MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2015

Roman Polanski Testifies At Extradition Hearing In Krakow

John Boorman Goes Long On Queen & Country As Well As His Earlier Career

Robert Alpert Situates Her Among Movies About Artificial Intelligence
While – Jonathan Romney Goes Inside Your Head On “Visionary” Movies

hollywoodreporter.com

Tom Rothman Sez He Prizes “Stability”

LA Times

Chris Kyle’s Killer Sentenced To Life In Prison

James Gunn‘s Semi-Viral Facebook Post Dissing The Superhero Movie-Dissers

NY Times

Why “Let’s Get Out Of Here” Is So Common In Movie Dialogue

“The problem for legacy media is their inability to propose disruptive or scalable perspectives. Wherever we turn—The NYT, The Guardian, Le Monde—we see only a sad narrative based on incremental gains and cost-cutting. No game changing perspective, no compelling storytelling, no conquering posture. Instead, in most cases, the scenario is one of quietly managing an inevitable decline.”

variety

“Fear is the condom of life; it doesn’t allow you to enjoy things. I did it without, and this was the result; it was real. It was making love.”
Variety Cover-Stories Iñárritu, Who Says He Wouldn’t Have Minded Losing

Selma As Counterpoint 100 Years After Birth Of A Nation

“When you go to see a movie, there is a spiritual exchange between the audience and what you’re watching. There is something metaphysical going on, where through the eyes, through what that person is exuding, you go, “I understand who they are. I have a sense of what they’re feeling when they’re not even talking.” There is an embodiment that is total so that you forget all of that. People shouldn’t be looking at the mechanics of what you did.”
David Oyelowo At The Movies

hollywoodreporter.com

Study Says Diverse Casts Increase Ratings, Box Office

“The irony here is that I wouldn’t even want to make “Power Rangers: The Movie’ for real. Like if I had to make a ‘Power Rangers’ movie, this is it. It’s 14 minutes long and it’s violent and this is what I have in me. If they offered me the $200 million version, the PG-13 version, I literally wouldn’t do it. It’s just not interesting to me.”

Radicals In Iraq Continue To Burn Thousands Of Books

Film Critic Elizabeth Weitzman Moves On After 15 Years At The New York Daily News 

nymag

“Jamie Lee Curtis Consults Sigourney Weaver About Her Next Tattoo”

Screenwriter Jimmy McGovern Says Lack Of Working Class Actors Is Changing What Kinds Of Films Can Be Made In Blighty

Larry David Deals With Ordering A Seltzer At A Sheepshead Bay Diner

“It’s hard to imagine that the space where the Beverly Center is now located was once home to a bustling children’s amusement park that served as the inspiration behind Disneyland.”

How Apple Designer Jony Ive Is “De-Warhol-ing” The Corporation’s Price Structure

telegraph.co.uk

Godzilla Hotel To Open In Japan

There’s A Hunger Games-Inspired Motivational Video Morgan Stanley Would Rather You Not Watch

Previewing A NYC Retro Of Veteran Bay Area Filmmaker John Korty

Ben Sachs Updates The Case Of Bankrobbing Comic Filmmaker Joe Gibbons

ny post

Patrick Swayze Hits The Street
22,000 NYPD Members Being Shown Road House At $35 Million “Retraining” Weekend As Lesson In How To Be Nice

variety

Sony Hack Delays SAG-AFTRA Residuals For Months

indie wire

“Searchlight is the gold ring of distributors for indie filmmakers because the company has not only learned over the years how to score in the awards derby, but it also plays a canny box office game.”

Lionsgate Makes “Significant” Investment In Telltale Games, Developer Of “Walking Dead” Videogame

“This one’s an epochal Oscar travesty. This one hurts. By nominating Boyhood, the academy gave itself the chance to recognize a movie that is not just good but revolutionary—a film that reconsiders, in surprising and rewarding ways, the medium’s relationship with time, with storytelling, and with its audience. It’s both a singular work—no one but Richard Linklater could have made it—and a universal one. It’s the crowning work of a crucial American filmmaker and a profound statement about the lives we live.”
Dan Kois: Boyhood Fan

indie wire

“The Oscars haven’t abandoned movies with mass-audience appeal. It’s theatrical audiences that, with rare exceptions, who have abandoned anything but big-budget spectacle. “
Sam Adams Pooh-Poohs The Universally-Derided Cieply-Barnes-Grey Lady Screed Favoring The Banishment Of “Elitist” Films From Oscar

There’s Science Behind The Skin Tones Of Apple’s New Ethnically-Diverse Emoji

NY Times

“Comcast Reports Small Profit In The Face Of Regulatory Uncertainty”

LA Times

Tom Rothman Ascends From TriStar To Chair Sony Pictures

“Part of the nature of love in general is that it is necessary for both partners to submit. It makes a man a man to submit to the feminine, and vice versa.”
Jane Campion And Sam Taylor-Johnson Have A Chat

telegraph.co.uk

“Ida was a harmless little arthouse film when it first came out. It was only when it started winning awards–not just the Oscar nominations, but the European film awards, and then the Globe nomination–that it became a public phenomenon in Poland. Suddenly there was a spate of nasty articles, about how unpatriotic and disgraceful it was, and how it was designed for an Oscar. If there was one film that wasn’t designed for an Oscar, it was this one!”

Angelo Muredda Says David Cronenberg Is Making “Comedies Of Physical Frailty”

The Story Of The Rediscovery Of The Universal Newsreel “Midget Troupe Gets Short End As Circus Closes“

Hedge Funds Are Using Holdings Of Apple Stock To Bolster Appearance Of Success

indie wire

“I Attended The Oscars And Hung Out With The Losers,” Sez Eric Kohn

LA Times

J. K. Simmons Remembers The Lean Times

“Sienna Miller And The Rise Of The ‘Reactress'”

“Gentrifying The Web” With The New Lines Of Internet Domain Names

nymag

Ten Angry Reactions To Things Actors Said At Oscar

“How Did John Travolta Get So Creepy?”

Oscar-Winning Screenwriter Graham Moore Talks To ChiTrib About Growing Up “Weird” In Chicago

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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