Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2012

Thomson Sez Amour Is A Good Excuse For Him To Belittle Or Dismiss Every Other 2012 Film

Mike Kaplan On The Master And Kubrick

Nicholas Jarecki On His Toughest Scene To Write In Arbitrage

deadline

“I’ve had my own mild struggles with some of these bipolar issues and my son struggled with some of them. When you’ve been through that, you get it. And then on top of that I just found the family, the neighborhood and the community very enchanting.”
David O. Russell On How He Arrived At Silver Linings Playbook

guardian

“At 12, I swore I’d have my own film in the cinema,” Sez Tom Hooper

Judd Apatow 60 MINUTES Preview: Writing As Therapy

NY Times

Scott, Dargis And Holden Chirp Their Best Picture Shouldas, Including Triple Play For Amour

variety

Is The Accelerated Voting Deadline A Bigger Oscar Problem Than The Electronic Lockouts Of Voters?
And – The Atlantic Aggregates Some Stuff They Read

The Woz On Les Mis‘ Minx Manxman, Samantha Barks

Amour, War Witch, No, A Royal Affair, Intouchables, The Deep, Kon-Tiki, Beyond The Hills, Sister
Nine Films Make Oscar Foreign Language Shortlist

Baltasar Kormákur On The Shipwreck Of Iceland’s Oscar Submission, The Deep  

Top 10 Lists By Critic (Much More To Come)

Dustin Hoffman, “Sunset Cowboy”

Chicago Film Critics Zero In On Dark Thirty With 5 Awards; Four For The Master; Two Each For Beasts And Lincoln

Detroit Crickets Go Tiffany For Silver Linings Playbook: Best Film, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Script

guardian

“The shouters I dislike are what I call the pigeon kickers; that is, directors who yell at extras and people who have to take it.”
Dustin Hoffman Still Tough On Self For Being Difficult

M. Phillips Has His 15 Minutes With Bill Murray

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer On How She Would Liked To Have Seen Torture Portrayed In Zero Dark Thirty

NY Times

“We tried very hard not to make a documentary of this, which is why there’s not a single hand-held camera shot in the whole film.”
Spielberg On When He Does And When He Doesn’t Track Awards Season, Plus, Entertainment Value 

NY Times

“I wanted to play the most hated Negro in cinematic history.”
NYT At Altar Of QT’s NYC Django Preem For Celebs spoilers

hollywoodreporter.com

“It’s based on something real that I’ve fabricated and exaggerated. It’s like a novel; no one is really the person that you might think.”
Galloway Cover-Stories Apatow

“Django is both rugged and raw. As GZA was sitting beside me, he tapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘Yo, that s— was hardcore dirty.’ GZA, who you know from the Wu Tang Clan and I know as my cousin, thought it was a fly pic.”
HuffPo Hosts RZA Puff Of Mentor QT

“In Zero Dark Thirty, she’s the hero; in real life, CIA agent’s career more complicated”

Oscar Tunes Up 104 Scores

Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Dark Knight Rises, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Moonrise Kingdom, Silver Linings Playbook,  Zero Dark Thirty
AFI Pops Out A Top 10 Of American Pics For 2012

Mark Harris Goes 4,200 Words On The “Mad Dash” To Finish Zero Dark Thirty

DC Critics: Zero Dark Thirty, Zero Dark Thirty, Zero Dark Thirty

indie wire

Zero Dark -30-
Mark Boal: “This movie doesn’t have an agenda. You can take a political position because of a film, but to say that it’s in the film, I don’t know if I agree with that. It’s a movie that you can dissect however you want, which is fair enough, but I can tell you as the author that there was no agenda here other than telling a good story and being faithful to the research.”

NY Times

Earlier, Bruni: “It presents the kind of torture that Cheney advocated—but that President Obama ended—as something of an information-extracting necessity, repellent but fruitful.”

Shone Shines On “Cruelty-Free” Haneke

Searching For Sugar Man takes IDA Documentary Top Award

Old-Fashioned Newsweekly Esteems Les Misérables As “Whole New Kind Of Movie Musical”

As Ever, John Waters Kicks Off The Critics Top Tens For 2012

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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