MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2016

“Everything is in your face. Lots of close-ups, lots of tracking in for close-ups, long takes with plenty of camera movement. It is like pulp journalism, like a fluid Weegee. Emotion.”
Richard Hell Launches His Criterion Top 10

Novelist-Filmmaker Stephen Elliott Considers “The Great Film Festival Swindle”

hollywoodreporter.com

A Studio-By-Studio Survey Of Summer Risks

“Your father was never tried for any crime, because no charges were ever brought against him. Yet you’re essentially asking the media to treat him as a pariah who never faced up to the charge, or was convicted of a crime and managed to negotiate his way out of a proper sentencing. For someone with your background in law, that’s an interesting position to take.”
Robert B. Weide Open-Letters Ronan Farrow

variety

Variety Cover-Stories Shari Redstone; Scoop: May 27 B’day Fete Included “Sumner’s Back!” T-Shirts

AT&T Hopes To Phase Out Landlines

ny post

Viacom Board Member Says Redstone Not Capable Of Firings; Intends To Proceed With Sale Of Paramount

Amazon Increases Original Programming In Japan

Thom Andersen Lists His 10 Favorite Films Of Past 10 Years

NY Times

Poland’s Rightist Gov’t Renews Extradition Against Roman Polanski

Film Historian Bob Birchard Was 66

Yahoo!’s Katie Couric Says She’s Sorry If Anyone Might Have Been Offended By Her Misleading Nonfiction Programming Editing autoplay

NY Times

Michael Dann, 94, CBS Programmer Of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “60 Minutes,” “Hee Haw”

telegraph.co.uk

“’The thing is, love makes you feel alive,’ Vincent Cassel says. ‘If most women are looking for security, I think men look for adventure. There’s an expression in French–to go around the world with your dick and a knife–”n’avoir que la bite et le couteau.” Later in life, a man has the possibility to reinvent himself again and again.’”

the wrap

Blunt Comic Doug Stanhope Defends His Friend Johnny Depp

“The thing you have to remember with Warcraft, probably more than with any other computer game, ever, is that people spend more time in this place than in the places they live. It actually is like their home town. So if you get that wrong it’s a bit like the people in Notting Hill, who are still recovering from the Notting Hill movie.”

Babadook Director Jennifer Kent Goes From Horror To “Horrific” Nexxt

NY Times

“I woke up one morning and discovered that my tweet was on CNN. My name and words were on television—all without making me a dollar. The irony was not lost on me, someone who finds irony in things for a nonliving. I was barely able to pay my rent while simultaneously (briefly) entertaining people all over the planet. The Internet is like a broken slot machine. I didn’t put any money into it, I received all of its flashing, shrieking, beeping cacophony when I hit its jackpot, and no money came out.”

LA Times

Alice Screenwriter Linda Woolverton On Her Process Of Banging Her Head On The Table During Script Meetings

variety

“That’s the kind of rousing poetic action grandeur that the Bond series deserves. And without it, what really are we talking about?”
Owen Gleiberman Gives Instruction On James Bond’s Next Moves

“One sprints from an organic idea and has a truly artist’s eye working. And Friday the 13th affects me as very cynical. It’s very cynical moviemaking. It just doesn’t rise above its cheapness.”
John Carpenter On Horror That Doesn’t Cut It

Seminal Filmmaker Haile Gerima Is “So Alienated By The Whole Idea Of Love”

NY Times

Frank Modell, 89, Contributed Over 1,400 Cartoons To The New Yorker

Sin Again: John Carney, Director Of Begin Again And Zonad, Repeatedly Rubbishes Keira Knightley

indie wire

Studio Ghibli Animator Makiko Futaki Was 57

Charles Mudede On The Never-Gainful Employment Of Ramin Bahrani’s Characters

variety

“‘Depp is a fantastic actor, thus will always have a draw with the right project,’ said Jeff Bock, a box office analyst with Exhibitor Relations.”
Variety Rushes To Bury Johnny As Alice‘s Body Cools

Taika Waititi On The Go-For-Broke Style Of Wilderpeople

variety

Ramin Setoodeh Says Kristen Stewart Has Reinvented Herself

From 2015, Ten Seconds Of Trumpbluster Against Indiana Jones And Ghostbusters

Sony Music Asserts It Can Charge “Administrative Fee” For Fair Use

“It’s not a democracy. Barbara Broccoli decides who is going to be the next Bond, end of story.”

“It’s quite a few years and I have a dreadful memory of the musical and for people who think that’s all there is, I thought it’s important that people realize there is a lot more to Les Misérables than that sort of shoddy farrago. The book needs a bit of a champion.”

Jürgen Doering Costumes Kristen Stewart For Olivier Assayas

variety

Variety Rumors Freston Return To Viacom

NY Times

“Naturally, Mr. Fiennes leaves the shirt open — the better to show off his well-maintained 53-year-old torso and to convey a mischievous sexuality.”
Style Section Salutes The Duds Of Ralph Fiennes In A Bigger Splash

San Francisco Silent Film Society Branches Into Restoration

Aaron Stewart On Bi Gan, Director Of Kaili Blues, The Week’s Most Rapturously Received Debut

Sean Axmaker On “Genuine Acts Of Courage,” The Films Of Jafar Panahi Under Sentence Of Silence

Novelist Adam Thirlwell Appreciates “Unserious” Whit Stillman

Two Hours Of Steve McQueen On The Route From Gallery To Cinema

“I think he was baffled by me because my boobs weren’t bigger than my head and I wasn’t blonde.”
Kate Beckinsale Says Michael Bay Lacks Manners

deadline

Rashida Jones On Slaying Slapstick

daily beast

Domestic Abuse-Accused Celebs Seldom Shunned

ny post

When eBay Founder And Gawker Went Against PayPal Founder And Hulk Hogan
Multibillionaire Omidayar’s First Look Media Weighs In On Multibillionaire Thiel’s Financing Of Anti-Gawker Litigation

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MCN Curated Headlines

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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

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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