MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2014

NY Times

“It’s a missed opportunity and unfortunately characterizes the way AOL has mismanaged the Moviefone business for quite a while,” Mr. Jarecki said. “The fact that a lot of people still call—hundreds of thousands a month, from what I have been told—shows that it isn’t some ancient idea.”
“Mr. Moviefone’s Lines Are Going Dead”

M. Phillips On Groundhog Day As An Expanded Chicago Improv Theater Game

hollywoodreporter.com

Report: Fox Wants DreamWorks’ Snider For Exec Slot Below Gianopoulos

“Groundhog Day is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable. It unfolds so inevitably, is so entertaining, so apparently effortless, that you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is.”
Ebert Revisited And Revisited Harold Ramis’ Masterpiece

variety

“His footprint in comedy is enormous. And as he got older, he had a stronger voice and a tremendous influence. He became this Yoda-like guy. As he grew older he got mellower, and became this wise and calm presence. He was a great wit and it’s just really sad.”

deadline

Beatty’s Hughes Biopic Is At Long Last Aloft

variety

“There will be memorials across the country to honor the memory of beloved member, Sarah Jones.”
“Midnight Rider” Production Reportedly Was Denied Permission To Shoot On Railroad Bridge

“Perhaps my favorite of Ramis’ answers is a throwaway, about the Dalai Lama: ‘He’s cool. He’s jolly.'”
From – Brett Martin’s 2009 Profile Of Ramis

“Ramis was a spiritual Marx brother—smart and literate like Groucho, benignly twisted and coiffed like Harpo — and a life spent making comedy can yield no higher praise than that.”

“He remembers everything. I don’t think he’s one of those people who works then relaxes–he can’t stop. He’s observant. He’s got a very, very good memory and he soaks it all up.”
A Visit To Wes Anderson World
And – Pre-Budapest Hotel, Here’s Richard Brody’s 2009 New Yorker Profile Of Wes Anderson

Watching Todd Solondz’s Happiness With Harold Ramis

Pride On Harold Ramis, Seeker

Wesley Morris On “After Normal”: Gay Today On Cable, In Sports, And At The Movies

“Netflix has agreed to pay one of the largest broadband providers in the United States Comcast Corp for faster speeds, throwing open the possibility that more content companies will have to shell out for better service.”

LA Times

“We love the idea of continuity. This is a huge show. We’re very lucky this year to have the benefit of veterans. The ratings were up last year. It was an entertaining show. There was a lot of discussion. But I have to tell you, I kind of love the discussion because it means people are invested. What would make me nuts is if nobody talked about it.”
Talking Oscar With Cheryl Boone Isaacs And Dawn Hudson

“Harold Ramis and I together did the ‘National Lampoon Show’ off-Broadway, Meatballs, Stripes, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day. He earned his keep on this planet. God bless him.”

Monte Hellman‘s Bulked-Up Criterion 10

Kentucker Audley Launches Petition Asking Mediocre Indie Filmmakers To Just Quit

A Harold Ramis Tribute At The Ghostbusters Firehouse

Remembering Harold Ramis’ Playboy Years

The Act Of Killing Picks Up Congressional Supporter

“You would watch people in the audience just lose their minds. Harold Ramis is the yardstick of what you want to reach for, of people’s bodies around you going into convulsions of joy while your brain is thinking and your emotions are deeply tied in to the characters, and you’re going, ‘Oh my God, This is the best two hours I’ve ever spent.’”
Tad Friend‘s 2004 New Yorker Profile Of Harold Ramis
And – Eric Spitznagel’s 2006 Believer Interview

At Second City “I don’t know how many times I’d be on stage improvising with some person who goes off on an idiotic tangent. First chance I got, I started writing what everybody was going to say.”

HAROLD RAMIS WAS 69

Anthony Lane On Philip Seymour Hoffman
 And – Waxing On Oscar

“People would like to see her fail but she is serious and she is winning,” says Geffen. He advised her when she was thinking about a Hollywood career and looks out for her. ‘She is quite a girl. It never occurred to me she would be this successful this quickly’.”
Garrahan Profiles Producer Megan Ellison, With Comments From CAA’s Bryan Lourd, An Advisor; Screenwriter Mark Boal; And A Get, David Geffen

Remembering Sarah Jones, 27, The Atlanta Camera Operator Killed On The Bridge Shooting “Midnight Rider”

“I Give Up,” By Alec Baldwin: “Goodbye To Public Life”

“Comcast’s Traffic Pact With Netflix Is Shrouded in Secrecy”

hollywoodreporter.com

Judi Dench On Life Near 80 And Adapting To Macular Degeneration

Frank Terry, 75, Headed CalArts Character Animation Program

Salon

“Amazon’s system of employee monitoring is the most oppressive I have ever come across and combines state-of-the-art surveillance technology with the system of ‘functional foreman,’ introduced in the workshops of the Pennsylvania machine-tool industry in the 1890s.”

“Scorsese’s movies often have a complicated attitude towards society’s disruptive and marginalized elements, and the type of relationship those elements can have with the wider social sphere.”

“Instead of delivering a final, fixed judgment in a clever epigram, he shares with us his effort, pushing against the limits of language, always approximating, trying to capture hard outlines by lightning sketching.”
Good Dr. Bordwell On Film Critic James Agee

How Failure In America Led To The Making Of Palestine’s Omar

“Forbes is an obvious fraud. It is not a magazine or editorial operation at all. It is just, in effect, a user comment site that allows commenters the pretense of saying they have written for Forbes.”
Michael Wolff Scoffs At The Price Asked For Digital Publishing

hollywoodreporter.com

Casting Director Joy Todd Extends Talent Search To Afterlife

NY Times

“Piers Morgan Live” Has Only Weeks To Live

Netflix To Pay Comcast To Increase Its Streaming Speed

“Atrocity is both banal and ultimately impossible to comprehend.”
BBC Storyville Editor Nick Fraser Again Pules Mightily In The Face Of The Act Of Killing
But It’s A Triple-Dip, Twice Published Earlier  – About.Com Continues Battle Against The Act Of Killing With Excerpt Of Upcoming Film Quarterly Piece By BBC Programmer Nick Fraser
“The crimes are monstrous, but the killers still remain human. This is the great and devastating lesson to learn from The Act of Killing.” Herzog: “Ignore David [sic] Fraser.”
And – Oppenheimer, Herzog And Morris Do A Reddit AMA

“That’s how the internet works: it is the biggest network of networks, full of copying machines, and it’s getting larger by the day. It is astounding that the internet’s fundamental principle of operation is being papered over, with legal minds and politicians pretending we’re still dealing with a broadcast medium.”

Why Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa Deserves Its Oscar Nom

hollywoodreporter.com

Blue Jasmine, 12 Years Win At Costume Designers Guild

Educating James Toback

Gawker’s Nick Denton On The Future And Beyond

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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