MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2013

wsj

“Young hipsters in northern Tehran, fruit peddlers in the bazaar, teachers in the suburbs, parliamentarians and members of the plainclothes Basij militia loyal to the regime have seen it.”
Bootleg Argo DVDs Of Interest To Iranian Citizenry

NY Times

Stelter On That 13-Hour Fincher Binge Available Beginning Midnight PST On Netflix

“Thing is, what Netflix needs is network-level smashes.”
Poland Defines Netflix 2013

Time Inc. To Eliminate 500 More Jobs After BainCo Analysis

Michael Chabon On Wes Anderson

Groundhog Day Is 20… Again? Still? 

Emerson On “The Private Lives Of Jodie Foster”

MCN Public Service Announcement
Oscar Voting Starts In One Week

Rick Prelinger‘s Manifesto “On The Virtues Of Preexisting Material”

LA Times

LAT Excited To Repeat MTV’s Gossip About Dakota Fanning Being Nude In Her Latest From Sundance Which Premiered Twelve Days Before This Story

guardian

Pinewood Studios Still Hoping To Double Space On Green Belt Land

Late Internet Activist Aaron Swartz’s Ever-More-Moving Afterword To Cory Doctorow’s “Homeland”

guardian

Christian Slater Says He Feels Sexier Sober

Sony To Stop Shipments Of MiniDisc Players

guardian

Joe Queenan, At 62, Cautions Against Prescribing Amour To Those Over 60

“She must have been named after the ’90s R&B group Zhané.”
Harmin’ Armond Gets Around To Beasts Of The Southern Wild; Vocabulary Invokes “Freaks,” “Gaudy,” “Lurid,” “Pickaninny”; “Motherly Black Whore”

How Stefan Kudelski, 84,  Changed The Way We Hear Movies With The Nagra

“Well, this is a big bugaboo of mine watching what’s happening lately because I’m like you should have a reason for every shot, a reason for every cut. If you don’t then you’ve broken … I don’t know if you’ve broken a contract with the audience but you’ve broken a contract with me.”
Soderbergh Answers Qs After Walter Reade Side Effects Preview

Cricket Ken Tucker Out At Ent Weekly

guardian

“Internet copyright law has to have public support if it’s going to work”

Kenny Muses On David Mamet Getting Away With It

indie wire

Philadelphia Weekly Cuts Film Section By Half; Eliminates Capsule Reviews

Michael Shannon Gets Action Figure: It’s Not For Take Shelter

M. Phillips On “What The Hell” Walter Hill And New Orleans

How Trapped Are Your Contractually-Leased Digital Data Movies And TV Shows?

Is The Dominion Ready For The Mandatory “Starlight: The Canadian Movie Channel” At $10 A Year?

Australia’s Four Oscar Winners Stand Behind AACTA Awards

“‘Smash’ is a case study: in how megalomania and television can clash unproductively; in how high expectations can crash immediately; and in how intense network and studio oversight can result in a paranoid show creator and a bad TV show.”

Nicholas Hoult’s Life After Death

wsj

Kodak Film Used For Six Of Nine Best Picture Nominees

Russell’s Toughest Scene To Write In Silver Linings Playbook

Ebert‘s “Great Ecstacy Of The Carver Herzog”

“The trouble with female celebrity profiles and the men who write them”

SXSW Announces 2013 Feature Lineup; 109 Attractions Include Work By Sayles, Whedon, Sklar, Swanberg, Schnack/Wilson, Poyser, Mazer, Rifkin, Von Scherler Mayer, Korine

hollywoodreporter.com

9/11 Families Offer Press Release Regarding Zero Dark Thirty

variety

MGM Near $650 Million ReFi

indie wire

“Let’s monetize this mother——. I’m more or less at the end of my career and it’s just a gas to do this.”
Eug On A Nearly-Finished Cut Of The Schrader-Ellis-Lohan The Canyons

Rosenbaum On “The Best Jewish Director You’ve Never Heard Of”

hollywoodreporter.com

CAA Goes After Tony Scott Estate For A Million Dollars In Commissions

“Financiers, insurance companies did not like the insurance profile. But they’re based on dumb — not facts, perceptions. We just had to not have insurance, which was fine.”
Longworth Inside Inside Charlie Sheen

Coates On “David Mamet And The Irrelevance Of The Actual Meanings Of Words”

Sapphires Sweeps Six Australian AACTA Awards: Film, Director, Leading Actress, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay And Chris O’Dowd For Leading Actor

U Mass Prof Ponders, Why No Actual Slavery In Lincoln?

“In comes Sam with a burger in his hand and a drink in the other hand and stinking like fast food. Me and Quentin and Lawrence were sitting on the couch, and he walked in and just started sipping that shake and biting that burger and looking at all of us. I was scared —-less. I thought that this guy was going to shoot a gun right through my head.”
Sampling VF’s Pulp Fiction Oral History

Jim Nabors On Marriage At 82

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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