MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2016

NY Times

Tribeca’s Jane Rosenthal On Managing Through The Years

“I learned most of my math skills working the box office I was barely tall enough to see over the counter of.”
Jeff Reichert On A Childhood At The Moviehouse

hollywoodreporter.com

Leslie Felperin On “Why Cannes’ Elle is the Most Empowering ‘Rape Movie’ Ever Made”

NY Times

Manohla Dargis Meets Maren Ade At Cannes

“Why Nobody Wanted Any”

telegraph.co.uk

Elijah Wood: H’wd “Vipers” Still Prey Sexually On “Innocents”

Pat Aufderheide On New Chinese Documentary

NY Times

Manohla Dargis On Traditions At Cannes, Including The Boos

Palme d’Or Goes To Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake; Cannes Prizes Xavier Dolan For Grand Prix; Farhadi For Scenario, Actor; Mungiu, Assayas For Direction; Jury Prize To Andrea Arnold

“The pure anger and humanity of I, Daniel Blake will stop you in your tracks and, once the tears have dried from our eyes, should make us see clearly that things are very wrong, very wrong, in the world. People are starving, dying and crying and we are ignoring it. But we are, all of us, a hair’s breadth from it. This isn’t just Tory bashing, although they do get it in the face of course—this is aimed at all of us.”

10 Films That Owe Their Fame To VHS Bootlegs

EU May Push Netflix To Stream 20% Euro-Con

LA Times

“If I don’t split, what are we doing here? Creativity is about reactions. And reactions are the essence of experience. If you don’t react, what are you doing here? Why would you waste your time? There are so many things in life you could do besides watch a film or TV show. Look at all the reactions you guys are having. Take it or leave it, but you can’t deny it‎.”
Nic Refn On Creativity

Matthew Ingram On The Dying=Giant Fight Of Gannett v Tribune

indie wire

Almodóvar Says H’wd Partakes Of “Diabolical Sexism”

NY Times

Bill Herz, 99, Was Part Of Orson Welles’ “War Of The Worlds” Broadcast

LA Times

“Who the fuck does this person thinks she is? How does a person think they know what my personal life is? This is not journalism. It’s gossip. It’s pretending to be a sophisticated analysis, but really it’s cheap psychology. It’s hard to shut them out when they’re about you personally and not your work.”‎
Xavier Dolan Does Not Take Kindly To Review By Jessica Kiang
“It’s simply impossible to believe that a story this stridently self-pitying could not refer, more or less explicitly, to writer-director Dolan himself.”
With – Kiang’s Notice For It’s Only The End Of The World That Made The 27-Year-Old Director Contemplate Retirement

Oz Oscar-Winner Wants New Documentary To “Shame” Australia Internationally For Its Deadly Polices Against Asylum Seekers

Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Prizes B&W Finnish Boxing Pic

hollywoodreporter.com

FIPRESCI Cannes Gongs Led By Toni Erdmann

LA Times

“We have no desire to disrupt the movie business for the sake of disruption, or to preserve it for the sake of nostalgia. What we want to do is evolve it so it’s a better experience for filmmakers and a better experience for consumers. I don’t believe it’s sensible to hold back 81 million people from watching a movie so that a couple of hundred people can see it in a theater.”
Netflix Sarandos Says He’s Insuring The Future Of Film

Redstone Reportedly Ousts Dauman From Trust That Will Control Viacom-CBS

variety

“Mister Ed”‘s Alan Young Was 96

NY Times

Tracing The Onscreen History Of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper”

Katherine Barnard On Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye’s Second Act

hollywoodreporter.com

Another Anonymous Hw’d Assistant Given A Platform, This Time To Vent About Booking Lunch

NY Times

“What Reese Witherspoon Likes About The South”

“Uncle Of The French New Wave” Alexandre Astruc Was 92

NY Times

Wesley Morris Argues The Superhero Movie Is The Death Of Stardom As We Know It

Disney Has Grossed $10 Billion (Across 13 Features) Against Its $4 Billion Marvel Investment

Foundations Of Shakespeare’s First Theater Excavated In Shoreditch

Stellan Skarsgard Takes Stock

Tom Shone On The Screening Room Scheme And Other Threats To The Big Screen

“’Wow,’ he murmured.”
Whit Stillman Pays A Visit To Handwritten, Only Surviving Complete Jane Austen Manuscript spoilers

variety

“Art is not about good or bad, guys, those days are over. This is fuck-the-establishment youth culture.”
Nic Refn’s Prickly Presser At Cannes: Something Always Rotten With The State Of Danes spoilers

hollywoodreporter.com

Screen Shot 2016-05-20 at 11.34.40 AMCary Fukunaga May Adapt Kubrick “Napoleon” Script As HBO Series

“Their model right now is to overpay up front because they don’t really have a backend structure. That’s only gonna fly for so long, because at a certain point, if I go create a valuable asset for Netflix or Amazon and the thing blows up, I want to participate in that. I’ll take less money up front for real participation in wild success. I’m always willing to gamble on myself.”
Steven Soderbergh Questions Aspects Of The Netflix Approach

variety

“It’s important to entertain if entertainment is not synonymous with Donald Trump’s behavior. Too much of film is today.”
Sean Penn Responds To Negative Reviews Of His Much-Maligned New Film

“I want to be at the stage with Grasshopper where, if it’s a film that Grasshopper picks up, even if you’ve never heard of the film, you should have an interest in seeing what it’s about because we’re releasing it. That’s the ideal scenario.”
Vadim Rizov On The Ideas Behind New Indie Distrib Grasshopper Film

indie wire

Paul Schrader Says Dog Eat Dog Seeks Redemption In More Ways Than One

Terry Gilliam Pleased That Adam Driver (And Star Wars) Makes “Quixote” Bankable

NY Times

D. A. Pennebaker On The Origins Of His Dylan Docs

Tribune Publishing Moving 200 Jobs To India

Jesse Eisenberg Brings Further Prose Stylings To The Pages Of The New Yorker

Cinemark Ruled Not Liable In 2012 Aurora Mass Murder

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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