MCN Curated Headlines Archive for July, 2014

“Why did the famous white actress not turn black to elude the cops or who ever wanted to get their grubby little hands on her? It sounds like a pretty cool thing to do (use your brilliant brain to become a sister like that); cool, that is, to someone who has no clue about the history of 20th century entertainment in the U.S. … Do not change the color of your skin from white to black. We are not there yet. We are not a post-racial society.”
Mudede Poses, “Can You Imagine Scarlett Johannson In Blackface?”

hollywoodreporter.com

Studios Agree To Nolan-Abrams-Apatow-Tarantino Proposition To Buy And Stash Kodak Film Stock

The Man In The Suit: “Being Godzilla“

hollywoodreporter.com

Masters Sez There Are Hidden Costs In Making Transformers A $300 Million Hit In China

“Twitter has proven to be a minefield for celebrities. It provides celebrities with an opportunity to make any number of careless mistakes that can come back to haunt them. But in a war environment, where emotions are so high and people are seeing pictures on CNN of babies dying and crying, it’s particularly incendiary.”

Here’s An App For Film Set Workers To Report Deadly, Unsafe Conditions

Lena Dunham‘s Criterion Notes For The Big Chill: “These Are Your Parents”

LA Times

“I’m a vehement opponent of adventure. Any idiot can go to Antarctica. And any idiot can climb Mount Everest. Even grannies have done it. There are thousands lining up. There is no adventure left.”
Mark Olsen Listens In On Werner Herzog As His 1970-1999 Blu-Ray Box Set Hits The Street
And – “When you look at the box set, it looks like a brick. Like a piece of rock; I can stand on this piece of rock.”

John Waters Interviews Isabelle Huppert

NY Times

“What a pleasure it is to watch a film showing life as it is, not warped into a fantasy of superhuman power. You can feast on such realism in Richard Linklater’s seven-course masterpiece, Boyhood, or sample it in Joe Swanberg’s modest but savory amuse-bouche, Happy Christmas. Both films are portraits of white middle-class American families, the first set in Texas and stretching over 12 years, the second during a single Christmas holiday in Chicago.”
Holden Emits A Quiet Rave

Australian Communicatons Minister Says ISPs Should Do More To Crack Down On Piracy

“The paradox is that Farocki is probably more important as a writer than as a filmmaker, that his films are more written about than seen, and that instead of being a failing, this actually underlines his significance to the cinema today and his considerable role in the contemporary political avant-garde.”
Harun Farocki, 70, Made Over 90 Films
And – Jonnie Rosenbaum On The Late Harun Farocki’s Films

Comcast :30 Spot Says Time Warner Cable Megamerger Would “Extend Net Neutrality Protections To More Americans.”

“Dear World: Stop Giving All Your Money To Michael Bay”

Nollywood Benefits From Nigeria’s Version Of Netflix

An In-Depth Conversation With The Designers Of Guardians Of The Galaxy

Esquire Sez “Nobody Is Better Than Cameron Diaz. Nobody.”

NY Times

Judge Rules Microsoft Must Turn Over Data Stashed In Ireland

“A Note To The Guardians Of The Galaxy Fans Who Are Calling Our Critic A ‘Harlot'”

hollywoodreporter.com

Latest Transformers Now China’s Highest-Grossing Film

indie wire

Robert Greene Says Both The Negative And Positive Reviews Of The Kill Team Get The Film Wrong

variety

“How Daniel Radcliffe Killed Harry Potter”

Prolific Director, Essay Filmmaker, Screenwriter Harun Farocki Was 70

A Comprehensive Interview With Late Documentarian Robert Drew By Jonathan Marlowe

Makeup Artist Dick Smith Was 92, Films Included The Godfather And The Exorcist

AMC Networks May Buy Big Into BBC America

Esquire UK Cover-Profiles Robert Pattinson

Cinema Verité Pioneer Robert Drew Was 90
And – Drew’s Bio Page

NewsCorp Apparently Ready To Launch The Daily All Over Again

Veteran Programmer Mike Plante Lists His 25 Essential Short Films From The History Of Cinema

Zvyagintsev Sez “Killdozer” Inspired Leviathan

“What was it like, I asked this very funny man, a man whose work, whose life, has shaped New York sensibilities for more than four decades, to have had your cataracts fixed recently.”
Roger Friedman Lobs Some Softballs At Woody Allen

wsj

“It’s a financial commitment, no doubt about it. But I don’t think we could look some of our filmmakers in the eyes if we didn’t do it.”
Coalition Of Studios May Keep Kodak Film Stock Alive

Why A Lot Of Doc Filmmakers Are Against Social Impact Metrics

Ferrara Talks Pasolini

variety

Expendables 3 Stolen By Over A Million Downloaders Three Weeks Before Release

Actor Anson Mount On The Art Of The Western

Promoting His Clear Spirit, Singani63, Soderbergh Starts An Instagram images mnsfw

Glenn Kenny On The Movie That Made Robert DeNiro Bankable

hollywoodreporter.com

Austria Film ProdCos Get Order For ISPs To Block Online Piracy Sites By Friday

“When Did Crowdfunding Become A Four-Letter Word?”

Comcast Confessions, Drawn From Interviews With Over 100 Employees: “When Every Call Is A Sales Call”

Toronto Int’l Sets Preems, Including New Kevin Smith, Winterbottom, Broomfield, The Yes Men, Sion Sono, Strickland, Dave McKean

hollywoodreporter.com

Are These The Ten Best-Dressed Of Comic-Con?

variety

James Shigeta, 81, Acted In Die Hard, Flower Drum Song

« Older Entries

MCN Curated Headlines

Archives Comments Most Recent

“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