MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2014

The Boston Globe Remembers Film Critic Jay Carr

When Bill Murray Offers Unsolicited Marriage Advice After Crashing A Bachelor Party, Well… Listen?

NY Times

Catching Up With “Stone Punk” Lukas Moodysson

German Director Helma Sanders-Brahms Was 73 Deutsch

NY Times

The Bronx Down To Only Two Movie Theaters

Jonathan Gordon New Production Prez For Annapurna Pictures

NY Times

Rapold On The Rarity Of Homegrown Radicals Onscreen

Rookie Writer Hazel On Her “Extremely Rad Day” On The Set Of The Fault In Our Stars

Jack Schafer On Ditching His Amazon Account

Read The First Six Pages Of The Big Trouble In Little China Comic 

Hw’d & Fine Swears Off Horror

NY Times

“They are counting on the fact that publishers are not allowed to speak with one another.”
Amazon Also Strangles A Publisher’s Trade In Germany To “Negotiate” Larger Cut Of E-Books

ny post

Surveillance Cameras On 160-Year-Old David Schwimmer Mansion Help Cops Solve Stabbing

“People in movies can’t have it both ways: either pop culture is totally irrelevant, and therefore the work they do is totally irrelevant, or pop culture does matter, which means they will sometimes have to reckon with the fact that their work can be a force for evil as well as good.”
“Seth Rogen Is Not A Victim Of The Santa Barbara Killings”

“I wanted to sort of tease out how the movies that we watch that are primarily created by a sm–, by men and primarily pivot around male fantasies of wish fulfillment and vigilante justice, how that might inform not just someone’s suffering under a really terrible mental illness, but the culture at large in terms of conditioning our own expectations of what we think life is and what we feel like we deserve from it… I by no means meant to cast blame on those movies or on Judd Apatow’s work for this heinous action, obviously not. But I do think, again, it bears all of us asking, what the costs are of having such a narrow range of stories that we constantly go back to.”
Critic Anne Hornaday Posts 2’25” Home Video Response To Rogen And Apatow And Her Critics

Apatow And Rogen Respond To WashPost Film Critic Ann Hornaday’s Column Blaming Neighbors For Mass Killing
Screen Shot 2014-05-27 at 1.20.42 PMAnd – “How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, ‘It’s not fair’?”
Hornaday’s Opine

NY Times

Radu Florescu, 88, Scholar Who Linked Dracula And Vlad The Impaler

“Fifty Shades Of Gray” Is Really A Self-Help Book, Sez Academic

Geoffrey O’Brien On Hawks’ Red River

NY Times

Dargis Wraps Cannes With Assayas Chat

“Should Vice Corp. Be Allowed To Buy ComcastWarner And DirecT&T?”

BBC Did Not Find Benedict Cumberbatch Sexy

Cuarón Sez The Only Kids He’ll Be Around This Summer Are His Own

wsj

Jet Li Joins Alibaba Pictures Board

“It is the lack of creative marketing, pricing and windowing schemes that service and entice the customer that give the mainstream entertainment industry its biggest problem. This is a social phenomenon, not a legal one, and, therefore, needs social solutions.”

“Can we just concentrate on how the wobble board came into being?”
Another British Children’s Entertainer Accused Of Sexual Crimes Brought To Trial

Michael Wood On Ozu

hollywoodreporter.com

“This part is a little controversial. Do you want to change this or that?”
Sony CEO Sez He’s Hands-On, Down To Changing Endings Of Movies And Binge-Watching Sony Series

Alderman Blasts Rahm Plan To Give Away 17 Acres Of Chicago Lakefront To George Lucas Presidential Museum
“The institutions standing now on the museum campus are dedicated to the exploration of earth, ocean, and sky. If there’s something about the Lucas museum that would launch it into that league, we haven’t yet heard about it.”
And –  A Short List Of Reasons “The Museum Equivalent Of Trump Tower” Is A Bad Idea
Plus – The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum Home Page, Effusive In Its Love For The Bay Area

“Turturro is an accomplished miniaturist capable of suggesting entire lives in the briefest of screen time. But a leading man he is not. He is the acting equivalent of coriander. A little goes a long way and too much is plain revolting.”

Hollywood Boulevard’s World Book & News Is No More

“Yes I love being charmed and delighted in the theatre, but I don’t want to be killed with kindness by artists, I want to be provoked by them and made to look at the world differently.”

Australian Feature Production Affected By All The Actors Working On Quality Television

NY Times

Western Companies Including BuzzFeed, Huffington Post And The Guardian See Opportunity In A Digital India

hollywoodreporter.com

Convicted Prankster James O’Keefe Referred To Authorities Over Secretly Recorded Video Of H’wd Environmentalists

“People thought I was an idiot and that video would never last,” Sez Bill Viola From St. Paul’s Cathedral

hollywoodreporter.com

Class-Action Lawsuit Against Robocaller Mike Huckabee And His Anti-Movie Movie Pitcn Dropped

NY Times

Super-Short Me
Morgan Spurlock And Microsoft Co-Founder To Explain Economy In Three-To-Five Minutes Bursts, With The Help Of Akiva Goldsman, Catherine Hardwicke, Gary Ross, Mary Harron

In 11th Weekend Atop The Box, Frozen Pushes Past Howl’s Moving Castle To Become Japan’s Third-Highest Grossing Film

hollywoodreporter.com

We Have Titanic To Account For Xavier Dolan

LA Times

Herb Jeffries, 100, The “Bronze Buckaroo,” Hw’d’s First Black Singing Cowboy

“He doesn’t care.”
Snider On Turning A Blinded Eye To Adam Sandler

SPC Snaps Salt Of The Earth, Un Certain Regard Winner By Wenders And Salgado

“This man is a dangerous philistine.”
Beloved British Education Minister Orders Focus On English Literature; Books Like “To Kill A Mockingbird,” “The Crucible” And Especially “Of Mice And Men,” “Which He Really Dislikes,” Axed For Jane Austen

Thinking On The “Malevolent” “Savage Portrait” Of To The Wonder

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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