MCN Curated Headlines Archive for March, 2015

“I was watching some of the cut-together footage the other day. I’m too close to tell how it all adds up just yet, but I like how it feels. It seems sensitive and scrappy. Like a little kid with hand-me-down-clothes and a bloody nose, cuddling a kitten.”
David Lowery Set-Diaries Day 51 Of Pete’s Dragon

Criterion Unearths A Messsage From Ingmar Bergman vid

Hal Hartley On Ned Rifle, Themes Of Responsibility And The Course Of His Career

Ari Folman Animates Anne Frank

variety

Variety Cover-Stories Jeff Skoll’s Hopes To Sustain Participant Media

hollywoodreporter.com

Scientology Replies Vehemently, But Not To Points, In THR’s 20 Questions Raised By Going Clear

“Birthplace Of British Cinema” Reopens After $8.9 Million Refurbishment

A Survey Of Berlin’s Amazing Cinemas

NY Times

Ex Machina‘s Alex Garland Picks Five SciFi Faves

Ian Parker Spends An Afternoon With Charles Grodin And His Fiberglass Menagerie

hollywoodreporter.com

The Robin Williams Trust Restricts The Right Of Exploitation Of His Image For 25 Years

The ASC Remembers Cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek

“I love this world, I love these characters. It is definitely a passion project for me.”
Furious 7 Screenwriter Chris Morgan Talks About The Five Installments He’s Written

deadline

“Nellie is trained in the sciences and used those sensibilities to analyze a data sample; the word “ethnic” is commonly used by casting agents. None of that works when talking about people, and race.”
Mike Fleming And Peter Bart Tapdance Around The Subject Of Nellie Andreeva’s “Ethnic” Casting Article

“The Salon piece, a late-breaking bit of Allen disapprobation, is just one of a great many you see these days; a cultural note that attempts to instruct the reader that ‘we’ can’t accept ‘this’ anymore. One almost universal feature of such pieces is a frustrating vagueness about what action ‘we’ are supposed to take concerning the unacceptable state of affairs.”
Glenn Kenny On “The Melodrama Of Woody Allen’s Critical Reputation”

“We are here to enjoy my gift. We are not here to argue. Let those people speak. We will find them and ask them to leave. I am going to handle this the way I want it handled. I’m going to tell you some more jokes.”
Cosby Does Not Countenance Hecklers

Noah Baumbach’s Ever-Shifting Musical Obsessions

Stephen Rodrick Profiles Allison Jones, Casting Agent-Slash-“Nerd Hunter” For Apatow, Feig

“Baumbach perpetuates a filmmaking tradition that is almost clinically narcissistic: willfully charismatic, devoid of a real core, doomed to seek meaning in other reflections and references. It’s why their style changes completely from project to project but always can be identified by a blind, bottomless longing. With these guys, God isn’t in the details; the details are God. Yet we still succumb to their charm, the calling card notoriously exerted by all narcissists. We have to love them so they can love themselves.”

Beleaguered Chicago Sun-Times Cuts Veteran Showbiz Columnist Bill Zwecker To Half-Time

Dame Helen Mirren Says Sex Better Than Ever At 69

On The Origin Of Color Bars And Other TV Test Patterns

NY Times

“It is a magical moment in a marketing plan. It’s fun, even if only 45 people show up.”
Michael Cieply On Buzzfeed, VICE, CNN And Others Who Think It Would Be Fun To Run A Mini-Studio

Ebert Website Gathers Remembrances On Secondary Anniversary Of Roger’s Passing
And – Ray Pride’s Memories From Time Of Release Of Life Itself

NY Times

An Interesting (If Confusingly Organized) Look At New Approaches To Security In Hw’d

the wrap

The Wrap Seeks, Finds, Celeb Tweets During Broadcast Of Going Clear

Esquire Asks Anna Faris Some Semi-Random But Definitely Goonish Questions

PIXAR Makes Its Renderman Rendering Software Free For Noncommercial Use

Rome’s Cinecittà Studios Advertises Italian Tax Credit To Lure Studio Productions Like Zoolander 2 And Ben Hur

What Excites Bill Nighy?

variety

Oscar-Nominated Cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek, 80, Photographed Amadeus, O Lucky Man!, Fireman’s Ball, A League Of Their Own, Garp, Silkwood

hollywoodreporter.com

Academy Pays $344,000 For 2001‘s Aries 1B Trans-Lunar Space Shuttle

NY Times

Gene Saks, 93, Actor, Film And Stage Director Largely Known For Work With Neil Simon

“In another environment without drones, we would have been limited to a tripod on the street, which is not nearly as exciting as God’s Louma crane.”
Alex Gibney On Stylistic Choices In Going Clear

Jim Ridley Talks To Reclusive, Nashville-Based Video Essayist ::kogonada

LA Times

Sheri Linden On Los Angeles Retrospective Of  Taiwan’s Master Director Hou Hsiao-hsien

Adam Driver At Length Of Where He Sees Himself Today

BBC

Sir Roger Moore Says He Is Not Racist

Screen Australia Gets Banker As New Boss

Stephen King Challenges Maine Governor To Retract Lies About His Taxes

Netflix Digital-Only Down Under, With An Estimated 7,000 Fewer Titles Than In U. S.

Hw’d Food Stylist Melissa McSorley’s Not Talking About That Pile Of Caviar In Danny Collins

“Cinema is gone—everyone agrees. And yet cinema also abides, if only so that Jean-Luc Godard can go on delivering valedictions to what it used to be. Like the history of which it’s a part, the moving image has not finished its work, nor is it likely to anytime soon. I think it’s just gotten a little too much into itself. The future of the moving image, radical or otherwise, is now being decided by a bunch of 10-year-olds. My ideas won’t greatly affect what they like.”

While We’re Young DP Sam Levy On Removing What Seems Electronic In The Image And On Making The Final Film Print At Technicolor New York

Incoming Guardian Editor Katherine Viner On New Digital Journalism And “The Rise Of The Reader”

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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