MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2016

hollywoodreporter.com

“And Biden hung out afterwards. He’s obviously a beloved figure in this town. I saw him chatting with Wolfgang Puck and his wife afterwards. And who wouldn’t? Everyone wants all those delicious chicken pot pies.”
Oscar Producers Hudlin And Hill Offer Their Postmortem

NY Times

“Matters of diversity now threaten to overwhelm the institution just as they did Sunday’s show. The academy has only a few months to repair damaged processes, internal relationships and its public image before the next Oscar season descends in late summer, bringing with it a chilling prospect: What if voters, even after a planned purge of inactive members, again snub actors of color?”
Cieply & Barnes Summarize Their Collected Fear

FCC Intends To Facilitate Cord-Cutting

Oscars 136-Soul Online “In Memoriam” Slideshow Includes Abe Vigoda, Andrew Lesnie, Andrzej Zulawski, Angus Scrimm, BB King, Bud Yorkin, Colin Welland, Douglas Slocombe, Franco Citti, Gunnar Hansen, Ib Melchior, Jacques Rivette, Kirk Kerkorian, Laura Antonelli, Nova Pilbeam, Richard Libertini, Vanity, Setsuko Haro And Manoel De Oliveira

Filmmaker David Lowery On Still Lacking Distance Enough To Love A Finished Movie

“Learning by Making With Abbas Kiarostami”

“The Cliftex continues to make, and reinforce, memories for its town’s residents, many of whom show up to socialize under the marquee’s blue-and-green neon when the box office opens a half-hour before showtime. ‘You can see everybody in this town that you want to see in 30 minutes.'”
Clifton, Texas’ 150-Seat Cliftex Theater Turns 100

variety

“These nationalists don’t deal with the actual film. They use the film as a pretext to rouse patriotic sentiment and give vent to their neverending obsession with a supposed worldwide Jewish-German-leftwing-liberal-Russian conspiracy against Poland. It’s their outrageous xenophobic statements that do damage to our reputation abroad—not my film.”
Polish Public Television Prefaces Broadcast Of Ida With 12-Minute Attack 

An Appreciation Of Oscar-Winning Costume Designer Jenny Beaven’s Trousers And Leather

So What Was Up With Oscar’s Crude Asian Jokes?

“It was clear from the outset that the #OscarsSoWhite campaign had seeped into the very thing it was made to criticize, just as #BlackLivesMatter has entered the political discourse—hashtag activism made good.”

indie wire

Eric Kohn Mingles At Oscar

George Kennedy Was 91

NY Times

“We don’t care, and yet somehow we must because there’s a lot at stake. I mean, no Rivette in the necrology montage? What kind of world is this? Well, this world—one in which our host stood up for less racism, then cracked a joke about the academy’s accountants being cute Asian kids who make our iPhones. Comedy’s messy!”
Dargis, Morris & Scott Review Oscar Evening

Anthony Lane Peers Down On The Oscars

NY Times

“Sam Smith, The Only Openly Gay Oscar Winner? Not Really “

daily beast

Journalists And Mexicans And Women, Oh My: Jen Yamato On The Anti-Trump Oscars

hollywoodreporter.com

Scott Feinberg‘s Post-Mortem On Spotlight Win

Spoils Shared By Spotlight, Revenant, Fury Road

Josh Dickey Anticipates Oscar Will Be Joyless

“Roger Ebert wasn’t bad. He was a true film lover at least, a failed filmmaker, which gave him a great deal of insight. His passion for film was contagious and he shared this with his fans. He loved films and his contribution to cinema as a result was positive. Now we have a pack of diseased vultures pecking at the bones of a dying carcass. Trying to peck to the rhythm of the consensus. I applaud any filmgoer who values their own opinion enough to not base it on what the pack-mentality say is good or bad.”
Alex Proyas Reads His Gods Of Egypt Reviews And Posts To Facebook

Frisky New MTV News GIFs DiCaprio’s Reaction Each Time Oscar Went To Someone Else

NY Times

“We know you couldn’t break your contracts this year, but we are putting you on notice: If you want to have another all-white Oscars, we will cut you off,” Mr. Sharpton said, as the jam-packed church erupted with cheers. “We cannot and will not have the face of American culture exclude us.”
Cieply & Barnes Align Oscar Broadcast Doubts

Is Oscar Hacker-Proof?

variety

World Record For R-Rated Film In Sight For Deadpool, China Or No China

daily beast

“Inside Drew Barrymore’s Posh Pokémon Party: ‘I Like Things That Are Colorful and Happy’”

NY Times

David Geffen Goes Home

“The New York Times approached Scott in 2000, asking if he’d be interested in film criticism. ‘I thought, “Well, OK. It sounds absurd, but OK.” And then you have to show up and work and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, my God, how the hell do you do that?’ But the paper is very supportive.”

ny post

Oscar Goes Back To 1929 Design Origins, But Its Eight-And-Half Pounds Now Plated With “Laser Gold”

“Oscars are based on visibility and resonance. A movie studio’s marketing dollars give a film visibility. Resonance is partly up to timing, but mostly it’s up to us, the audience. It’s our empathy in the dark of movie theatre that just might change the nominees list next year.”
TIFF’s Cameron Bailey On Inclusiveness

“Involving all minority groups in the mainstream diversity discussion is necessary, but it also raises complicated questions about the merits and limits of solidarity. To what extent should people of color focus on increasing opportunities for all people of color, versus their own communities?”

Sam Adams And Tim Grierson‘s #Oscars So Drunk Drinking Game Could Be Lethal

ny post

Posthumous Frank Mankiewicz Memoir Asserts Herman Mankiewicz Wrote Every Word Of Citizen Kane

Andrew Pulver On González Iñárritu Leader Of A Charge Of Latino Filmmakers

LA Times

A Look Behind “Oscar Factory” Film 4

Dave Kehr On MoMA’s Race To Preserve Its Oldest Films

Richard Brody Considers The “Oscar Whiteness Machine”

Attending Musso & Frank’s With Kenneth Anger As He Approaches 90

The Explosive History Of The Deadly Projection Booth

nymag

Red Carpet Interviewees Have Trouble Naming 5 Female Filmmakers

David Kamp On Randy Newman And The Newman Film Scoring Clan

Yahoo! Axes 8 “Digital Magazines,” Leaving Only News, Sports, Finance And Lifestyle On Its Front Page

Taki On “Flirting With Ava Gardner”

“How good and important the BBC is to British life is important to remember in extremis as a deluge of criticism descends.”

Sarah Larson On Spotlight And Its Revelations

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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