MCN Curated Headlines Archive for August, 2012

It’s A Lawful Age Of Moonshine

NY Times

Times Tumbles About Group To DillerCo For $300 Mil Cash

guardian

“Phillipson suggested that women bring copies of the trilogy to burn alongside an effigy of Christian Grey. ‘People have said we are total lunatic fascists for wanting to burn a book. But is there something sacred about it, or is it just rubbish?'”

telegraph.co.uk

“There’s an assumption that Nazis are the only people who burn books. What we are saying is: this book is rubbish and we would like to reduce it to ashes.”

NY Times

Living Quadrophenia

The New Yorker On Neil Armstrong
Anthony Lane, 2012 and E. B. White, 1969 

guardian

Nick Cave On Making “True Myth” Like Lawless

NY Times

Documenting Ann Richards’ Texas

Hari Kunzru On Werner Herzog, “The Present Director”

guardian

Michael Apted On Yet Another Squashed Stones Doc

deadline

“Guess it sucks to be Polone these days. Maybe he should make his day job writing that lame blog.”
In Rush To Bash Premium, La Finke Fails To Note Producer Polone’s Call For Her Banishment From Polite Discourse

Earlier – “I think Nikki Finke’s manner of writing nasty personal attacks, threatening people, and exhibiting general incivility is unacceptable, and I am asking those who read this to ‘unfavorite’ Deadline from their browser, read it less often, and stop tipping her when they have a story until such time as she has begun to adhere to a more professional practice of journalism.”

NY Times

“In order to have a pleasant life, you have to be able to trust that people are who they say they are. And if you questioned everything you heard, you’d never get anything done.”
Bruni On Compliance, “An Essential Parable Of Human Gullibility”

guardian

And – Glenn Greenwald On “Authoritarian Desire”

LA Times

Sony Goes B’wy Musical, Starting With Tootsie

NY Times

India Starts Selective, Politically-Motivated Crackdown On Internet; Number Of Daily Text Messages Allowed Set At 20

guardian

Colin Farrell, No Longer The “Wild One”

Animator Ken Walker, 91, Worked At Disney, More

LA Times

“His characters were so perfectly real. He was a pretty good writer who could channel his own experiences.”
James Fogle, 75, Incarcerated Career Criminal Who Wrote Drugstore Cowboy

Your Rights To Your iTunes Library And E-Books Don’t Extend Past The Grave

Expendables 2‘s “Nepalese” Bad Guys Speak Thai!

Buzz Aldrin Responds To Conspiracist Who Tells Him He Did Not Land On The Moon 21-sec vid

NY Times

Profiling A Quartet Of Bachelors Approaching 40, Together In Same Apartment For 18 Years, Times Offers That Kurosawa And Preston Sturges Are Province Of “Film Snobs”

NY Times

“Men have landed and walked on the moon.

Two Americans, astronauts of Apollo 11, steered their fragile four-legged lunar module safely and smoothly to the historic landing yesterday at 4:17:40 P.M., Eastern daylight time.

Neil A. Armstrong, the 38-year-old commander, radioed to earth and the mission control room here: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

“People think ‘independent’ means it has to be independent subject matter, but it doesn’t, necessarily. You have a lot more freedom because you can go right to the financiers who love working directly with the filmmaker. And if you can build up a trust with them, then they just write you the check and then you go get the distributor. And then you and the financier own it.”
Robert Rodriguez Looks Forward

wsj

“Kodak To Sell Film Business That Made It A Blue Chip” 

NEIL ARMSTRONG WAS 82
And – The Onion’s #@$!! Front Page On The Moon Landing
Plus – “For Neil Armstrong, It Was All about Landing the Eagle”
And – A Large, Beautiful Version Of Armstrong’s Smile After Walking On The Moon
Plus – The NASA Transcript Of The Apollo 11 Landing Communications

NY Times

“My Father The Pioneering Cable Guy”

“Midnight In The Garden Of East Texas”: The 1998 Texas Monthly Article That Inspired Bernie

Salon

Lundegaard Challenges Chait’s Terrifyingly Lame New York Article About The Myth Of “Liberal” H’wd

Whit Stillman Talks Some More About Writing

Pushing It With William Friedkin And The Real Shawn Levy

guardian

“A jury has rubberstamped Apple’s exploitation of the patent system. But Samsung’s $1 billion loss will cost consumers dear”

Expendables 2‘s Simon West Can’t Get Enough Withnail & I

NY Times

“The knotty-pine Tamarack Cafe and Movie House in Inlet, N.Y., is closing after having served that lakeside community, not far from Old Forge, since 1946.”
Resort Towns Face Last Picture Show

Syrian Doc Producer And Activist Orwa Nyrabia, Director Of That Country’s Dox Box Film Festival, Missing After Arriving At Damascus Airport 

“Their fight pivots on a vast technological shift in the movie exhibition industry.”
Houpt On Possible Picketing Of TIFF12 Showings Over The Work Of “Digital Revisors”

LA Times

Sharkey On Tony Scott As Man Of Action Who Brought The Best To His Men

NY Times

The “Microfame” Of Maude Apatow

guardian

Will Apple Go After Motorola And Other Competitors Now?

“She has so much information crowding sentence after sentence that the absence of vaudeville timing is a side issue, and indeed while she was going at full steam you would swear there was no other means of transport: this, she convinces you, is the way to talk about popular art.”
Clive James Goes Hissy On Pauline Kael

“Claims that 2016 Obama’s America is the number two documentary in 2012 are at best misleading.”

Jury Tells Samsung To Give Poor, Poor Apple A Billion Dollars For Six Patent Violations

Ebert Reminisces Of Siskel’s Unabiding Contempt For “Lip-Flap”

telegraph.co.uk

Tom Stoppard On His “Fortunate” Life

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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