MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2016

Remembering The Best Film Appearances By L. A.’s To-Be-Demolished 6th Street Bridge

How Does Dealing In “Theater Clearances” Affect What Movies Play Near You? More Than You Probably Know

LA Times

Hulu Buys Streaming Window For All IFC Docs, Including City Of Gold And Weiner

NY Times

Behind The Scenes With Sundance-Crasher Concierges

hollywoodreporter.com

Disney, Fox And Lionsgate Put $50 Million Toward Group Ticketing App

indie wire

Read Christine Vachon And Pamela Koffler‘s Sundance Fest Producers Lunch Keynote

Ellen Page: “Being out became more important than any movie”

Marshall Brickman Looks Back To His Early Days In Comedy, Then Working With Woody Allen

A Report From Mark Romanek’s Star-Studded Dr. Strangelove LACMA Live Read

“Game respects game!”
Spike Lee On His Latest Michael Jackson Doc

NY Times

Spike Lee On Those Who “Want To Rewind The Clock”

HBO, Magnolia In Pink With Sundance Doc Tickled

Sundance Grand-Juries Birth Of A Nation, Wiener; The Daniels For Directing Swiss Army Man; Birth Also Takes Audience Nod

“After the P/I screening, I overheard several white male film critics speculating that the film won’t possibly make back that record-breaking purchase price. One joked about the lack of sequel potential; another predictably sniped that Fox Searchlight overpaid because of all the recent furor over diversity. But no distributor ever pays for a film based purely on its artistic value, it’s always a mix of flag-planting prestige, pure supply-and-demand, favoritism, and fickle bias. Birth of a Nation‘s huge price tag seems to be a reasonable reaction to the pent-up demand for more serious, diverse stories in an industry that has largely defined serious cinema as white cinema.”

Ensemble: Spotlight; Larson, DiCaprio; Supporting: Vikander, Elba; Stunts: Mad Max: Fury Road
The Complete 2016 SAG Film Awards List

NY Times

“No matter how much the industry and its media minions seem determined to turn Sundance into a snowy exurb of Hollywood, the festival continues to push against the mainstream tide through some of its selections.”
Manohla Dargis Reports From Sundance

Google Shifts Over $40 Billion In Profits From Non-U.S. Sales To Tax-Free Bermuda; Rejects UK Call To Sanction Shelter Nation

John August Calculates That 86 Of The 100 All-Time Worldwide Top-Grossing Movies Are Part Of A Franchise

Spotlight Prompts More Victims To Come Forward

Craig Keller On The Death Of Jacques Rivette

NY Times

“If the academy is out of touch, what does that make me? A dinosaur. A stagecoach driver in the age of Uber. An old man yelling at a cloud.”
A. O. Scott Previews His Forthcoming “Better Living Through Criticism”

hollywoodreporter.com

Colin Treverrow Hopes To Shoot Part Of Star Wars IX In Space

“Ira Sachs has become the quintessential auteur of today’s New York–the one of class inequality, and of relationships transformed by the changing city around them.”
Bilge Ebiri Salutes Sundance’s Little Men

Michael Koresky On Nonfiction Sophistication At Sundance, With Cameraperson And Kate Plays Christine

Director Tim Miller On The Rebirth Of Foul-Mouthed, Pansexual, Sarcastic Deadpool

Ed Lachman Expands On The Lush, Loving Look Of Carol

“The internet I do use, mostly email, and it’s a fine instrument. Those who read gain the world, and those who are too much on the internet lose it.”
Werner Herzog In The Modern World

What Happened Miss Simone‘s Liz Garbus On Playing “First Boss”

Tony Rayns Open-Letters For Sustaining The Work Of Busan International Film Festival Director Lee Yongkwan

hollywoodreporter.com

“’You will have to fly Mo’Nique and her team out and you would have to pay for her team—for hair and makeup and wardrobe—because that’s a night where there’s a lot of picture-taking and it’s TV.’ And they said, ‘That’s not something that we do. We don’t fly anyone in and pay for anyone and put anyone up.’ And we said, ‘We understand. But that’s not something we do either. We don’t pay out money to come on your program.'”
Mo’Nique On To Oscar Or Not

“Notes may seem stupid. It is your job to look past their bad solution to the problem they are responding to–and come up with a better solution.”
Zoe Kazan’s “Useful Lessons I Have Learned From Having Screenwriters For Parents”

Canny Alliance: Amazon Studios Sundance Buy, Gleason, To Be Distributed Theatrically Via Open Road (Owned By Two Of The Largest Chains)

hollywoodreporter.com

“Baseball and football have taken proactive steps to solve the problem and have made significant progress. The Academy has now embarked on a path that will hopefully also produce positive results with enough effort and intent.”
Democratic Political Operative Donna Brazile Has An Oscar Campaign Written In Deadly Politic-ese

Sony Classics Adopts John Krasinski Sundance Pic

variety

Universal Takes Michael Shannon Erotic Thriller Frank And Lola For $2 Million

American Cinema Editors Award Mad Max, Big Short, Amy, Inside Out

variety

Marvel CEO Perlmutter $1 Million Donation To Trump To Funnel To Veterans Meets Mixed Response

“We trans folk are likewise aggrieved when our complex struggles are reduced to mannered gesturing as shorthand for stereotypical gender behaviours, especially when played equally to the Academy as to the gallery.”
Australian Trans Woman Cerise Howard On The Danish Girl

variety

People Magazine Took On A “H’wd Blackout”—In 1996
“Although Hollywood’s executive corps is clearly too vanilla, why launch your assault at this time, when significant inroads are being made? Protests and picketing are passe. There is growing resentment in this country against anything that smells of affirmative action. No matter what anyone tells you, Hollywood hires on merit, and the opportunities are there.”
And – A 62-Year-Old Peter Bart Dismissed The Idea

LA Times

Sam Adams On Lubezski’s Revenant Instagrams

“The show is distinctive in its sparseness, its fixed and almost obsessive concentration on Nichols’ face and voice. Beyond the substance of the film, its very form is May’s highest tribute to Nichols: she can’t stop looking at him and listening to him.”
Richard Brody‘s Bittersweet Appreciation Of Elaine May’s Mike Nichols American Masters Doc

variety

A24 Propels Swiss Army Man In North America

FOIA Request Answers What Movies Bill Clinton Watched At The White House

Michael Moore‘s Broadside Says Flint, Michigan Needs Much More Than A Daily 20.4 Million Bottles Of Water From The Public

“This is a guy who discovered, nurtured, befriended, defended more great writers than just about anyone.”
Esquire Ejects Editor-In-Chief After 19 Years

« Older Entries

MCN Curated Headlines

Archives Comments Most Recent

“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