MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2015

Sundance Grand-Juries The Wolfpack, Me And Earl And The Dying Girl, The Russian Woodpecker, Slow West

ACE Eddie Editing Awards Go Boyhood, Grand Budapest, LEGO, CITIZENFOUR

“I don’t know Thomas Pynchon; I don’t know who he is, I don’t know what he looks like. I didn’t consult with him on the script. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
Paul Thomas Anderson Again Demurs On The Topic Of Old Tom

Nathan Rabin Goes About 7,500 Words On “The Epic Uncool Of Philip Seymour Hoffman”

Benedict Cumberbatch Calls On Royals For Pardon For 49,000 Other Gay Men In Addition To Alan Turing

NY Times

Mekado Murphy And The Wachowskis Decipher A Single Image From Jupiter Ascending

variety

“VOD day and date, you basically are signalling that this movie is not as good as the other movies. It’s a valid way to go if you don’t think you can sustain a theatrical run.”
Sony Pictures Classics’ Barker And Bernard On Female Films From Sundance And A Disdain For Foreshortened Windows

NY Times

“Watching Boyhood incrementally on Blu-ray inspired a desire to cast off the story and experience the movie shot by shot, perhaps even in a random sequence, in the manner of Chris Ware’s graphic-novel-in-a-box, ‘Building Stories.’ Were it possible to so program Boyhood on disc, narrative would melt away to leave a succession of exalted present moments, a composition in what another avant-garde filmmaker, the pioneer Maya Deren, called ‘transfigured time.’”

Michael Medved Steps Back From Radio Show

NY Times

David Duchovny Likes Playing With Words

“As I was walking down the street from the final Awards luncheon, a big car stopped next to me and who else but Udo Kier (a local resident) should offer me a ride to my hotel?”

indie wire

Anthony Kaufman Has Some Problems With Sundance’s Documentary Programming

Slamdance Jury And Audience Awards Announced

hollywoodreporter.com

“Annapurna is helping out to keep the doors open.”
Megan Ellison Saves Santa Monica’s Vidiots

On The Rise Of Genre Stories In India’s Publishing Boom

“The biggest problem isn’t genuinely independent cinema, where lower budgets mean more opportunities for women in front of and behind the camera. The problem is the six major studios that dominate the box office, the entertainment chatter and the popular imagination.”
Richard Brody On “How Critics Have Failed Female Filmmakers”

“After Sundance, There Will Be Normalcy In Park City”

NY Times

“The nominated shorts offer a vision of what the Academy Awards should and could be but very rarely are: eclectic, cosmopolitan, scrappy and surprising.”
Writes A. O. Scott

“Waiting for bliss is a fool’s game at Sundance, whose screeners and programmers sift through thousands of titles for a selection that’s too big to see in one movie-gorging gulp. Other festivals are bigger and certainly easier to navigate than this one, with its myriad locales and black ice. But Sundance has become the pre-eminent North American showcase through its steadily growing infrastructure, brand-building and legacy-burnishing and, of course, the quality of its choices. All the world, it seems, wants to make movies and wants to go to Sundance.”
Reports Manohla Dargis

“There’s a youthful energy. I love being here.”
Lindsay Bahr On A Park City Week With James Franco

NY Times

Citizenfour‘s Laura Poitras On “Heroic Acts”

variety

Judge Throws Out A Gravity Screenplay Lawsuit

NY Times

Sarah Lyall Hopes To Think Like A Film Critic After Watching 12 Films In Two Days; Wreaking Nearly 3,000 Words

Lee Ann Norman On Still-Productive Renaissance Man Melvin Van Peebles

“When An Obit Calls Revered Author Fat, Twitter Exacts Its Revenge”

Sundance Sale: Joe Swanberg’s Digging For Fire Planted In The Orchard

ny post

Sara Stewart Sees Golden Age Of Nude Dudes

hollywoodreporter.com

McDonald’s Won’t Sic Legal Hamburglers On Michael Keaton-Starring Ray Kroc Biopic, Reportedly Since Kroc Admitted Much Of The Script’s Allegations

Watching American Sniper In Baghdad

indie wire

Sam Adams Sez Journos Not The Worst People At Sundance
“As journalists, we are being subsidized to watch movies, talk to cool people and then process what we’ve learned into articles the world can read. So lighten up, journalists. We’re here to cover the cool kids, not pretend to be them.”
But – Jordan Crucchiola Declares They Are

NY Times

NYT Op-Docs Elizabeth Lo’s Silicon Valley Poverty Film Hotel 22 8’09”

Oliver Farry On Anachronisms In Films And Why They’re OK

Colleen McCullough, 77, Australian Author Of “Thorn Birds”

Focus World Cuffs Cop Car

Sony Pictures Classics Acquires Woody Allen’s Irrational Man

Jeremy Kinser Talks To Me And Earl And The Dying Girl‘s Alfonso Gomez-Rejon About The Personal Story Behind The Sundance Hit

thestar.com

Peter Howell Sez It’s Year Of The Woman At Sundance

Sundance: Magnolia Runs With The Wolfpack

“They are unnerved not only that Selma threatens to become ‘official’ history, but that it represents a sea change in who has custody of that history.”
Mark Harris Thinks Selma Through Thoroughly

Francine Prose On The Fun And Frenzy Of Birdman

variety

Lionsgate Talks $1.5 Billion Investment With China TV

LA Times

“The important thing is locating the cuisine or the restaurant or the chef within the context of the culture. You have to know about food, and you have to have the tools to evaluate it, but I don’t think it’s any more consumer criticism than when an art critic reviews an art show.”
Looking For “A Thereness Beneath The Thereness” In Sundance Sale City Of Gold

Taylor Swift Illustrates Foolishness In Current Copyright Law

VICE Premieres Harmony Korine’s The Legend Of Cambo (9’30”)

“What Silicon Valley Thinks Of Women”

Esquire Fixes On “The Most Overlooked Outfits Of The Royal Tenenbaums“

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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