MCN Curated Headlines Archive for July, 2010

NY Times

Barnes And Cieply Heft Some Career Advice To Mr. Katzenberg And DreamWorks Animation

Michael Bay Continues To Perform Safe-Wrecks On Chicago

“I think Ebert does not have the training. I think he simply had the position. I think he does not have the training. I’ve got the training. And frankly, I don’t care how that sounds, but the fact is, I’ve got the training. I’m a pedigreed film critic. I’ve studied it. I know it. And I know many other people who’ve studied it as well, studied it seriously. Ebert just simply happened to have the job. And he’s had the job for a long time. He does not have the foundation. He simply got the job.”
Harmin’ Armond On Ebert And The Fact Of Self-Love

Kidman And Cotillard Gab For Interview
And – Greta Gerwig On Playing Dress-Up
With – Burton And Elfman In Tune

guardian

Teshome Gabriel, 70, Leading Film Theorist In “Third Cinema”And The Third World

nymag

Has The Kids Are All Right Snapped The Big-Buy “Sundance Curse”?

Hoser Hoedown: Toronto Int’l To Open With Olivia Newton-John Hockey Musical

hollywoodreporter.com

Hans Zimmer On His Wall-To-Wall Inception Score

“Like bottom feeder Charlie Kaufman, Mr. Nolan’s reputation as an arrogant maverick draws a first-rate cast of players… barely even remotely lucid… incomprehensible gibberish… sorry butt… jabbering twaddle… pretentious perplexity”
Great-Unka Rex Reed, The Charlie Callas Of Ad Homineh-Homineh-Hominem Movie Reviews, Rubs One Out Over Chris Nolan

LA Times

Albrecht’s Blackberry CC: Boo-Boo Led To Rossett And McGurk Bouncing Out Of Overture

guardian

Jeff Goldblum: Buddha Of H’wd

telegraph.co.uk

Photos By A Teenage Beatles Fan Unearthed

Why Google Can’t Build Good Social Apps

The Gags Alone Make This Analysis Suspect: “Even Ishtar has its defenders—ironic, coquettish types who wink at you from behind their yashmaghs.”
“What Happened To The Box-Office Bomb?”

Amy Taubin On Sally Potter

For FCC, A Concise History Of F—

Forbes Blogger Suggests It May Be Moviegoers Who Sound The Death Knell For 3-D, Rather Than Producers

Frances Bean Cobain’s Art Debut At La Luz De Jesus Gallery Might Not Be Safe For Work

The Old Man And The 8 1/2 C, Or, The Scholl’s Also Rises: The Latest Hemingway Tribute Is A Loafer

hollywoodreporter.com

Bob Kerrey Sez He’s Close To Transforming Into Jack Valenti

Inception‘s Comic Prequel: “The Cobol Job”

CNBC Pundit Advises Murdoch To Shatter NewsCorp

On Chick Flicks: WolcottSez Carrie Bradshaw Oughta Meet Mildred Pierce

“What Working For Wikipedia Taught Me”

NY Times

Fox Favors FCC Ruling On Fleeting F—s

LA Times

L.A. Location Shoots On Rise

Ebert Goes Architectural

hollywoodreporter.com

Report: Jackson Keeps “Hobbit” Habit, Meeting With Actors In L.A.

FT Goes Deep And Wide On How Google Works; Latest Installments Include Lessons On How Corp Manipulates Results

Details Linked About Stieg Larsson’s Unfinished, Likely Never-To-Be-Completed Fourth Lisbeth Salander Tome: The Girl Who Would Be Canuck

LA Times

“Murky and flat… commands a lot of admiration but doesn’t produce a commensurate level of enjoyment… cinematic Calamine lotion amid a swarm of mosquitoes.”
Zeitchick Sez He’s No Reviewer, Then Dismisses Inception At Length


wsj

Music Labels Aroused By Use Of Their Songs On Porn Sites

“This country can only function with an independent media with access to what the government is doing. How is anybody to know what’s going on, if the media doesn’t have access to the story?”
NPR On The Suspension Of The Press In BP Gulf Oilspill Coverage
Plus – PBS’ “5 Digital PR Lessons From BP’s Oilspill Response”

