MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2014

Gyllenhaal And Villeneuve: Born Enemy

Ralph Fiennes On Evil And Intimacy

On Scarlett Johansson’s Complicated Job As “Brand Ambassador”

“A backlog of Hollywood garbage awaits Peter Travers’ scum bucket”
Truth In Cutlines

the wrap

Producer Cassian Elwes On Tom Sherak’s Support

variety

Tim Gray Pooh-Poohs Academy’s Foreign-Language Film Voting Process

Listening To Gravity

Behind The Work Of The Nicholas Ray Foundation

NY Times

Times Discovers “Saturday Night Live” After-Party

Beauty And The Beasts And Guillermo Del Toro

Getting Perspective With 11-Time Oscar Nominee Roger Deakins

20 Years To Dallas Buyers Club

HUNGARIAN DIRECTOR MIKLÓS JANCSÓ  WAS 92

variety

Setoodeh, Best Known For Saying Gays Can’t Play Straight, Sez Jesse Eisenberg Is No Lex Luthor In His Superheroverse

Toon Titan Arthur Rankin, Jr. Was 89

“A movie like this is cause for celebration. With a solemnity so inflated it defies all logic, common sense and presumably several of God’s holy commandments, this is a spectacularly awful film. Breathtaking to behold as it barrels from one terrible artistic decision to another, it’s so histrionically abysmal that it makes you realize how lazy and complacent most other movies are in their banal mediocrity. Its atrociousness is thrilling. I felt alive again as I left the theater.”
Sean Burns Celebrates In The Worst Way

Ebiri Longs For Longer Trailers

“I think the first movie, you’re always surprised, like, ‘Oh, wow, we’re not getting a 100 Rotten Tomatoes score?’ And then you go, ‘It’s not a critic’s cup of tea,’ and some people don’t like it and then you move on. Otherwise, you go crazy.”
Seltzer And Friedberg Speak!

NY Times

“Are there other ways to think of a digital-era Film Society of Lincoln Center?”
With – Dargis On Bringing The Youth
And – Scott Sez “The Film Society is literally, physically alienated from its audience.”

indie wire

Could The Times Be Wrong About The Film Society Of Lincoln Center?

hollywoodreporter.com

Christian Movie Awards Show Books Quadriplegic Evangelical Singer Joni Eareckson Tada After Oscar Nixes “Alone Yet Not Alone”

indie wire

“Film.com had a somewhat tenuous place in MTV’s strategy for the future, though I must stress that I have been told precisely nothing about what that strategy might entail.”
Viacom’s Film.Com Fires Editor David Ehrlich

SXSW Announces 115 Features; Ahoy, Boyhood!

variety

Telluride Will Still Eke Sneaks, Despite Toronto Fest Exclusivity Dictate

Johansson Cuts Ties With Oxfam After 8 Years Over Fizz-Machine Conflict
But – She’s Not The First “Ambassador” Who Left
And – “Palestinian Workers Back Scarlett Johansson Opposition To SodaStream Boycott”

Analyzing Big Data’s New Era Of Discrimination For Profit

Who You Gonna Play? Lego Ghostbusters

Facebook’s Valuation Of You

hollywoodreporter.com

Many Sundance Titles Still Await Post-Fest Sales

Brody On The “Rothiness” Of Listen Up Philip

Matching Roger Ebert’s Voice For Life Itself 0’41” vid

Investment Firm Absorbs Gay-Focused Distrib TLA Entertainment Group

The Shyamalan Script That May Have Returned From The Dead

Horror Director Gordon Hessler Was 83

Noah Pre-Games Its Apocalyptic Super Bowl Comm’l

Catching Up With Icelandic Film Godfather Friðrik Þór Friðriksson

Nymphomaniac Part 2 Forbidden To Be Shown In Romanian Public Spaces

deadline

Harvey Weinstein On Being Mentored By The Late Tom Sherak

“I’m devastated. I indulged in the simplest grassroots campaign and it went against me when the song started getting attention. I got taken down by competition that had months of promotion and advertising behind them. I simply asked people to find the song and consider it.”

Emerging Pictures Sets Cooperative Initiative To Get Italian Pics Into More Theaters, Including New Films by Sorrentino, Bertolucci, Amelio, Bellocchio And Golino

“I imagine that in the moment, with the shards of his imagination on the floor around him, continuing just felt impossible to him.”
Brian Koppelman’s Fantastically Good And Right Personal Reflection On QT Ditching His Script

“Unlike other directors from Germany and Austria who have gone to America as an exile, it was never an exile for me. It was always some sort of parallel life that I could live somewhere else. I liked America very much, I still like America very much, but at a certain point I realized that my roots and my soul is in Europe. This is the place where I belong.

“Alone Yet Not Alone” Song From Virtually-Unseen Christian Film Disqualified From Surprise Oscar Nomination Over Lobbying By Former Governor Of Academy Music Branch Bruce Broughton; Sorry, Llewyn, Nomination Slot Will Not Be Filled
And – If You Care To Take A Listen To Its Mysterious Charms Of Broughton’s Song

Filmation Animation Co-Found Hal Sutherland Was 85

Why Fixate On Sherlock’s Coat When You’ve Already Got Withnail‘s?

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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