MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2013

guardian

Another Journo Falls In Love With Sarah Polley At Cafe Diplomatico

Michael Kinsley Types Something About The Fox Searchlight Intern Case But Does Not Make A Lick Of Sense

Pappademas On Gandolfini

NY Times

Hulu May Redo In Yoohoo To Revenue Lookie-Loos

Behind Facebook “Shadow Profiles,” In Which The Company Harvests Personal Data You Don’t Want Them To Have “To Better Create Friend Suggestions”

NY Times

Columnists Find Zombies Attractive As Fodder
“The metaphor about the broken global system is less vivid than the metaphor about the broken Hollywood system,” Asserts MoDowd
And – John Kass, Well, If You Read John Kass, Well, He Seems To Have Seen The Film
Plus – Foreign Policy Sics The Author Of “Theories of International Politics and Zombies”

“James Gandolfini Loved His Rescue Dog”

variety

“James Wan’s sixth and best feature is pull-out-the-stops horror filmmaking of a very sophisticated order, treating the story’s spiritual overtones with the utmost sincerity even as it playfully mines all manner of apparent clichés for every last shiver of pleasure.”

LA Times

“According to three people who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.”
Yet Another Anonymously-Sourced Version Of Robinov’s Plans At Warner Bros.

guardian

“Oh, I’ve had to mother—- a few people every now and then.”
Shone On Seth Rogen’s “Slacker’s Guide To Getting Ahead”

hollywoodreporter.com

Keanu Roadshows Tai Chi In China

guardian

“It’s just not possible to break out of a club, and clubs are what the Brits do really well. Everything is a fecking club.”
Mike Figgis On Today’s “Defeatist” British Film Industry

telegraph.co.uk

Pacino Talks To Hiscock About His Lighter Side

LA Times

Sharkey Sez Brad Pitt “Model For Aging Actors”

guardian

“I like those kinds of films and I don’t know why they’re not being made any more. This has got a —-ing really massive freakout; there’s no holding back anything for taste, we absolutely go for it. You’ve got people —-ting in it, and —-s and drugs and madness and very fast cutting, so it’s earthy but it’s also an art film. It’s not polite.”
Bravura Brit Ben Wheatley Does Not See Himself Becoming “A Hollywood Guy”

Bruce Springsteen Plays Entirety Of “Born To Run” For James Gandolfini In Midst Of 30-Track Conventry Show

NY Times

“Max Brooks Is Not Kidding About The Zombie Apocalypse”

Ellen Page On Filming Personal Films And Blockbusters

LA Times

Getting Giddy-Goofy With The Ladies Of The Heat

“Does it matter that ‘Orwellian’ has become a conveniently meaningless cliché?”

wsj

Kickstarting The Backlash

NY Times

“Sex scenes are rare in American movies because most Hollywood filmmakers are practiced at violence; they either leave sex to juvenile innuendo or cover it up with violence.”
NYT Convenes Panel On F—ing On Film, Brings Armond White Into Room With Martha Coolidge, Richard Porton, More

NY Times

Carr And Scott Do Their Statler-And-Waldorf Act Over “Cinematic Kryptonite”

Chris Columbus Writes Kids’ Book, Checks In, Of Course, With JK Rowling Before Publishing

LA Times

Focus Group Indicates Students Steal HBO Go, Netflix

“I used to use musical metaphors to describe my movies. These days I’ve been using drugs to do that. Drive was like gettting the best cocaine and doing it all night long. Only God Forgives is like doing good high school acid, and not the kind where you sit in a chair and see things, the kind of good acid where you become the chair.”

Advance Publications Gut-Cuts Go West
Oregonian Moves To Four-Day Delivery, 35 Newsroom Staff Axed, Including Editors, Reporters, Photographers: Subscribers Will Get Online-Only “MyDigitalO”
“Editors will now be known as “managing producers,” and all employees moving to the new company will be required to take a fresh drug test.”

filmlinc

Eug At Provincetown On One Future Of Movies: $1,000 Locally-Shot Homegrowns For Friends And Family And, Just Maybe, A Nearby Film Festival

NY Times

Food Network’s Butter Queen Deen Out Of The Fat And Into The Fire

variety

Ownja! Marvel Moves Its Amazing Casting Scoops And Remarkable Character Enhancements To Own Website

“We’ve concluded that approximately 6 million Facebook users had email addresses or telephone numbers shared.”
Just One Bug Facebook Will ‘Fess Up To

guardian

Liam Neeson Calls For Renewed Search For The Irish “Disappeared” In The Troubles

Patrick Wang On The Philosophical Drama Of His Great In the Family

guardian

Editor Walter Murch As “Beautiful Nucleus”

Brett Martin‘s “The Night Tony Soprano Disappeared”

NY Times

Barnes And Cieply Weigh The Weighing Of The Wait For Warner Bros. And Robinov To… Erm?

guardian

Kip Thorne In Chris Nolan’s Side

“Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof says Iran needs more than a new leader”

indie wire

Scott Farrar, Zombie Fixer

NY Times

“Wedded bliss is a nice idea, but it does not usually produce a satisfying narrative.”
Scott On “Marriage As Work” At The Movies

variety

“We’re here to get behind this content.”
Walmart Tells Producers They’ll Move More Family And “Faith-Based” Product

NY Times

“Such is the fate of the great character actors, who, role after role, are called on to add shading – a line reading, a swaggering gait, a jaw that leads, quivers, retreats–to lesser pictures. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s that’s precisely what Mr. Gandolfini did until Mr. Chase arrived with his game changer.”
Dargis On Galdofini 

Phipps Sees The Never-To-Be “Sopranos” Movie In His Head

NY Times

Kehr On The Restoration Of The Last Of The Lubitsch Musicals

Kurosawa’s Ran: “Noh Exit”

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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