Top 5 Singers Turned Shoddy Actors: 5) Mick Jagger in Ned Kelly; 4) Britney Spears in Crossroads; 3) Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice: ‘Do you want to smell my ponani?’; 2) Madonna in Shanghai Surprise; 1) Mikey Graham – Boys Own – in Fatal Deviation. ibid.
Godawful Sequels: Jaws & the sequels inc Jaws the Revenge; Magnum Force & The Dead Pool; Grease & Grease II; The Lost Boys & The Lost Boys: The Tribe; Stars Wars & Stars Wars Episode One – The Phantom Menace. ibid.
Top 5 Unbelievable SFX From Turkish Cinema: 5) Col [Jaws] and shark’s teeth made of cardboard; 4) Donuyor [Superman]; 3) Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda [Star Trek]; 2) Badi [ET]; 1) Seytan [Exorcist]. ibid.
Why, Why, Why Did They Do That? Tiptoes [dwarfs & Gary Oldman on knees ... Breakfast at Tiffany’s [Mickey Rooney as the Japanese neighbour] ... The Toy 1982 [Richard Pryor as gift-wrapped black man] ... Nowhere to Run ... The Never Ending Story. ibid.
45,556. Top 5 Annoying Characters: 5) The Fifth Element [man in leopard skin suit; 4) The Cable Guy; 3) Little Nicky [son of Satan]; 2) The War of the Worlds [continuous screaming child]; 1) Star Wars: Episode One – The Phantom Menace and the young Skywalker. ibid.
Worst Annoying Movie Moment: The Wickerman. ibid.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought. Jean Cocteau
American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema. Sergei Eisenstein
American motion pictures are written by the half-educated for the half-witted. St John Ervine
A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. Stanley Kubrick
There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness. Frank Capra
Film is incredibly democratic and accessible. It’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it. Banksy
Movies took you right to the edge but kept you safe. John Updike
Films are always pretentious. There’s nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker. John Milius
It is the critic’s duty, I believe, to deliver honest opinions to posterity on the immediate experience of viewing movies, hoping that successors will respect their honest opinions and find them useful, rather than sneer at their insensitivity. Philip French, The Observer 5th March 2006
The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film, and I was just directing traffic. Mel Gibson
Anyone who’s made film and knows about the cinema has a lifelong love affair with the experience. You never stop learning about film. Francis Ford Coppola
A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan. Mel Brooks
What astonishes me about this ... It’s an incredible piece of inept public relations to expel somebody not just from any film but from a film about expelling people for their opinions ... A film in which you are present and acknowledged and thanked in the acknowledgements at the end of the film. Professor Richard Dawkins, interviewing P Z Myers
Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys. Max von Siddow
Frankenstein, made infamous by the classic Boris Karloff films of the 1930s, was written by a 19-year-old girl nearly 200 years ago. Frankenstein: A Modern Myth, Channel 4 2013
Mary Shelley raised larger questions about our own origins and mankind’s place in the universe. ibid.
Mary and her married lover, Percy Shelley, were a scandalous couple. ibid.
‘Every creature has a mate’. ibid. monster
They’re gonna make a movie about me. Boardwalk Empire s5e5: King of Norway, Capone to gang, HBO 2014
I am a huge Woody Allen fan, although I’ve only seen Antz. But I’ll tell you something. What I respect most about that man is that when was going through that stuff from the press that said Antz was basically a rip-off of Bug’s Life, he stood true to his films, or at least the one I saw, which again is Antz. The thing is, I thought Bug’s Life was better. Much better than Antz. Point is, don’t listen to your critics. Listen to your fans. The Office US s7e17: Threat Level Midnight, Michael, NBC 2011
Overnight [Rudolph] Valentino became one of the silent-era film’s biggest stars. The Italian Americans: Becoming Americans 1910-1930, PBS 2015
The Rat Pack briefly became the Jack Pack. The Italian Americans: American Dream 1945–Today
TV screens across the country were inundated with reports of a government crack-down on organised crime. ibid.
Not all Italian-Americans had such a positive response to The Godfather. ibid.
Italian stereotypes have been mined for their entertainment value. ibid.
The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture. Alfred Hitchcock
The film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep. For a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a facade, the largest stage set in the world. Without realizing it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles. As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit. J G Ballard, Super-Cannes
London: think you can fake it? … This bunch of mugs were fraudsters of the highest order. Storyville: The Great Gangster Film Fraud, BBC 2016
The making of A Landscape of Lives: lured to the glamour and the glitz of making movies. ibid.
Bashar: back to his old stomping ground at East London Uni – he wasn’t the type of guy to end up in middle management tapping a keyboard in an open plan office – no, sir, Bashar had another sky-high ambition: to become a film producer. ibid.
The film tax credit is only meant to be a percentage of the real cost. ibid.
A bunch of wannabes ... or a gang of scammers who planned it all from day one? ibid.
A Landscape of Lives became A Landscape of Lies. ibid.
One of the most imaginative attempts to covering one’s tracks … Acting out an alibi. ibid.
‘To continue to do something wrong with the same people … You kind of deserve what’s coming your way.’ ibid. witness
No-one wanted to watch his film (£60-80,000 cf. declared budget £20,000,000). ibid.
The judge threw the book at our unlucky film-makers. ibid.
Were you born in America? Aren’t you ashamed to have ever seen a John Wayne picture? Who’s That Knocking at My Door 1968 starring Harvey Keitel & Zina Bethune & Ann Collette & Lennard Kuras & Michael Scala & Harry Northip & Philip Carlson & Wendy Russell & Catherine Scorsese & Bill Minkin et al, director Martin Scorsese
As an inveterate film fan, I turn to the listings every week and try not to lose hope. I search the guff that often passes for previews, and I queue for a ticket with that flicker of excitement reminiscent of matinees in Art Deco splendour. Once inside, lights down, beer in hand, hope recedes as the minutes pass. How many times have I done a runner? There is a cinema I go to that refunds your money if you’re out the door within 20 minutes of the opening titles. The people there have knowing looks. My personal best is less than five minutes of the awful Moulin Rouge.
The other day, I saw Blue Jasmine, written and directed by Woody Allen. The critics applause was thunderous. ‘A work of brilliance’ ... ‘Pure movie-going pleasure’ ... ‘Smart, sophisticated and hugely enjoyable’ ... ‘Brilliantly funny’. One journalist called it a ‘miracle’. So I queued for a ticket, even conjuring the wonderful scene from Annie Hall (1975) when Woody Allen, standing in a movie queue, meets his hero, Marshall Mcluhan: he of ‘the medium is the message’.
Today, he might as well call up Hans Christian Anderson’s parable about a naked emperor, which applies to his latest ‘work of brilliance’. By any fair and reasonable measure, it is crap. Every character is cardboard. The schematic ‘plot’ is crude. Two adopted sisters are thrown together, implausibly. There is a wannabe politician whose name should be Congressman Stereotype. The script is lazy, dated and patronising. Clearly, Allen wrote it during a night sweat. ‘If Cate Blanchett doesn’t receive an Oscar nomination’, wrote The Times critic, ‘then I will eat a Chanel hat’. Actually, Blanchett deserves a Lifeboat medal. By sheer dint of her acting, she tries and ails to rescue this wreck.