MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2013

NY Times

Steve Pond Tallies Estimates Of How Few Oscar Voters Could Insure Nominations In Certain Fields
AND – Ryzik Repeats Same

Being Jack Huston

Schoonmaker Talks Wolf Cuts With Tapley

When The Gov’t Examined It’s A Wonderful Life For Communist Propaganda

indie wire

Thompson Ponders Why Two Film Societies Shifted Their Bigs

NY Daily News

The Movies Of The Summer Of ’71: Two-Lane Blacktop, Carnal Knowledge, Taking Off, The Beguiled…

Shelton J. Lee Throws Another Trash Can

hollywoodreporter.com

John Singleton Sez African-American Films Have Been “Unshackled”

Agnieszka Holland On The Long, Diverse Patterns Of Her Writing-Directing Career

Her’s Him, Here
Spike Jonze Evolves, Just Like You
While – Aronofsky Examines Johansson

And – “For a while I want to make things that are more like pencil sketches, while movies are more like large oil paintings. For a while I’m gonna think small.”
And – “It feels like a memory. The mood of a day without the specifics. A memory of this girl, in this beautiful, funny forest.”
Plus – “I  didn’t do research into other people’s futures, I mainly worked off the script and off of emotional things we found that we tried to incorporate into our visual world. We’d find photographs from different photographers and say, ‘this is beautiful, this is clean, how do we make a world like that? Rather than thinking of architecture first, how do we create this soft bubble?’”
Designing Her Here And Now

The Economist Sez H’wd Just As Unpredictable Now As When Wm. Goldman Said, Nobody. Knows. Anything.

Mariah Carey Criticized For Allegedly Taking $1 Million From Angolan Dictator

Leakers Who Leaked That Leon Panetta Leaked Secrets To Zero Dark Thirty May Be Punished, But Panetta Will Not

Who Hitched Joaquin’s Trousers?: Him

Ronee Blakley Talks Nashville

“An alligator skin couch, really nice tassels on loafers, when a woman flips the hair out of her face to light a cigarette, Cuban baseball players, pork chops, walking naked around the locker room for hours and hours, controlled burns, the bathroom at a steakhouse…”
Things Ron Burgundy Likes And Things Ron Burgundy Dislikes

hollywoodreporter.com

“All who volunteer to serve on these committees deserve to be commended and thanked for their service. It is a giant task and not every country’s entry is particularly enjoyable to watch.”
A Harrumph To The Foreign Language Oscar Shortlist

NY Times

“‘You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movie into a theater!’ Mr. Lucas said.”
James B. Stewart Tries To Understand The Movie Blockbuster Game

Bong Joon-ho Admires A Criterion 10

Elle Publishes A Weird Little Tale From A Writer Who In College Slept With Someone Who’s Kinda-Sorta Famous Now

Glenn Kenny Remembers Pornographer Al Goldstein

indie wire

Sam Adams-Sasha Stone Fracas Ensues Over Utah Film Critics Award And Scorn For “Defensive White Person”

variety

“My mother didn’t raise me to count nipples.”
Richard Heffner, 88, Longtime MPAA Ratings Czar

Sweet Reading: John Goodman Talks Coens, The Acting Life And Leaving The Sauce

NY Times

“Audrey Totter, who as a femme-fatale star of Hollywood’s noir films of the 1940s could twist daggers with the subtlest arch of her perfectly plucked eyebrows, died on Thursday in West Hills, California. She was 95, and it had been decades since she last committed a crime—most were of the heart—on the silver screen.”

“Everyone he’d ever worked with or known well, he praised at length as though he simply couldn’t fathom how creatively that person’s mind worked. Every time, I just wanted to say, ‘Ned, you’re a better storyteller than all of them. You know that, right?'”
Kyle Buchanan On His Friend, Ned Vizzini, 32, A Suicide, Wrote “It’s Kind Of A Funny Story”
And – Vizzini’s Website

NY Times

“Our films are very dark, and I don’t know whether most Academy members care whether you win a Golden Bear or not. You have to make a little campaign, and have something they know.”
Why Doesn’t Oscar Care For The Romanian New Wave?

Croce On Stanley Cortez’s Light In Night Of The Hunter

“To me, a movie is essentially a Velvet Elvis. Because no matter how much artistic effort or social relevance or breathtakingly photographed panoramas that we endeavor to stuff into a feature film, we still require an audience willing to pay to see it exhibited.”

NY Times

Schwarzbaum Mocks Guy-Geezer Ensemble Comedies

Art Of The Title Credits National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

NY Times

“At this point in life, it’s a valuable lesson to look back on. It definitely taught me to be much more careful.”
How Do Jordan Belfort’s Victims React To The Wolf?

Brody Thinks Tramp

Happy Holidays From Oswald The Lucky Rabbit

NY Times

Spike Jonze, The Alien Child, And The Joy Of Saying “—- you, —-head, —face.”

And The Foreign Language 9 (From 76) Are: Broken Circle Breakdown, The Hunt, The Missing Picture, The Grandmaster, Omar, The Notebook, Two Lives, Iron Picker, The Great Beauty

Alliance Of Women Film Journalists Go 12 Years

nymag

“Man On The Street” Turns Out To Be The Fonz

“Yes, there is a precise correspondence between Jep Gambardella and me. The way he feels about people and the heart and parties are very close to me. I am not usually a guy that goes to parties, but many of his ideas are exactly mine.”

NY Times

Nocera On The Wall Street Part Of  The Wolf Of Wall Street

Esquire Solicits Year-End Top 10 From Filmmaker Joe Swanberg; Hello, Frank V. Ross!

Coveting The Ice Buckets Of The Stars

deadline

Weinstein, Letts And Clooney On The Positives Of August: Osage County‘s Changes Since Toronto And Release Move To January

Joshua Oppenheimer On Act Of Killing Being Named Guardian Film Of The Year

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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