sleep With Anger, Ralph Wrecks Internet, Liz & Blue Bird, Hannah Grace, Unseen, Jupiter's Moon, Legally Blonde, Willard, Bang … More

Gary Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Bumblebee, Ginsburg, Buster, Silent Voice, Nazi Junkies, Prisoner, Golden Vampires, Highway Rat, Terra Formars, No Alternative … More

GDA on: The DVD Wrapup: Bumblebee, Ginsburg, Buster, Silent Voice, Nazi Junkies, Prisoner, Golden Vampires, Highway Rat, Terra Formars, No Alternative … More

Larry K on: The DVD Wrapup: Sleep With Anger, Ralph Wrecks Internet, Liz & Blue Bird, Hannah Grace, Unseen, Jupiter's Moon, Legally Blonde, Willard, Bang … More

Gary Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Shoplifters, Front Runner, Nobody’s Fool, Peppermint Soda, Haunted Hospital, Valentine, Possum, Mermaid, Guilty, Antonio Lopez, 4 Weddings … More

gwehan on: The DVD Wrapup: Shoplifters, Front Runner, Nobody’s Fool, Peppermint Soda, Haunted Hospital, Valentine, Possum, Mermaid, Guilty, Antonio Lopez, 4 Weddings … More

Gary J Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Peppermint, Wild Boys, Un Traductor, Await Instructions, Lizzie, Coby, Afghan Love Story, Elizabeth Harvest, Brutal, Holiday Horror, Sound & Fury … More

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