MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2012

variety

UBS Kick-In Of $75 Million Brings WeinsteinCo Funds To $225M

Salon

O’Hehir Goes Belly-To-Belly With Alec Baldwin

From 2008, Andrew Sarris And Molly Haskell Speak To Aspiring Critics 76-minute audio

roger ebert

 “Andrew Sarris, who loved movies, is dead at 83.”
Ebert On Sarris

variety

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter Gets Embargo Blood Sucked By AP, Voice & Variety After Pre-U.S. Launch In UK

With – Pinkerton’s Contempt, Unguarded In VOICE

And – Lemire Mired In “Really Rather Tasteless” Details For AP

Longworth Cover-Stories Woody

 “If auteurism were nothing other than the recognition of arcane patterns across a director’s body of work, it would have had a short and obscure run. But in fact, its power comes from its inspiration of artists. Auteurism is the mode of criticism through which burgeoning directors identify those established filmmakers in whom they see themselves—and the future of the art form—reflected.”
Brody On Sarris And The Other Sarrisites

“It has been impossible to be a critic since the 1968 publication of ‘The American Cinema’ without reckoning with Sarris’ work, which, at its best, combined the French penchant for logic and categorization with a spiky American iconoclasm.”

Emerson Peers Into “Adam Sandler’s House Of Cruelty”

NYC Peeps On Storage Units To Stem Bootleg Sales; In Brooklyn, Barry Boubacar Had 44,000 Disks Awaiting Streetcorners

Andrew Sarris On Pauline Kael’s Death

LA Times

“Though I’d quibble with some of his choices today, the subjective notion of accuracy is far from the point.”
Strained Seriousness: Turan On Sarris

The Real Shawn Levy On Once Editing Andrew Sarris At American Film Magazine

A Digital Repository Of Andrew Sarris’ NY Observer Columns

NY Times

St. Peter Has A Subject For Further Research
ANDREW SARRIS WAS 83
And – Sarris’ Psycho Notice, His First For The VOICE

NY Times

“We were so gloriously contentious, everyone bitching at everyone. We all said some stupid things, but film seemed to matter so much.”
A 2009 Profile Of Andrew Sarris

“Hail The Conquering Hero”: Kent Jones‘ Profile Of Andrew Sarris

LA Times

“The movies we loved were footnotes of histories being written. Auteurism was about subtext. The way we looked at subtext changed movie criticism.”
Desowitz‘s 2000 Appreciation Of Sarris’ Body Of Work

Andrew Sarris In Front Of The New Yorker Theater Marquee In 1960s, Hanging With A Friend

guardian

Grauniad Spells “Sarris” Correctly; Too Bad About “Howard Hawkes”

indie wire

“Piranhaconda” Director Has Words For Online Reviewer, Mostly “F—,” “F—,” And “F—“

wsj

“All these little dreams coming through”: Al Pacino At 72

LA Times

Rumor: Looper Pulls A Johnny Mnemonic With A Chinese Version With More Shanghai-Set Footage, Restored After Reportedly Testing Badly With American Audience

“I texted back. At 5:34 a.m., before dawn, when the sky was surreally blue and I was asleep, she sent a photo of her face, shot from below, her green eyes staring straight. “I’m out walking,” she wrote, “it’s nice out.”
Dan P. Lee Goes 7,300 Words With Fiona Apple And, Well… It’s Magnificent

NY Times

Ben Sisario Weighs In On The NPR Intern-David Lowery Back-And-Forth On Music That’s Not Paid For

News Limited Australian Newspapers Trims 19 Divisions To 5, Total Of Firings To Follow, Fewer Than Fairfax’s 1,900

“That’s the kind of Lincoln we don’t know much about. We need to think of him as a human being —somebody with a sense of humor and someone who was willing to be ridiculous and funny.”

“How to Remake Rambo for $95.51″

ny post

“If Joy Behar or Sherri Shepherd was a dude, they’d be off TV. They’re not funny enough for dudes. What if Roseanne Barr was a dude? Think we’d know who she was? Honestly.”
Adam Carolla Bros With NYPost, Sez Women Not Funny; Testifies That At Party At Jimmy Kimmel’s, Tom Cruise “Uncomfortable In His Own Skin”

Five Guys Discuss “Girls”‘s Last Episode For Slate, Including Karpovsky And An Exec-Producer; It’s the Slate-iest!

guardian

Male Strippers Sue Magic Mike?

LA Times

How Twitter Made @KellyOxford A H’wd Writing Star From The Strength Of Her Voice From Her Home In Alberta

Friedkin: “We don’t set out to promote violence”

telegraph.co.uk

Telegraph First-Reviews The Amazing Spider-Man (spoilery)

guardian

And – So Does The Guardian

John Kaye Serializes His Memoir About Being A Young Screenwriter In The 1960s Paid To Censor The Smothers Brothers
And – Part II

Pappademas And Witzke‘s 8,100-Word “A (Not So) Brief Conversation About The Alien Franchise”

guardian

Welsh Comic Victor Spinetti, 82, Acted In Help!, A Hard Day’s Night

SPC So Excited For Almodóvar

NY Times

Three Weeks Before Its Video Release, NYT Joins #TeamMargaret, Talks “Thwarted Masterpiece” With Lonergan While Misspelling His Surname In Photo Cutline

RIP Film Preservationist Nancy Mysel

Alamo Drafthouse Takes Over AMC Mainstreet In Kansas City

“I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.”
David Lowery‘s Letter To The NPR Intern Who Says She Bought Only 15 Of The 11,000 Songs In Her Library

The Summer Rerun That Is Movieline’s Sacking Of Zacharek

42 Unseen Set Photos From Moonrise Kingdom

Susan Tyrrell, 67, Acted In Fat City, Cry-Baby, Big Top Pee-Wee, Forbidden Zone, Tales Of Ordinary Madness, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
And – Her Website

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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