MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2015

variety

SFX Hands On “Putting Life” In Paddington‘s Eyes

nymag

Emma Watson On The Progress Of Her HeForShe

variety

China Censor On Excising Breasts

ny post

“Strange Magic is a jaw-droppingly terrible animated musical that mismatches George Lucas’ inane story about a pair of fairy princesses to an oddball selection of the Star Wars creator’s favorite pop tunes.”
And – “Mortdecai typifies playful English wit in much the same way as Wimbledon is known for its monster truck rallies.”

“It raises very painful questions and considers them very frankly and head-on, without any equivocation or embellishment.”
The FT Profiles Leviathan‘s Andrey Zvyagintsev

Murdoch’s Brit Tabloid, The Sun, Restores Topless Women To Page 3, Blaming A “Mammary Lapse”

Casting Society Of America Lists Its 30th Awards, Including Career Achievement For Richard Linklater

Screenwriter Jason Hall Says He “Bled” For American Sniper

A Look At Salt Lake City’s Old Movie Theaters

NY Times

Amy Chozick Reports That Bill Clinton Chills Unfinished Scorsese Doc, Demanding Final Cut, Question Approval, As Well As Whether Chelsea Clinton Would Be Hired

Amy Davidson Sez Selma More Than Fair To LBJ

thestar.com

“We brought it here in the mountains because they would be free, they would feel like there’s a safe place outside of where the action is, so to speak. We believe in diversity, and freedom of expression is very much fundamental to us. And that’s how it is with the films. You’ll see a lot of films here that are going to upset other people, but that’s okay. It’s diversity.”
Redford Remarks At Sundance Opener

“This isn’t the defining film of the Iraq War. After nearly a quarter century of war and occupation in Iraq, we still haven’t seen that film. I’m beginning to think we’re incapable of producing a film of that magnitude, one that would explore the civilian experience of war, one that might begin to approach so vast and profound a repository of knowledge. If such a film ever arrives, it’ll be made by Iraqi filmmakers a decade or more from now, and it’ll be little known or viewed, if at all, on our shores.”

variety

Scorsese Gets Silence Money

deadline

Kevin Spacey Reignites Controversy Over Stanley Kramer’s Role In Blacklisting

indie wire

Eric Kohn On The Year Since Boyhood Came Into The World

There’s No Sundance London In 2015

variety

Gregg Goldstein Surveys What Constitutes “Sundance Bait” In 2015, With Producers And Acquisition Execs Chiming In

“In its own way, American Sniper is doing just what First Blood did all those years ago.”

Matt Singer On 25 Films That Monkey With Their Studio’s Openings

Almodóvar Set For WGAW’s 2015 Jean Renoir Award For International Screenwriting

“I can’t see into the hearts and minds of these people, but I watch and listen to them. They’re polite and friendly. They’re teachers, retirees, parents. Others will view their presence as unforgivable, but they don’t strike me as raging misogynists.”
A Report From A $73 Seat At A Cosby Show In Colorado Springs

NY Times

“The outrage over the Oscar nominations has been welcome even if the problem isn’t the Academy Awards but a blinkered, fossilized industry that offers so few opportunities to women and minorities. While it’s disappointing that Ms. DuVernay wasn’t nominated, she made a great movie and is going to keep directing without the permission of the mainstream old guard. The good news is that she won’t be alone.”
Manohla Dargis Hard-Charges The Optimism For Systemic Shifts In Film Production

filmlinc

MoMA And FSLC Name First 9 Selections For New Directors/New Films

hollywoodreporter.com

Miramax Names Acquisition Exec

Salon

“Perhaps Maureen Dowd is hypersensitive about the alleged ‘artful falsehood’ in Selma because racial politics in this country are a frequent and unrelenting exercise in ‘artful falsehoods.'”

Jenni Olson On Sundance 2014’s Queer Cinema Landscape

Björk Says The Media Essentially Has No Notion Of The Female Auteur

Sundance Institute Announces Alliance With Quiver Digital, A “Dashboard” For Indie Filmmakers Working With Artists Services To Have Streamlined Access To Major Online Distributors

Interview Revisits Its 1994 Robert Redford Cover Story

hollywoodreporter.com

Pre-Sundance, Gibney Talks Going Clear

“Everything we do here is cooler than everything they do everywhere else, and so it will ever be. We will never necessarily be more compassionate or more intelligent, but we will be more grand and creative. Maybe the Chinese know math better because they count grains of rice or something, but American 16-year-olds invent apps on a dime — and America invented the 16-year-old.”
Considering Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Creatocracy: How The Constitution Invented Hw’d”

indie wire

What Became Of The Filmmakers Behind 2005’s Four-Eyed Monsters?

variety

“To all of those involved in the making of Selma, they have gotten in the door, they are telling their stories. It’s those who haven’t attained that status, who are lost, or will be lost. That is where we need to focus our attention.”
Barry Levinson Columnizes Controversy Of The Day

FCC Fines ESPN, Viacom $1.4 Million For Airing Olympus Has Fallen Trailers With Emergency Alert System Warnings

hollywoodreporter.com

THR Cover-Stories Jennifer Aniston

NY Times

“If you can’t find a woman you like to direct, then damn it, develop the female directors yourselves. The women who can direct are out there. Just call me, I’ll send them over.”
Manohla Dargis Talks Directing With Ava DuVernay, Barbra Streisand, Jill Soloway, Mimi Leder, Jennie Livingston, Kimberly Peirce And More 

EXCLUSIVE! Mark Lisanti Interviews The Fake Baby

variety

“Based on an idea from George Lucas, Strange Magic is rambunctious without being lively—and ‘magical’ without being very magical.”

And – “An insipid byproduct of the Disney-Lucasfilm merger that looks to attract a fraction (if that) of the audience for this year’s Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens, this noisy, unappealing children’s fantasy fails to distinguish itself among January’s many, many reasons to steer clear of the multiplex.”

Overstock.com To Launch VOD, Streaming Services

On David Bowie’s Style Upon His 68th Annum

Picturing Vintage Sundance (Even In Black & White!)

Scott Tobias On Movies That Demand To Be Seen At Least Twice

Salon

“Clint Eastwood’s huge heartland hit is flawed, contradictory and America-centric—but it’s not war propaganda.”

indie wire

Guy Gallo, 59, Adapted Under The Volcano, Mentor To Many At Columbia U

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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