MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2015

An Excerpt From J. R. Jones‘ “The Lives Of Robert Ryan,” On The Actor’s Pronounced Politics

NY Times

The Cable Execs, Traders And Bankers Who Will See The Most Profit From Charter-Time Warner Cable Merger

deadline

“‘We tried to make a wide release movie, it doesn’t really feel like it, let’s not make someone spend $30 million and the movie open to $7 million, let’s go to Netflix or iTunes and have a little theatrical or no theatrical,” and that’s how the process works. Occasionally, the director and us disagree, and it’s a shit-show, it doesn’t happen to often.”
Jason Blum Describes The Blumhouse Model

For Fassbinder’s 70th, David Hudson Visits Berlin’s “Fassbinder—NOW” Exhibit

Jill Soloway Says Women In H’wd Must Cry At Work, “Don’t Be Like Anyone Else”

NY Times

“Way, way back when I made Do the Right Thing, there were people who said this film would cause riots all across America, that black people were going to run amok. They wrote a whole bunch of things. But those people ended up being on the wrong side of history. And the same is going to happen in Chicago.”
Julie Bosman Offers Background As Spike Lee Starts His Chicago Gun Violence Movie

“Our mission’s to do great journalism and tell people about the world,”
Buzzfeed Publishes “The Hardest Game Of ‘—-, Marry, Kill’ For Anybody Who Is Attracted To Hot Ladies”

ew

“Unlike Stone’s character, I have a darker complexion and black hair. Moreover, like most Eurasian people I know, have never been able to ‘pass.’ If anything, my racial identity has necessarily entailed a great deal of explanation to clarify that I am in fact Chinese-American/French-Canadian and not, say, Brazilian, Tibetan, Colombian or Filipino.”

“Kael wrote with the same spontaneity and intelligence about popular entertainment as about the films of Renoir and Antonioni. The key was that her criticism continued to flow from the experience of viewing the film–if it made her feel good, then it was good.”

“186 Movies That Should Be In The Criterion Collection”

An Extensive Before-And-After Comparison Of All Manner Of VFX In Fury Road
And – “Center-framed and barreling right at the audience.”

“She would just go stand for nine hours at a time at an Apple store. She would just write and write and write. It was no bullshit, so conversational and unpretentious. ‘Look, I want to adapt these into a movie,’ and she said, ‘That sounds awesome,’ and I was like, ‘I want you to play the lead,’ and she was like, ‘Okay, sure.’ She lives so presently. Two hours before she met me, that didn’t exist, and then two hours later, I didn’t exist. She exists in hours.”
How The Safdies Discovered Their Heaven Knows What Star When She Was A Homeless Junkie

“Showbusiness sucks,” Says Brian Cox, “It’s run by people I have little respect for”

Nick Schager Highlights 10 Moments Of Milla Jovovich “Badassery,” Because, Milla

ny post

Helen Mirren Says When She’s On B’wy, She Lives Like A “—-ing Nun”

“The political sensitivities of young critics these days are so finely tuned that it’s hard to know sometimes whether a protest is part of an attempt to create a new critical paradigm centered around diversity, or just some kind of high-functioning troll activity.”

Picturing Wim Wenders’ Borders And Open Roads

Joanne Harris Tracks Loki From Icelandic Mythology To Present-Day Popularity

What Peter Bradshaw Learned At Cannes: “Scoping”

indie wire

Andrew Bujalski Gets Results With “Funky” Mixtape

telegraph.co.uk

“Looking back, I can’t think of one funded show that was any good, while every day the world of commercial entertainment throws up work that is new, vibrant, creative and exciting without any need for government help.”

John Bailey On Vilmos Zsigmond And The Rose

Daniel Clowes Has Thought Of Following The Ghost World Girls As Adults

NY Times

“She is now barred from practicing journalism about the entertainment industry online for about a decade. Ms. Finke declined to discuss the settlement for fear of violating it. She declined to be photographed for this article, supplying the portrait instead.”
Ravi Somaiya Seances For 1,100 Words With Nikki Finke Over Her New Fictional Enterprise

Gawker Employees Seek Union

NY Times

James B. Stewart On Netflix Lobbying At White House And On Capitol Hill

Olivier Assayas Criterion Top-10s Twenty-Two Pictures, Just Getting Started With The Leopard, Pickpocket, Andrei Rublev…

“I honestly don’t know why people aren’t more into Cameron Crowe, or at least wanting him to succeed. Maybe it’s some sort of grown-up version of instinctively disliking things that your parents either like or are likely to like.”
Alex Ross Perry On Cameron Crowe And Aloha

Animator Don Hertzfeldt Says “Artists Shouldn’t Be Making Art On The Side, It Should Be Their Job”

A Poet Considers The Music Of A Title

Sydney’s Former Film Australia Studios To Be Sold For Residential Use

Texas Slashes Production Incentives

thestar.com

Charlize Theron: Alpha Female

A Note To All Media, Not Limited To Trades: “Your ‘Scoop’ Doesn’t Matter”

Adrian Curry On The 34 Fine Movie Posters In “Scorsese Collects”

Alan Rusbridger Looks Back On Twenty Years Of Running The Grauniad

Canuck Pics Assemble For Possible TIFF 2015 Opening Slot

Toronto Int’l Offers Designers Chance To Compete On 2015 T-Shirt Design For “Public Exposure”

hollywoodreporter.com

Netflix Faces Obstacles In Entering China Market

NY Times

Chinese Filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai Says It’s The Worst Of Times For Chinese Indies

Vanity Fair’s Forever-Editor Says The Mag Will “Think Like A Start-Up”

“Part of the reason Aloha works is because Crowe never holds back: he is never less than 100% committed to really Going For It, which doesn’t necessarily mean an endless series of epiphanies, and it’s certainly not all about love. Whether you find this charming, cloying or both is a little irrelevant: rote connective tissue is systematically rejected for something more aggressive.”

Kyle Buchanan Marks The 10th Anniversary Of Leonardo DiCaprio Going From “Twink” To “Twunk”

“I want to enter someone else’s life and learn something. A lot of gay men have boyfriends that look like them. Mine are never age-appropriate. Most of my men friends that are successful in the arts do not have age-appropriate boyfriends.When you’re 68, 40s are young. Things work or they don’t.”
Thelma Adams And John Waters Have A Small Sit-down

hollywoodreporter.com

Wally Cassell, 103, Bad Guy In White Heat, Never Had A Fight With His Wife

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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

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