MCN Curated Headlines Archive for September, 2015

variety

Tim Gray Concerned About Awards Voters Finding Balance In The Walk

“The tastelessness of his jumbled thrill ride lacks precisely the purity, the simplicity, the stillness in motion and the infinitesimal perfection of Petit’s walk. The collection of images has neither a constructive compositional complexity nor a severely disciplined set of self-imposed limits. Zemeckis reduces—or, rather, inflates—the walk from sensation to sensationalism.”
Richard Brody Not Found Among The Zemeckisites

NY Times

“Steve Jobs draws a cinematic dividing line between a shiny new digital future and the scruffy old past, and it envisions a man-machine interface in which people merge with devices that ultimately separate them from others.”
Stephen Holden Tries To Science The Shit Out Of NYFF

Clem Bastow Sez Male Critics Panned The Intern Because, Male Critics
Earlier – Producer Mynette Louie On “4 Ways Women Get A Raw Deal In Hollywood”

hollywoodreporter.com

John Guillermin, 89, Directed Towering Inferno, Dino’s Kong, Shaft In Africa

Philadelphia City Paper Alt-Weekly Closing Next Week; Employees Fired, Archives Likelky To Extinguished

Peter Dinklage Sez “The Fight Is All”

wsj

John Carpenter To Perform Scores Live For First Time, In Iceland

NY Times

Joshua Oppenheimer Op-Eds 50th Anniversary Of Indonesian Genocide

hollywoodreporter.com

Matt Damon: “Oh My God, I Look Like An Asshole”

NYDN Lets Go Of 13-Year Film Critic Joe Neumaier

Good Dr. Bordwell On When Strange, Subjective Sounds First Appeared In H’wd Pics

daily beast

Hw’d Figures Sought To Assist Anti-ISIS Propaganda

The Inspirations Behind Rebel Citizen, The Haskell Wexler Bio-Doc

Tom White And AJ Schnack On The “Field Of Vision” Doc Series Online Launch

Jada Yuan Profiles Cary Fukunaga; Shooting Beasts Of No Nation Was Tough

“Can Anyone Save The Library Of Congress?”

Drew McWeeny Blown Away By The Timeless Timeliness Of 1982’s The World According To Garp

A+E Blends Broadcast Film Critics’ Ass’n’s TV And Movie Awards

Vpon Ye Apple Store As Modern Chvrch

“A24 has established itself as the film industry’s most forward-thinking company by releasing the kind of midsized, stylish, quality films that seemed on the verge of going extinct, transforming them into a collective theatrical experience, and aiming them squarely at a demographic that would rather watch movies on their phones.”
David Ehrlich Offers Warm Tongue Bath Of Praise For A24 Distribbery

Michael Moore’s Latest Lands At New Shingle Headed By Tom Quinn-Jason Janego-Tim League

New Wave Film Directors Seen As Comic Book Characters

Laura Poitras, Charlotte Cook And AJ Schnack On The “Field Of Vision” Doc Series 

Two Minutes Of New Scenes Grace New Edition Of Iron Giant

“Lost Forever?” More From Cinematographer John Bailey On Movies Imperiled And Movies Saved

I’m a huge BBC fan but how often do I hear an estuary accent on Radio 4? It’s fighting for its life and needs to engage with millions of people just like the Goggleboxers. There should be a new dish in the BBC canteen–humble pie.”
Another Former BBC Exec Disses Broadcaster Toward, Gasp, Own Agenda

Vivendi Building 10 Open-Air Theaters In Africa Under “CanalOlympia” Label

NY Times

YouTube Set To Paste Shopping Ads Atop Any Video It Can

Ben Sachs Looks Back On Dennis Hopper’s “Sad,” “Exhilarating” “Galvanic” Film Of “Raw Power,” Out Of The Blue

NY Times

“Sir Ridley Learned About Water On Mars Before We Did, But Not In Time To Change The Martian“

John Cassidy On “The Financial Times And The Future Of Journalism”

NY Times

Media Measurement Co’s Rentrak And ComScore To Merge

A Report On The Walk Making 3D Viewers Nauseous Relies On A Single Tweet By Mark Harris

BBC

“I’m going to make a quite narrow definition of culture. And I’m going to call culture the creative arts. But I’m going to make a very broad definition of what art is. And my definition is quite simply art is everything that you don’t have to do.”
Full Transcript Of Brian Eno‘s BBC John Peel Lecture On Culture, Pop And Not pdf download

“Tiny Canadian” Ellen Page On This Historic Moment

“I’m not a control freak necessarily, but there’s direction to my direction when I’m making a movie. In this case I wasn’t in control. I was accepting that feeling and I was excited about the idea of not having control.”
Eric Hynes And Dustin Guy Defa On His New Shepard Fairey Doc, God Is An Artist

“Vancouver is a service city, Transaction Town, and if you’ve got something to say, you ought to keep your head down unless it’s got dollars and cents at its center. I urge VIFF not to measure its homegrown talent on these terms.”
Filmmaker Will Ross On The Vancouver Int’l Film Fest From A Local Perspective

Poitras-Schnack-Cook “Field Of Vision” Series Launches First Weekly Mini-Docs

As Privatization Continues Apace, Britain’s Channel 4 Chairman To Step Away

Alert The King: Claire Danes Says She Couldn’t Eat Fresh Vegetables For A Month While Filming In Morocco

200 Financial Times Journos Seek Assurance Of Editorial Integrity From New Japanese Owners

hollywoodreporter.com

“The worst part was seeing the American press as a willing accomplice, an eager accomplice to terrorism. I don’t know how these reporters who printed the stuff can look at themselves in the morning… [A]bsolutely aided and abetted terrorism.”
Aaron Sorkin On Sony Hack

Sony Ramps Up Crackle

variety

Lionsgate UK Backing Passion Projects

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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