MCN Curated Headlines Archive for November, 2011

LA Times

Cinemark Knows No Shame

NY Times

Tony-Winning Parker-Stone “Book Of Mormon” Makes Its Return In 9 Months Flat

“So Long For Awhile”: Ebert Announces Hiatus For “At The Movies”

The New Yorker Asks The Right Questions About The Disappearing Of Margaret, But Apparently Didn’t Ask Them Of The Right People

LA Times

Producer Graham King On Hugo’s Slow Rollout: “A Masterpiece Needs To Be Nurtured”

The 5 Best Philadelphia Movies

LA Times

“Everybody yells First Amendment so you never get very much done about it.”
74-Year-Old Senator-For-Life Jay Rockefeller Tells FCC Commissioners That Media Is Too “Dumbed Down,” “Obscene” And “Promiscuous” For His Liking

NY Times

MPAA Spokesman Says Dangerously Overreaching SOPA Legislation Will Be Pared Back Ever-So-Slightly

Errol Morris On The Art Of The Interview

110 Features From 31 Countries
88 World Premieres
46 First-Timers
4,042 Feature Submissions
Sundance 2012 Announces Films In Competition

Lim On Murakami

guardian

Michael Shannon Is Not Trying To Exorcise Any Demons

A Petition To Free The Great-But-Disappeared Margaret For Critics’ Year-End Consideration, With Admirers’ Comments
And – Ebiri On Why It Matters

On “Scorsese On Scorsese” And News Of A British Cinema Doc

How Changing Media Landscape Could Topple FCC Indecency Rules

Facebook Makes Privacy Settlement With FTC; Involves “Opting-In” And Rare, Intermittent Check-Ups

nymag

How Shame Makes Gavin Polone Feel Good

“In Defense Of Shameless Oscar Campaigns”

BBC

“We have to react against the theme park film, as well made as they are, and as enjoyable as some of them are.”
Marty Says: Don’t Take The Ride

NY Times

VanAirsdale Goes To The Dogs For The Artist

Phillip Noyce Nearly Bowls A Googly In India

Attorney General Holder Asks America To Report Neighbors Who Download, Or Buy Canadian Drugs

Mark Harris Calculates Some Oscarmetrics

Comedian Patrice O’Neal Was 41; Appeared In Scary Movie 4; Roasted Charlie Sheen

NY Times

British Playwright Michael Hastings, 73, Wrote Tom & Viv, The Nightcomers

wsj

“Let us now praise professional book reviewers, like them or not.”

How Did First!-In-America New York Film Critics Circle Announce Silent Film The Artist As Best Of The Year? Twitter.

Early Voters Give Out Only One Award For A Film Not Seen Or Released By October 1
NYFCC Announces The Early Winners

Report: “VOD Rides To The Rescue Of Indie Film”

The Artist vs The Descendants is the story in another year of all big indies duking it out
Indies Spirit Noms Announced

Gothams Ties Beginners To Tree

LA Times

Westwood’s AMC Avco Center 4 Moviehouse Shutters Sunday

“The film must be refused classification because it contains gratuitous, exploitative or offensive depictions of violence with a very high degree of impact and cruelty which has a high impact. Films classified RC cannot be sold, hired, or advertised in Australia.”
Oz Censors Refuse Human Centipede 2‘s Refuse

How Hedy Lamarr Invented Bluetooth And GPS

nymag

A Warrior Moment Between Nolte And His Director vid

guardian

Sean O’Hagan On The Beauty Of Ken Russell’s Street Photography
And – Russell Picks One Of His Favorites

“Much of the drama emerges through the interstices of the tensely unfolding scenes of emotional writhing and indecision; the sixty-nine-minute sketchbook implies a novelistic amplitude of experience.”
 Sounds Like Richard Brody Likes What’s Likely 2011’s Last Joe Swanberg Joint

David Cronenberg’s “Positive Transference”

guardian

“In Praise Of Ken Russell At The BBC”

Breaking Down: Rumors Stir Of Summit-Lionsgate Merger

Feds Summarily Shutter Another 150 Websites On “Cyber-Monday”

variety

Icon UK Group To End UK Distrib, Turn Library Over To Lionsgate UK

guardian

Roger Moore Is Still Looking For A Good Review

nymag

A Delicious, Delirious Conversation With Carey Mulligan

“Hollywood Gingrich”: The Nat’l Review On Newt’s Video Factory

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MCN Curated Headlines

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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