MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2016

Emma Watson Calls For “Awesome, Great Alternatives” To Pornography

NY Times

Documentary And Trial And (T)ERROR

A New Criterion For Best Picture (Hint: Did You Rewatch The Artist?)

At Least 7 Deleted Snippets Planned For Force Awakens Digital Release

Bay Area “Guerrilla Filmmaker” Nijla Mu’min On “My Struggle Being a Black Woman Filmmaker Outside White Hw’d”

NY Times

“I’m hoping for a sequel focused exclusively on Trump’s emotional ecosystem. Rated R and titled ‘The Id of the Deal,’ it would play only in Imax-3D and never be dubbed or subtitled in Spanish.”
NYT Op-Ed Sinecures Douthat And Bruni Chat Oscar, Lavishing Dollops Of Customary Wit

LA Times

LATimes Group-Bylines Why It Won’t Be Easy To Change Oscar

Danny Leigh On “The Oscars v. The 21st Century”

NY Times

“What It’s Like To Have Tina Fey Play You,” Answered By The Author Of Whisky Tango Foxtrot

Bette Davis Didn’t Just Name “Oscar,” Writes Kim Morgan

ny post

“It’s virtually certain that our long national nightmare will end on Sunday night — with Leonardo DiCaprio finally winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Revenant.’’

“If you get to make a movie, that’s a great thing.”
John Sayles Says “It’s Just Moviemaking”

variety

Influential Busan Festival May Fire Director

Criterion Shows Restoration Tests On 172-Minute Edition Of Malick-Lubezki New World

“A movie about ancient gods turning into flying robots should be more fun than this.”

Nigel Andrews On Hitchcock As “The Man Who Knew So Much”

indie wire

Academy Member Ira Deutchman Has 8 Ideas About Diversifying The Academy, Including Discouraging The “Sport” Of Pundits

NY Times

New Republic Sold To Portland-Based Publisher Of Quarterly Lit Mag Tin House

Five Boston Film Bigs On Movies Made There

Devin Faraci Sneak-Peaks The FX Of Jon Favreau’s Unreal Jungle Book

Jordan Cronk On A History Of Experimental Film In Los Angeles

“I was, like, an unknown corpse-washer in New York, kind of a has-been punk underground star or whatever.”
Son Of Saul‘s Géza Röhrig Is An Actor, Poet, But Also A Shomer

hollywoodreporter.com

“Chris Rock is gonna annihilate every one of us in the first 20 minutes of the show, and it will be well worth watching. It will be an Oscars to remember.”
Harvey Weinstein On Oscar

“Rock will clam up and cancel all press opportunities he had leading up to the show, including his THR cover profile.”

Wild Bunch Eyeballs Three Photos From Terrence Malick’s Next Two Pictures, Both Entitled Voyage Of Time

“‘The Oscar Bag Outrage Story’ reads like what might have resulted had Marx been able to read SkyMall,” Quips The Atlantic

the wrap

Steve Pond’s Brief Explainer On Oscar Best Picture Preferential Balloting Process

NY Times

“Bosomy damsels and brawny slabs; cheering digital crowds; a lachrymose sphinx; a bedazzled Geoffrey Rush; a galactic cruise ship; an Egyptian god played by the Dane Nikolaj Coster-Waldau; the sword-and-sandals enabler Gerard Butler; a smoky monster that from one angle looks like a fanged doughnut and from another an alarmingly enraged anus—Gods of Egypt attests that they do make them like they used to, except with far more money. If Gods of Egypt were any worse, it might be a masterpiece.”
Lede Of The Week From Manohla Dargis, Who Appreciates Earlier “Hieroglyphic Lucidity” Of Alex Proyas

Keith Plocek‘s “Secret History Of The Endless Summer, The Most Influential Surf Movie Ever”

“What eating the liver has to do with acting remains to be seen—it’s certainly not in evidence in the movie itself, despite DiCaprio’s formidable artistry. He works hard for the money—and maybe that’s the point. The overtone of acting is play and fun, not work.”
Richard Brody Makes Oscar Predictions, Mostly Through Prism Of Electoral Politics

NY Daily News

“Dr. Feelgood,” 88, Personal MD To Elvis Known For His Many Pain Prescriptions

Sandy Powell On Garbing Cate For Carol

NY Times

Viacom Chief Dauman Ordered To Testify On Redstone Mental State

“As if to rub salt into the wound, the next morning the Oscars added that I was transgendered to the trivia page of their website. I want to be clear—I know that I wasn’t excluded from the performance directly because I am transgendered. I was not invited to perform because I am relatively unknown in the U.S., singing a song about ecocide.”
After Exclusion From Performing Nominated Song, Anohni Open-Letters “Degrading” Treatment From The Academy

Brian Raftery Does A Mean Survey Of Oscar Nominee Cutaways When Someone Else Is Named The Winner

“I wanted something contemporary and real and that’s what it is. It’s got diversity because that’s what America is.”
Director John Hillcoat Says Triple Nine‘s Got It

hollywoodreporter.com

THR Goes Second Round On Older-Hw’d-Figures-Losing-Tens-Of Millions Beat, With News Of Roger Corman $170 Million Litigation Against Financial Planner

“Hathor is portrayed by Elodie Yung, who is of French-Cambodian ancestry and therefore about as Egyptian as these folks get. Call it ‘Clash of the Whitans,’ and call it a folly that doesn’t have the energy or delirium to qualify as entertaining crap.”
Michael Phillips Feasts On Gods Of Egypt

Harmony Korine Takes A Break

James Lardner On A Childhood Spent Around Dalton Trumbo

Julianne Moore Interviews Christine Vachon

“After two hours with a character we feel we’re pretty much done with them.”
Coen Bros See No Reason To Make Teevee

“Netflix doesn’t care about viewers, only subscribers—its revenue comes from maintaining and expanding the ranks of people who find spending $10 a month to be a worthwhile investment.”

Prix Jutra Renamed The Gala Du Cinéma Québécois After Allegations Against Namesake Filmmaker

Tarantino Says He Takes His Costumes Very Seriously

BBC To Publish Jimmy Saville Sex Abuse Report Over Three Years After Inquiry Began

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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