MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2015

Penelope Spheeris On Interviewing Motörhead’s Late Lemmy

Reddit Readers Report On Their Hateful Eight Shows
“Don’t you have anything better to do on a Tuesday night?”
And  – Tarantino Drops In On Portland Screenings

NY Times

“’Tell your mother about the orgasm. Tell your mother how we talked,’ Cosby said he recalled thinking.”

Taffy Brodesser-Akner‘s Post-Cosby Joke Profile Of Hannibal Buress

Cosby Charged With Aggravated Indecent Assault

“In Defense Of George Lucas: It’s Time We Stopped Shitting On A Genius.”

“The Force Awakens is the feminist punch-the-air moment we’ve all been desperately waiting for.”

wsj

Appeals Court Rules Texas Can Deny Tax Breaks To Films That Hurt Politicians’ Feelings About Their State

variety

“Where have Janet Maslin, Carrie Rickey, Caryn James, Leah Rozen, Eleanor Ringel, Lisa Schwarzbaum, Susan Wloszczyna, Claudia Puig, Christy Lemire, Lisa Kennedy and Katherine Monk gone, once they took the buyout or got shifted from their perch?”
Thelma Adams On Women And Movie Reviewing

NY Times

“‘I’m not that smart in Team America,’ he admitted.”
Times Goes Good Oscar Hunting With Matt Damon Praiser

“The lightsaber is the ultimate sci-fi weapon, combining portability, elegance–and really cool sound effects.“

daily beast

“Michael happens to be a middle-aged person, but I wasn’t trying to make a mid-life crisis thing,” Kaufman continues. “That just happens to be this character. I’m going to take it one step farther from saying I don’t think he’s middle-aged by necessity—I don’t think he’s male by necessity. I think it’s a human condition to not be able to see other people, for various reasons.”

Idris Elba On His Mad Models For Beasts Of No Nation

“Malick seizes the ineluctable pertinence of the spiritual question for a noble conscience, amidst the abundance of cultural shards, and the progressive loss of meaning entailed by the lethargy of our assailed senses. This is an art that possesses the intelligence of myths-to-come, and which reactivates the value of Mystery.”
Is It Time Already For The First Terrence Malick-Knight Of Cups Thinkpiece?

Vittorio Storaro On His Latest Project With A Couple Of His Prep Collages

Girish Shambu On The Apu Trilogy In Buffalo On The Big Screen

Eric Hynes Defines An Era Of Film Production In Two Sweet Paragraphs: “Don’t Fuck It Up”

LA Times

Amy Kaufman On How Young Actors Deal With Sudden fame

Documentary Friends And Colleagues Remember Haskell Wexler

Art Of The Title Credits 2015’s 10 Best Openers

LA Times

Cinémathèque Française Dedicates A Floor To “Scorsese” Exhibition

The FT On Why The UK Must Stop Strangling The BBC

Ian Fleming And The Golden Typewriter

LA Times

“I fell in love immediately with Daisy Ridley. She is just a superstar born.”
For Force Awakens, John Williams Says He “Felt A Renewed Energy And A Vitality”

variety

Hw’d Publicist And Awards Consultant Murray Weissman Was 90; Key Player In Miramax Oscar Campaigns, Other Clients Included Crash, “Hogan’s Heroes,” Judy Garland

indie wire

Ren Klyce On Designing The Sound Inside Inside Out

Justin Davidson On The Virtues Of 2015 Film Scores

LA Times

“As a ‘rebooting,’ the term ubiquitously applied to The Force Awakens, it feels entirely market-oriented, the way the Tide logo gets periodically redesigned to look fresh or the trademark figures of Betty Crocker and the Gerber Foods baby are redrawn to stay ‘modern.’ But redesigning logos and brand icons is a technique drawn from Madison Avenue, not traditional moviemaking.”
Matthew Hiltzik Dares The Force And Its Fans

“No, Rey is not the perfect role model for little girls. She’s a role model for boys. Indeed, she’s the perfect role model for little boys, and a whole bunch of supposedly grown-ass men as well. She’s the role model they need. Frankly, she’s the role model our expanding universe of epic sexist bullshittery needs. And it’s about damn time, really.”
Mike Adamick Gets It

Producer Stacy Sher On Shooting Hateful Eight At Almost 10,000 Feet Above Sea Level

“He’s a real lowlife, there’s no question about it. He’s a very dishonest man.”
Donald Trump Reacts To Manchester Union Leader Publisher Comparing Him To “Biff” From Back To The Future In Front Page Editorial

“We haven’t yet got to the point where there’s an over-saturation of strong female characters. There’s only a couple of them that happen every year.”
Brie Larson On Preparing For Room

Kevin Gosztola On Haskell Wexler’s Political Activism Until The End Of His Long Life

variety

Justin Chang Delves Profitably Into The Agatha Christie-Quentin Tarantino Connection

A Definitive Translation Of The Late Peter Von Bagh‘s “To Program Is To Write Film History”

indie wire

“This is a column where James Franco talks to his reverse self, Semaj, about new films. Rather than a conventional review, it is a place where James and Semaj can muse about ideas that the films provoke.”
James Franco, IndieWIRE Columnist

NY Times

“Joy does seem intended to resonate with our own era’s mix of blue-collar anxiety and ‘can women have it all?’ agita among the well-to-do. And that’s another parallel to Baby Boom, which belongs with 9 to 5 and Working Girl in the ’80s-era museum case of ‘women: now they’re in WORKPLACE!’ comedies.”
NYT Provides Space For Frank Bruni And Ross Douthat To Muse On Holiday Movies, To Predictably Dismal Result

wsj

“Amazon.com’s day as a profit machine has finally arrived, or so many on Wall Street seem to believe. But there is reason to be skeptical that the age of [profitability] is at hand. The bulk of recent profits have come from Amazon’s growing cloud business, Amazon Web Services.”

indie wire

“Let the following reactions be a call for more capable projectionists and not proof that shooting on 70mm is no longer a viable option.”
Hateful Screenings Prompt Tortured Prose

Picturing Gloria Swanson At Home In NYC

How Philadelphia Hasn’t Changed Between Rocky And Creed: Poverty

NY Times

“The audience for the most part preferred to curl up in its comfort zone, turning out for new iterations of old screen stories.”
Cieply And Barnes Say 2015 H’wd Was About The Past 

The ASC Remembers Haskell Wexler

NY Times

Jennifer Jason Leigh On Her Two New, Dissimilar Roles

hollywoodreporter.com

“The speed with which records are falling is a testament to the audience broadening. And you can’t do these kind of numbers without extraordinary repeat business. People are seeing it three and four times. Everyone wants to be part of something that has become a cultural phenomenon.”
Is Compulsive Re-Watching Of Force Awakens Boosting The Box Office?

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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