MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2014

Roger Ebert‘s Reflections On Edward Herrmann At The Time He’d Read The Audiobook Of Life Itself

A Most Violent Year is “kind of dark, but at its core is this optimism that tomorrow’s going to be better than today. The most important thing is that I wanted the movie to look like the characters were walking into a painting of their own design–they’re very self-serious characters who are very formal in their presentation.”

wsj

White House Deflects Experts’ Doubts On Source Of Sony Hack

“I really wanted to get my arms around Roger’s whole life because I felt like his life truly informed his criticism.”

NY Times

Ciepley And Barnes Tick Their Own Sony Hack Tock, At 3,000 Words

“I’ve never been a snob about my career. I’ve spent a lot of time playing supporting characters, but to play a lead, the eponymous character, was something. Mike Leigh has always given the best shots for the most unlikely characters. That was true of Dickens and of Shakespeare. The profundity of tragedy creates a sense of the absurd.”

NY Times

“My least favorite genre of film writing may be the ‘What Film X gets wrong about Historical Topic Y’ chin-scratcher, which generally shows little understanding of either movies or history. But such articles do serve a purpose during awards campaigns, smudging the narratives producers and publicists carefully lay down.”
Manohla Dargis And A. O. Scott Situate The Awards Season

“Lyndon Johnson’s aides are mad that MLK is the hero of Selma“

The Great Edward Hermann Was 71

“There are all these other people who just say they’re critics and you read their writing and they can’t write, or they can write and their writing reveals that they’re quite stupid and ignorant. Some voices have emerged that are actually quite good who never would have emerged before, so that’s the upside.”
David Cronenberg: Concerned About The Future Of The Professional Critic

Phil Zabriskie Goes Farther Than American Sniper In Describing What It Means To Kill In Combat

deadline

“I’m never satisfied with the way I see my people photographed in movies. I think it comes from a lack of consciousness–if you grew up in a community where you don’t know black people, I wouldn’t suspect you would photograph them in a concerned way.”

LA Times

“It’s not that money is the root of all evil—it’s that it’s the root of everything.”
J. C. Chandor On His Roots Before A Most Violent Year

CNN Asserts H’wd Should Have Some Femme-Centric Tentpoles

NY Times

“Sony is the leading edge of something that’s been building steam for a long time: the ability of failing states, angry states and nonstate actors to reach deep inside their adversaries, trigger havoc and make demands.”

“The truth of the matter is the strategy that was employed so brilliantly in Selma wouldn’t work today, because what Dr. King advocated, what they came to as a notion, was that we are going to go into a town, we are going to make the racists act out on camera in front of the press, and that’s going to be enough to shame the nation into doing something about this. With Eric Garner, you have shocking, indisputable footage—you have a policeman breaking the rules, and yet you do not indict them. So I don’t even know what he would do with that.”

wsj

WSJ Gets The Sony Pictures Inside Hack Tick-Tock From CEO Michael Lynton

NY Times

Kings Theater Movie Palace On Flatbush Avenue In Brooklyn To Reopen In February

William Deresiewicz On “The Death Of The Artist—And The Birth Of The Creative Entrepreneur”

VF Sez James Patterson Is “The Henry Ford Of Books”

“Yeah, it’s the business cycle. It’s kind of like, yeah, that’s the mass murder cycle.”
“James Schamus Wants To Tell You How The Economy Really Works”

Oliver Stone Covers Some New Conspiracy Theories From On The Ground In Russia

Emma Brockes Visits With John Green, The 36-Year-Old Teenager

“The company alleges that a group of six individuals is behind the hack, at least one a former Sony Pictures Entertainment employee who worked in a technical role and had extensive knowledge of the company’s network and operations.”

Christine Cavanaugh, 51, Was The Voice Of Babe, “Chuckie” On “Rugrats” And Other Popular Cartoon Characters

Threats Loom Above Gmail Blockage On Mainland China

NY Times

“I was one of the horses of the Louis B. Mayer stable, and I thought the films I was given after my Academy Awards were not worthy. I couldn’t stand it anymore. Like a fire, it went to Louis B. Mayer, and I was called to him. He said, ‘We made you, and we are going to kill you.’ And I said: ‘Mr. Mayer, you did not make me. God made me. I am now in my 20s. You are an old man,’ which of course was an insult. ‘By the time I am 40 you will be dead.’”
Double Academy Award-Winner Luise Rainer Was 104

wsj

Why Do You See The Hangover Again And Again And Again—At Least 140 Times—On Cable Channels?

Bill Cosby Comments On Phylicia Rashad Unexpectedly Creepy

hollywoodreporter.com

Emanuel Lubezski On The Camera “Ballet” Of Birdman

variety

WB Sends Ryan Gosling’s Lost River Down The Stream
From May – Fleming Rumors Warner To Offload Gosling Helming Debut To Speciality Distrib

Is There Legal Ammo In Irving Azoff’s Billion-Dollar Lawsuit Threat Against YouTube?

NY Times

“I wanted to do a study of a family under hideous pressures and circumstances,” Mr. Ayer said, “the family that lives in the tank and kills people for a living.”

Those Who Find Into The Woods Too “PG” Sexually Are Directed Toward Neil Jordan & Angela Carter’s Company Of Wolves

LA Times

The War Movie Battles Back To The Box Office

“One of Nolan’s greatest strengths has always been his control of tone, and, not unlike Inception, Interstellar is a blockbuster bathed in sadness and desolation. His works are distinguished by the single-mindedness with which he pursues concepts; the films become cinematic fugues built around a single motif.”
Bilge Ebiri Gets To The Heart Of Interstellar
Earlier – “On Interstellar‘s sincerity, and the misunderstood implications of how a movie lets you see that we’re all traveling through time”
Aaron Stewart-Ahn’s Expansive, Imaginative Defense

Jonnie Rosenbaum Sez His Friend Adrian Martin’s New “Mise-en-scène And Film Style” Is Visionary, Indispensable And Wildly Expensive

Andrey Zvyagintsev On Leviathan, Putin And Directing Drunk Actors

Art Of The Title Illustrates 10 Best Credit Sequences Of 2014

telegraph.co.uk

London Kino Death Knell
Gov’t To Demolish Flagship Curzon Soho Arthouse For Railway Ticket Booth But Will First Be A Construction Depot For A Decade

“We never even asked, because we knew those rights are already gone, they’re with Spielberg.”
Why There’s No Familiar MLK Oratory Is In Selma: The Speeches Are Tightly Held Under Copyright And Licensed To DreamWorks

FBI Briefed On Alternative Analysis That Says A Fired Employee, Not North Korea, Fashioned Sony Hack

“Bottom line is folks should interrogate history. Don’t take my word for it or LBJ rep’s word for it. Let it come alive for yourself. #Selma.”

variety

Oscar Double-Winner Luise Rainer Was 104
And – More From EW

“I love talking about The Imitation Game, and three-minute slots is a really ugly way to do it. I’m shit at that. I would never be good at Twitter. It’s exhausting and frustrating. I just wish there was a more inventive or unique way of doing it sometimes.”

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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

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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