MCN Curated Headlines Archive for November, 2011

Corliss Goes Postal For Harrelson In Rampart

Gervais Offers Up A Couple Of Costume Changes For His Latest Globe Roast

Lieberman Asked Google For Button On Blogger To Flag “Terrorist” Material

guardian

“I suppose when I was writing ‘V for Vendetta’ I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction.”
Alan Moore On That Newly-Ubiquitous Mask

In Paris, Sofia Coppola Curates Robert Mapplethorpe

“Researchers Build Terminator Contact Lens”

hollywoodreporter.com

Tom Hardy Talks DKR Battle Royale…But To Whom?
Because – In 2011, Does Keeping An Exclusive To Your Print Magazine Mean That Content Theft Of That Print Content By Online Entities Is Okay?
The Actual Source Of The Now-Oft-Ripped-Off Content

“For 13 years I sat in a rented room. The phone didn’t ring. That’s a humbling, lonely, exhausting, disgusting, terrible place to be. I thought the dance was over, but I wasn’t going to give it up. I went to the psychiatrist, I kept going to the gym, I kept thinking, ‘Okay, tomorrow I’m going to turn it around’.”
More Rourke Raillery

Bert Stern’s Photos Of A Flirty Marilyn
And – “The whole thing gives off strenuously bad vibes. It’s not simply the offensive and vainglorious notion of a thousand-dollar art book—all but designed to set your teeth on edge with class resentment. No, it’s the actual insides of the book that are so distasteful. The photos snapped at Stern’s studio have long been described as the most intimate and beautiful ever taken of Monroe. They are also exploitative, unflattering, and spooky.”

“What is the state there for unless it is there to help us in the social sphere and the sphere of culture?”
Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Faustian” Pact With Putin

Siting The Slouch Potato
Ebert On Good Dr. Bordwell On Where To Sit At The Flickers

Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim Talks About Her Cairo Arrest And Detention

Zowie!: “The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, The Artist Who Gave Computing A Human Face”

Is Brad Bird Delivering Mission: Impossible Into Bondage?

guardian

John Grisham On A Life In Writing

NY Times

The Rolling Stock Of Tintin

Peter Aspden On Nanni Moretti

NY Times

“I really surprised myself. You know that scene in Star Wars? Luke and Solo—I don’t even know their names—are about to be squashed in that thing. That’s what I felt like every day on the set. Like I was being pressed up against the wall of my own abilities.”
Cathy Horyn Mash-Notes Lunch With Michelle Williams

2,300 Telling Words On The Corporate Incompetence That Demolished Borders

Stellar: Reuters Picks Its 100 Best News Photos Of 2011

More On The Cairo Arrest And Release Of American-Egyptian Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim

Popova On Robert Levine’s “Free Ride: Digital Parasites And The Fight For The Business Of Culture”

hollywoodreporter.com

How Tintin Producer Sir Peter Put Kiwi Kino On The Map

guardian

An Arthouse Survives In Sarajevo

Ticket Price Hike In China For Zhang Yimou’s Latest Stirs Debate Over Profit Sharing
And – Kraicer Reports From The 8th Annual China Independent Film Festival
Plus – A Look At China’s Strange, Mysterious “Ghost Cities”

NY Times

“The searing images of that day were dictated by Mr. Wicker from a phone booth in stark, detailed prose drawn from notes scribbled on a White House itinerary sheet. It filled two front-page columns and the entire second page.”
Tom Wicker, 85, Only NYT Journalist In Dallas When JFK Assassinated; Became DC Bureau Chief And Op-Edder

LA Times

Turan Glories: “The Artist is the wonder of the age, as much a miracle as Avatar“

NY Times

Fiennes’ Fierce Directorial Debut, Coriolanus

guardian

United Arab Emirates Retitles Puss In Boots, Advises Sr. Banderas Not To Say “Poose” In Interviews

NY Times

Fassbender And McQueen On The Sex And The City Of Shame

Jeff Nichols On The “Storm Within” Taking Shelter

NY Times

Birth Scene In Breaking Dawn Seems To Have Caused A Couple Of Seizures

Hazanavicius And VanAirsdale Talk Auteur, The Artist And “Complexity”

NY Times

Scott And Dargis Talk Male Repression In J. Edgar And A Dangerous Method

guardian

“Why are male writers so bad at sex scenes?”
Plus – Grauniad Excerpts “Bad Sex Award” Nominees King, Murukami, Child, Auel, Guterson, More

NY Times

Tropic Thunder Co-Screenwriter Scripts Murdoch Succession

telegraph.co.uk

British Pop Artist Gerald Laing, 75, Often Used Reflected Life Of Film Stars

“I’d love to see the Academy nominate more comedies, but giving them their own award would subtly communicate to voters that comedies can’t compete on their own merits.”

NY Times

Blogged In Lightning: Kehr On New Edition Of Birth Of A Nation

Lacey: “Telefilm gets it right with ‘Success Index’ for Canadian films”

BBC

Remembering Tim Hetherington 7’16” vid

Roger Corman Trailers-From-Hell St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

“People don’t live on top of each other in apartments. There’s a house every mile and a half apart, and you’re in four feet of ice. It’s unbelievable. There’s a reason this doesn’t take place in Cleveland.”
Fincher On Dragon Tattoo‘s Location

“I wish I could brand the movies in a way so they would just look at the page and trust me rather than a critic or anything else.”
AP: “Harvey Weinstein Seeks To Raise Company’s Profile”

NY Times

EU Court Rejects Call for ISPs To Curb Illegal File-Sharing

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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