MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2014

“Why We Still Love Tom Cruise”

Michael Wolff: Almost As Cynical About Apple-Beats Deal As If Rupert Murdoch Had Something To Do With It

NY Times

“In picking up gurus from fashion and music, and by emphasizing Apple’s commitment to human curation over algorithmic decision-making, Mr. Cook may be aiming to optimize what has always been Apple’s core strength, and what it lost when Mr. Jobs died: Human perspective and taste.”

Gravity Named Best At 15th Annual Golden Trailer Awards

Lukas Moodysson And Ebiri Have A Swell Sitdown

NY Times

“Squirming on the sofa next to him, Mr. Weber flashed one of his eager grins and, after a perfect beat, delivered his punch line.”
Barnes Offers A Dippy Appreciation Of Fault In Our Stars Screenwriting Team  Neustadter And Weber

hollywoodreporter.com

Ukraine TV Fires Will Smith-Kissing, Bradley Cooper Crotch-Rocketing, America Ferrara-Groping Brad Pitt-Puncher

Dick Cavett Reflects On The 1970 Episode Where Cassavetes, Falk And Gazzara Began At “Smashed”

LA Times

Sony Corp Of America Prez Nicole Seligman Adds Sony Entertainment Prexy Title

“Sack film critics and get ordinary punters in. People experienced, who know life.”
Ken Loach Brings The Boot

“The Nicolas Cage Crazy Train Makes A Stop At Kirk Cameron-Rapture-Remake Town”

the wrap

People Magazine Eliminates Film, TV Reviews

Karlheinz Böhm, 86, Acted In Powell’s Peeping Tom, Fassbinder’s Fox And His Friends; Mother Küsters Goes To Heaven; Effi Briest

NY Times

Nation’s Second Largest Magazine Wholesaler, Source Interlink, Will Fold, Firing 6,000

“‘We need to sit down with Elon Musk,’ Robert Downey Jr. said.”

What’s So Great About Laura Collella’s Little-Seen, Unassuming Breakfast With Curtis, Singled Out By Paul Thomas Anderson And Revisited By Ben Sachs

NY Times

“Over the past 15 years, I have sold millions of dollars’ worth of books on Amazon, which means I have made millions of dollars for Amazon. I would have thought I was one of their best assets.”
Malcolm Gladwell Expresses Surprise He’s A Bargaining Chip In The Amazon Ban Of Hachette Books
 So – Maybe Amazon Needs The Money?
And – “Perhaps the best solution would be an online marketplace controlled by the publishers—with the 30% commission being split 50-50 with the authors in addition to the author’s royalty.”
“How Book Publishers Can Beat Amazon”

Sony Pictures Imageworks Vacates L.A. Climes For Vancouver’s Friendlier Tax Set-Up

“It is perhaps not sufficiently emphasized that Godard spent two years in his twenties as a publicist for Fox in Paris.”
Colin McCabe‘s Histoire du Godard At Cannes, Part Un

The Geography Of Slacker, 25 Years On

“Your Newfangled Media Algorithms are Bull—-“

“In no other country do male-focused movies lead to gun massacres: Blame the gun laws, not Judd Apatow“

Ukrainian Director And Activist Oleg Sentsov Still In Captivity

Russian Citizen Depardieu Pays 6% Tax In Adopted Fatherland

The Hallowed Hallucinations Of Chris Marker

Angelina Jolie: “Secret Sillyhead”

9 Storytelling Tips From A Master Maker Of Coming Attractions

Brian D. Johnson Cover-Stories Atom Egoyan 20 Years After Exotica

thestar.com

“I vastly prefer an aisle seat, because it allows me some measure of legroom and also allows me to take notes without bothering the person next to me.”
Howell Notes That You Can’t Pick Your Family, But You Ought To Be Able To Pick Your Seat

NY Times

Why The Knockout Obvious Child Embraces The “Abortion Comedy” Tag

Programmer Creates Script To Kick Google Glass Abusers Off Public WiFi Systems

“She’s powerless at this point. She doesn’t have the work ethic or clout to be able to do what she did years earlier.”
Why No One Wants To See The Silenced Nikki Finke Resurface, By Kate Aurthur

Translating Frozen Into Arabic

Straight Outta Cupertino: Dr. Dre As First Hip-Hop Billionaire

“‘We Need To Talk About Jerry.’ My Year With JD Salinger”

Ferris Bueller Ferrari House Goes For $1.06 Million

hollywoodreporter.com

May The Ticket Line Always Be In Your Favor: Lionsgate Plans Hunger Games Theme Park Attraction
With – The Lionsgate Press Release

Screenwriter Dante Harper On The Life Of A Contemporary Studio Scribe

Good Dr. Bordwell On Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons

Forgetting John Wayne’s The Alamo

European Union “Right To Be Forgotten” Recognized By Google

indie wire

Maleficent‘s Linda Woolverton On Modern Fairytale-Making

Porton Considers The True And The False In FSLC’s Inaugural “Art Of The Real” Nonfiction Series

Universal Names Goldstine Head Of Worldwide Marketing

“Amazon’s petty fight with a publisher should make fans nervous about the future”
And – John Gapper Sez “Publishers Must Become Giants To Take On Amazon”

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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