MCN Curated Headlines Archive for August, 2015

Michael Phillips On Digital’s Domain And The Celluloid-Nurturing Northwest Chicago Film Society

NY Times

Carl Apfel, Nearly 101, Husband Of Iris Apfel And Fashion Plate In Own Right

LA Times

Netflix Will Move L. A. Operations To New Building Astride Sunset Bronson Studios

“Increasingly, when a Netflix series is recommended to me, it almost always comes with a variation on the same caveat: ‘You have to stick with it. The first six episodes are really slow. But if you stick with it, it gets good.'”

LA Times

Alex Gibney Says His Steve Jobs Doc Meant To Explore “Public Grief” Over His Passing

Seven Wonders, Selected By Richard E. Grant

Ice Cube Offers His Straight Outta Compton Fact Check

Jason Gorber And Michael Ironside Talk His Long And Fruitful Career

LA Times

Spike Lee Sez “The Academy Is Different Now”

UK Culture Secretary Summons Armond Iannucci For “Chat” After His Criticism Of Gov’t Diminishment Of BBC

David Edelstein Ranks Every QT Picture, Because
With – A “Syllabus” Of The Filmmaker’s Discernible (And Admitted) Influences

Euro Publishers’ Attempt To Tax Google Search May Be Misguided

After Charges Cleared In Phone Hacking Scandal, Rebekah Brooks Returns As Chief Executive Of NewsCorp UK

Alison Bechdel “Sheepish” Over “Bechdel Test”

indie wire

Sidebar Jury President Jonathan Demme To Receive Venice Visionary Award

A UK Plea To Save Soho Sex And Smut

MacArthur Foundation Lists The 200-Plus Docs It’s Financed Across 30 Years

daily beast

Ice-T Responds To Twitter Pestering Over An Episode Of “SVU”

“It’s an object lesson in the shortcomings of data-driven journalism, particularly in reporting the arts. These aren’t cattle futures or mortgage rates we’re talking about here—these industries aren’t about raw numbers, or average incomes, or total revenues. They’re about creative work produced by human beings.”
Quoted Jason Bailey Takes Deserved Whack At NYTMag “Creative Apocalypse” Piñata

daily beast

When The Going Was Good: Daily Beast Derp-Sixes Comment Section

Salon

“We have proof that diversity sells movies—so why can’t all of Hw’d catch up?”

Considering “Go Set A Watchman” As “Found Money”

indie wire

“In America, some money is better than no money.”
Alex Ross Perry Argues Convincingly Why Indie Filmmakers Can Afford Film

Behind IFC’s “Documentary Now!” Spoofs

Daniel Carlson Muses On Night Moves

Fall Fashion Is Starting To Look A Lot Like Wes Anderson

“The fact that Swift demurred at first with Apple Music, holding out for a better offer, sipping her drink, sitting sideways at the bar, shows only that she and streaming are truly made for each other.”
David Hadju On The Economics And Esthetics Of Streaming Music

Antonioni’s Widow Says “He Was A Man You Could Never Quite Reach”

An Argument For The Sulzbergers To Offload The NYTimes

“As someone who never knew David Foster Wallace personally but to whom Wallace meant a great deal, I have no idea whether Lipsky’s account is truer to the real Wallace than Glenn Kenny’s. Maybe it isn’t; maybe it’s totally inauthentic. All I can say is that, watching the film, it felt authentic to me.”

indie wire

“The Culture Of What’s Buzzing” Website, Uproxx, Hires Editor Of The Dissolve

“Yeah, a long time ago Terry Malick wanted me to be in a movie, and I always wished… There’s another one of my many mistakes. They’re in the museum of mistakes! All the scripts I rejected!” Says Al Pacino

“No Escape has nothing to do with an actual place in Asia and everything to do with affirming a outsider view of the region as a hotbed of corruption and sex work, filled with people looking to either rip foreigners off or, given the opportunity, kill them.”

NY Times

NYT Music Critics Go Deep On The Matter Of Hip-Hop And B’way Smash “Hamilton”
And – “The bracing fusion of hip-hop and the musical form shows that America’s history—and its future—belong to men and women of color as profoundly as to anyone else.”

A Primer On Why “Life Rights” Contracts Matter To Documentaries

Second City Shutters For Now After Offices Destroyed By Fire

“Can Walton Goggins Just Be In Everything, Please?”

“Either Rotten Tomatoes makes no sense or American critics make no sense or both.”
So Rants Writer Joe Hill

Viennese Actor-Director Peter Kern Was 68 German

2015 Governor’s Awards Go To Debbie Reynolds, Spike Lee, Gena Rowlands

indie wire

“Expanding our facility is crucially important in allowing us to continue to fill a unique and important cultural space in the downtown arts scene, as well as helping vital works of cinema get launched into broader release.”
Greenwich Village’s IFC Center More Than Doubling Screens And Seats

variety

Justin Chang And Peter Debruge On TeeVee On Show At Film Fests Like TIFF

deadline

“Studios develop 10-15 films for the one they make. On 10 films we develop, we make nine. We are very director-oriented. I see all over the world, lots of directors now who maybe were happy with their experience at a studio, but they feel not totally comfortable because the weight on theirs shoulder is big.” [sic]
Deadline Mike Transcribes Luc Besson On His Latest Ambitions, Both Fiscal And Creative

NYPD Diverts Manpower To 100-Strong “Times Square Unit” To Battle Faux Superheroes And Topless Women

Owner Of Williamsburg’s Nitehawk Wouldn’t Mind Park Slope’s Pavilion Theater

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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