MCN Curated Headlines Archive for November, 2015

LA Times

Three Bylines For LAT Sumner Redstone Update

Looking At An Australian Biography Of The Man “Before Rupert”

thestar.com

Peter Howell Christens Oscar Season And The Convening Of The Gurus O’ Gold

indie wire

Cahiers du Cinema Enjoins Playlist Against Publishing Their 2015 Top 10 List
While – Fandor’s Keyframe Daily Goes Right Ahead

Watch Eddie Murphy’s Six Minutes Of Stand-Up At The Mark Twain Prize

The Economist On What Zoolander 2 Trailer Brought To Trans Discussion

variety

Alex Proyas And Lionsgate Apologize Over Whiteness Of Gods Of Egypt Cast

NY Times

“When he wants to be, Audiard is France’s most provocative director: a major film artist who doesn’t care about what’s politically correct, only what is just. Insanely, sensationalistically just.”
Wesley Morris And A. O. Scott On Six Films That Speak To The Idea Of “France”

“Why tie a film so explicitly to a cause that “needs immediate attention,” whether through the plotting or promotion, if not to profit on the outdated idea of that there is a foreign land that needs saving?”

variety

“Despite all the changes that are occurring, great content is more valuable than ever We have the best array of assets that are going to allow us to be the most flexible and to win under many different scenarios.”
Variety Cover-Stories Warner Bros And Boss Kevin Tsujihara

“Both Creed and Mad Max should be instructive to studios: if you are planning to resurrect a franchise, that new entry should be able to stand on its own.”

wsj

How Google Inspired Raspberry Pi’s $5 Computer

NY Times

“Polish judges and prosecutors appreciated how many grave mistakes had been made on the U.S. side and exposed its hypocrisy. Roman and his family can finally take a deep breath.”
Polanski Won’t Be Extradited To Los Angeles

variety

Ben Affleck Feels “Ton Of Pressure”

Twelve-Year-Old BBC3 Youth Channel Ends By February

variety

Steven Gaydos Analyzes Golden Globes Historical Winners, Pushing Past Questions Of Present-Day HFPA Process

A Look At Male-Female Balance In Oz Film Industry

variety

Brian Lowry On What Empire Strikes Back Taught Him Long, Long Ago About Avoiding Spoilerage

“What major news media companies haven’t learned is that once you empty the newsroom of experienced, talented, prize-winning reporters and editors, you lose the essence of who you are, and the young, inexperienced journalists have no one to listen to when it comes to learning how to become those departing journalists.”
Former City Editor Bill Boyarsky On “The Once Great Los Angeles Times”

Redstone Lawyers Contest Competency Claims

indie wire

Eric Kohn Draws Out Paul Verhoeven On History, H’wd And Upcoming Work

hollywoodreporter.com

Disney’s ESPN Has Shed 7 Million Subscribers In Two Years

“We didn’t get a glimpse of the other men and women in the communities who are striving, often without pay, to provide vulnerable young people a chance at a future. I know it’s satire. But can we really afford to laugh when our situation in Chicago is so dire that a 9-year-old boy can be lured into an alley and executed?”
Tribune Reporter Takes Spike Lee For Not Making Chi-raq The Movie In Her Head

John Cleese Has A Few Choice Words About Most Everything

Carvell Wallace On “The Two Lives Of Michael Jackson”

“The Filmable Miss Highsmith”

indie wire

A Few Small Thoughts On The Origins Of Rocky From Producer Mike Medavoy

SF’s Le Video Shuttering At End Of Month

Peter Hartlaub‘s Oral History Of Star Wars And San Francisco’s Coronet Theater In 1977

NY Times

“Ms. Herzer is represented in the Redstone suit by Bertram Fields, Pierce O’Donnell and other lawyers from the Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger law firm, a Hollywood powerhouse.”

NY Times

“Harper Lee, 89, signed sheets of paper that were then bound into the books, in batches over a period of a few months. Ms. Lee is nearly blind and has trouble hearing, but can write and read documents, with the help of a magnifying machine. HarperCollins printed just 500 copies of the collectors’ edition, which includes a leather-bound book with gold gilded edges and a velvet-lined cloth box.”

Donald Richie‘s Celebration Of Actress Setsuke Hara

hollywoodreporter.com

Will Smith, “Incensed To A Level I Can’t Sleep,” Intends To Enter Politics

The Grauniad Sez Chi-raq Is A Five-Star “Midlife Masterpiece

NY Times

Ben Kenigsberg Goes Auteur With Kent Jones And His Interview Subjects On Hitchcock/Truffaut

hollywoodreporter.com

Elmo Williams, 102, Oscar-Winning Editor Of High Noon; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

NY Times

“I happen to like Mr. LaBeouf. Even in junk, he comes prepared for maximum intensity. Talent and fame reside in different ZIP codes. If he knows that, he might want to do more time-sharing.”
Wesley Morris On Celeb Look-At-Me Stunts

“If we are to believe even a small percentage of Sir Tom Jones’ reputation, he has slept with approximately every person in the world.”

Morgan Freeman Thriller, Momentum, Fails To Crack $70 At UK Box Office; Two Of Ten Theaters Dish No Ducats

“In every Richard Curtis film there is an unpopular character called Bernard, after the now Tory MP Bernard Jenkin won the heart of a girl who Curtis also loved in his youth.”

NY Times

“I’m stupid, and abstraction gives me vertigo.”
J. Hoberman On Miguel Gomes And His Epic Arabian Nights

“When shooting began, it was with the intention of filming material inspired by quite separate characters, so that there would be four completely different ‘threads’ at the outset, without knowing–I should have known, but I’d avoided asking myself the question–how this material would be edited together.”
From 1973, Jacques Rivette Gabs OUT 1

variety

Battles Over Redstone Legacy Heat Up

Grauniad Film Blogger Takes U. S. Film Blogger To Task For Daubing Revenant “Too Brutal For Women”

NY Times

Carell, Gosling And Wittrock On The Big Short Learning Curve

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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