MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2015

Nathan Rabin Sez “The Trailer Is Not The Movie”

A Smart Anti-Piracy Maneuver: Fridays Will Be Worldwide Record Release Day

“All Documentaries Are Participatory Documentaries,” Sez Richard Brody

“A sophisticated show for a sophisticated, beautiful beer. So we put the two together and sent it to them. If we don’t think it works and somebody’s brown-bagging a Stella on a bus and it’s not the right place for our brand, then we’ll let them know that we’d prefer not to be in that scene.”
Netflix Doesn’t Have Ads, But Product Placement’s In The Mix, Especially With “House Of Cards,” Season 3

On Leonard Nimoy’s Passion For Photography

nymag

How Net Neutrality Made It Despite Fierce Financial Opposition

“Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy… I loved Spock.”
A Statement By The President On The Passing Of Leonard Nimoy

Wim Wenders On The Pull Of America

The Jewish Roots Of Leonard Nimoy And “Live Long And Prosper”

DreamWorks To Sell Glendale Campus While Reporting $263 Million Quarterly Loss

Leonard Nimoy On Photography And The Jewish Concept Of The Feminine Presence Of God (from 2001)

“Bond Woman” Monica Bellucci Is Four Years Older Than Daniel Craig

Filmmaker Ben Wheatley‘s Criterion 10 Contains Some Fine, Succinct Film Crit

“The Atlantic consistently runs some of the worst film writing to be found on the Internet, which is to say in the universe… If you believe that a work’s entire significance can be found in the footprint that it leaves in public discourse, then looking at the thing itself will necessarily be an afterthought. ”
Nick Pinkerton Has 2,800 Words Worth Of The “Subterranean Hot Take Blues”

Revisiting The Classic 1995 Newsweek Column That Got Almost Everything Wrong About The Internet

Matthew Asprey Gear‘s History Of Orson Welles’ Never-Made RFK Conspiracy Thriller

“I’m the model of the non-model, the person who can’t be categorized. But they categorize me as non-categorizable, which is the same thing in the end.”
J. Hoberman On Godard As Speaker, Thinker And Filmmaker

NY Times

LEONARD NIMOY WAS 83

indie wire

Anne Thompson Talks To Ed Burns About His Hw’d Primer

Wong Kar-Wai’s Latest Film, “Regeneration,” Is Another 90-Second Cosmetics Ad

A Report On Diversity Says Things Getting Worse For Women In Hw’d

Jeet Heer Has Notes On Fifty Shades Of Grey, Romantic Comedies And Keynesian Economics

Billionaire Wants To Sell His New York Daily News

NY Times

Melina Ryzik On The Lack Of Fun In Shooting Sex Scenes

“So, let’s say you make District 9 and it does well. So, now, a normal director is like, ‘Shit, I’ve got this pressure because this last film did well and I hope this one lives up to it.’ I don’t have that. It definitely doesn’t bother me. The thing that bothers me is if I feel like I fucked it up.”
Honesty Not Alien To Chappie Director Neill Blomkamp

NY Times

“In Net Neutrality Victory, FCC Classifies Broadband Internet Service As A Public Utility”

variety

FCC Clears Way For More Municipalities To Offer Broadband Vs. Commercial Providers

Adam Gopnik On The Use Of “Who We Are” By Vin Diesel And President Obama

variety

2,236-Screen Euro Movie Chain Odeon & UCI Can Be Yours For $1.55 Billion

Italian Press Bad-Mouths Venice Fest For Not Prizing Birdman First

NY Times

Director Yann Demange On The Resemblance Of His Berlin-Sundance Hit ‘71 To Battle Of Algiers, Warriors And Escape From New York

“The point of being on social media is to produce and amass evidence of being on social media.”

NY Times

Twitter’s Boss Thinks Improv Comedy Is Great Training For Management

variety

Brian Lowry Surmises That Too Many Entertainment Choices Are Creating “Event Fatigue Syndrome”

the wrap

President Of Paramount Film Group Adam Goodman Out

telegraph.co.uk

Anne Bilson On “The Eclectic, Unpredictable Career Of Ralph Fiennes”

“All attempts at movie criticism inevitably involve an ‘impurification’ process that begins with us trying to express in words that which we never felt in words.”

Sugawa Akiko On “The Evolution of Magical Girls in Japanese Anime”

deadline

Investor John Malone To Increase Involvement In Lionsgate

NY Times

Elisabeth Moss Is Never Happier Than When She’s Crying Onstage

Successful Illinois Film Office Head Replaced By Republican Consultant With Little Or No Production Experience

wsj

One Billion Viewers A Month Don’t Add Up to Profit for YouTube

“Django is a black film. More than that, it is an exemplary black film. We would even go so far as to say that it is one of the most important black films of the century… which is where some of you will interrupt us to point out that Quentin Tarantino, the film’s director and screenwriter, is white, making it impossible for Django to be a black film.”
“Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Black Film”

NY Times

“He and I talked about how I was the intellectual and he was the humanist. I would see the big picture and he would connect with people. Even in the darkest, most gruesome situations, Bruce projected a warmth and humor that really put people at ease.”
Bruce Weber‘s Obit For Documentarian Bruce Sinofsky

Eleven Hours Of Richard Linklater & Co. Talking About The 12 Years Of Boyhood, Including Four DP/30s

« 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