“Harvey Pekar’s life was not an open book. It was an open comic book.”
The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Obit
And – Chef Ruhlman Says Goodbye To Fellow Clevelander

“There is no doubt that Polanski did what he did, which is have sex with a 13-year-old after plying her with booze. There is no doubt also that after all these years there is something stale about the case, not to mention a ‘victim’ who has long ago forgiven her assailant and dearly wishes the whole thing would go away. So do I.”
Annoying, Fustian Washington Post “Columnist” Richard Cohen Salutes Switzerland On “Freeing” Roman Polanski

An Open Letter To Maureen Dowd About Her NYT Audition Piece To Write Next Sex And The City Instalment

la observed

Latest LA Times Turf-Encroaching Ad Found Despicable By News Staff

NY Times

Naftali Tuli Kupferberg, “Bohemian And Fug,” 86, “World’s Oldest Rock Star”
With – Tuli’s 175 Videos On YouTube, Including Recent “Perverbs”
With – “CIA Man,” His Great, Ribald Song Under End Credits Of Burn After Reading (“F—ing Amen”)
And – 129 Of His 1,001 Ways To Beat The Draft

telegraph.co.uk

“As an old prostitute once wearily complained at the end of a long shift, it’s not the work, it’s the stairs.”
Why Watch Theater On A Movie Screen?

A Close Reading Of The Loose Ends Of Night Moves And Harry Moseby As A Knight In Distress

guardian

“There’s an extra-special thrill for the film reviewer: going to see a film in the morning. At 10.30, or even earlier. It feels illegal, immoral and absolutely brilliant. Short of actually drinking a pint of absinthe and smoking one of Lord Henry Wootton’s opium-flavoured cigarettes in the cinema foyer, it couldn’t be more decadent.”

Why Is David Lynch Crowd-Sourcing His New Doc?

telegraph.co.uk

“I have busy nights. If I wake up during a dream I can usually go back to sleep and finish the story.”
Marion Cotillard, Dreamer

U. S. Appeals Court Strikes Down FCC Indecency Policy For Unconstitutional Vagueness

telegraph.co.uk

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”
Prince Dances About The Internet

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“I don’t think it’s cruel to say this, because John himself would undoubtedly have turned it into a gleeful anecdote: When he had the stroke that killed him, he was at a local dinner theater. Hell of a review.”

“I am inclined to aver that every activity needs its critics, from narcissists bloviating in Washington to exhibitors of knee holes in their blue jeans by way of following a fad. So, too, tennis players and others wearing their caps backward. There is, to be sure, only fairly innocuous folly in puncturing pants or reversing caps, but for political or artistic or religious twisting of thought or harboring holes in the head there is rather less excuse. I have always inveighed against the bleary journalism practiced by newspaper reviewers, as opposed to the real criticism performed by, well, critics.”

“I often felt a twinge of grief at the idea that John Simon had devoted his life to a method of work that could only make him increasingly unhappy. Here was a man, elegant, articulate, and vastly knowledgeable, fluent in at least half a dozen languages, whose gifts of mind gave nothing back to the arts he wrote about except a few unkind remarks that made fun of someone’s performance, ethnicity, physical attributes, or, with a pun, on his target’s name. (“If this is Norman Wisdom, I’ll take Saxon folly.”) Other theatre critics keep such darts in their rucksacks for occasional use; John lived by them.”

“One person’s critic is another person’s crackpot. That they are not united in their opinions is ascribable to the Latin saying: quot homines, tot sententiae. I myself prefer being considered a creep, but that is what you get for having what Vladimir Nabokov called ‘Strong Opinions.’ It is odd that in a country so wallowing in negativity, starting with mass shootings and climaxing with Trump, such an unimportant matter as theater criticism should generate so much hostility. The only target patently more important is lead in the drinking water.”

The DVD Wrapup: Cold War, Betty Blue, Official Secrets, Demons, Olivia, American Dreamer, Land of Yik Yak

E. Scott Weinberg On Youthful Fangoria Encounters

Rome Bookstore Closes

With a Grauniad-Alleged $300 Million Budget, Could The Yet-Unseen But Surely Weird Cats Pass A Billion Dollars at The Box Office?

WEEKEND READS ON MEDIAQUAKE

Tribune Trolley Problem

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