MCN Curated Headlines Archive for April, 2015

hollywoodreporter.com

“The real question becomes where do people see films first more than whether there are too many features being made or too many features being released.”
John Sloss On A Boyhood Sequel, The Virtues Of Self-Releasing, And Proper “Windowing”

“What’s alarming is the climate of which the plan is symptomatic. We’ve come to prefer anticipation to reflection—to thinking idly about a film that’s coming soon than to thinking seriously about one that’s already out. Publications tease and rumor-monger rather than digest and analyze; release dates and casting decisions are more widely shared and read than actual criticism.”
Calum Marsh Considers The Marvel Factory As An “Anticipation Machine,” With The Movies Almost Beside The Point

“While many people talk about the way that the Internet has democratized things, the film world is still stuck in old-media based patterns that rely on gatekeepers to keep things flowing. The flood of well-made films that was unleashed by the increased availability of the means of production has only made this pattern more entrenched.”
Filmmaker Michael Galinsky On The Shifting Fates Of His Doc, Who Took Johnny

“If we can get people to watch documentaries better, with a better comprehension of the inbuilt complexities of the form, perhaps we can get them to watch the news better, or to be better equipped to deal with the often crude narratives they’re presented with daily.”
Robert Greene Thinks Up Another Customarily Thoughtful Doc Thinkpiece

“At some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. We end the drug war. I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the —-ing drug war.”
David Simon On Baltimore

“Like his friend and occasional jousting partner Roger Ebert, Richard didn’t judge a film by whether it measured up to some ideal yardstick of the medium. He welcomed the movies—at Time, some 2500, between 1980 and now—as they came. He let his wide tastes, good sense, vast memory and knowledge, and breakneck gift for language decide what they counted for.”
Good Dr. Bordwell Remembers Richard Corliss

hollywoodreporter.com

“Yes, I am a big target and I have been very successful, and there are always people who either may not have had success or for whatever reason are not fond of my success who tend to be very willing to say things that are not nice.”
THR Cover-Stories The Joel Silver Saga

daily beast

“Over the course of four movies, including Avengers: The Age of Ultron, Scarlett Johansson’s token lady Avenger has been positioned as a seductive foil to as many different male teammates.”
Jen Yamato Ponders The Black Widow’s Lack Of Agency In All Those Many Marvel Movies

“Sandler’s blatant racism and insensitivity adds a massive amount of insult to centuries of injury toward a group of people, given that just a little over 100 years ago it was acceptable to sell their scalps for $25. There’s ignorance being displayed if this entitled old comedian thinks that he can get away with making fun of that same group of people that happens to still be marginalized and oppressed by their dominant settler colonial society to this day.”
Writes Native Actor Tyson Houseman, Who Was In Twilight Movies

MCN Curated Headlines

“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