MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2016

London Independent Newspaper Neared Breakeven Even As It Went Digital And Five Directors Doubled Their Pay

variety

A24, Oscilloscope Partner With BitTorrent Now Distrib Platform

NY Times

Filmmaker Peter Hutton Remembered By J. Hoberman

Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise As Seen As “Brexit” Parable

Bud Spencer Was 86

“The Reuters report suggests that many news consumers are resistant to watching video because it is faster to read an article, and because of the ads that often precede videos.”

NYPost Lets Go Of First String Theater Critic Directly After Deadline Ditches Jeremy Gerard
And – What Does It Mean For The Boston Globe To “Refocus” Its Arts Coverage?

Here’s The Blood Simple Pitch Trailer That Got The Coens Their Cash In 1985

LA Times

Viacom CEO Dauman Asks Judge For Immediate Mental Exam For Sumner Redstone

LA Times

Los Angeles Times Mocks Director Peter Atencio’s Twitter Posts About Keanu’s Kitten-Centric Promtion, Embedding A Shitload Of Tweets But Making No Apparent Attempt To Contact Filmmaker

“Terry sometimes cuts the movie to the look of things — or even to the exposure — rather than directly to the story, because he’s looking for more of a feeling. With me doing the dailies, Terry could go in and start editing according to how things flow color-wise. So we were very conscious about it during production and Chivo and I talked daily. We would send stills back and forth every day just to make sure we were all on the same page.”
I Am The Colorist Of Terrence Malick

variety

Ramin Setoodeh Thinkpieces Three Reasons Independence Day Not Resurgent Stateside (Aside From Quality, Or Lack Thereof)

“I didn’t really understand where I stood in relationship to the film, the story, Rupert Pupkin, and Jerry Langford, too, until I was in the process of making the film—the shooting, the editing. I don’t think I necessarily liked what I found.”

“Stanley Kubrick” Joins Twitter

hollywoodreporter.com

Hw’d Shrink On Reacting To Being Fired From The Dream Factory

StalkRoulette: Facebook Using Your Phone Location To Suggest New Friends Near You

“It is very paradoxical. I am so shy, and, at the same time, I expose myself literally to thousands of people. I don’t really understand why I do that. I need to go through therapy!”
Cover Story-ing Eva Green

hollywoodreporter.com

“It used to be that success meant stability. Not any more. Today, even when you’re doing great, you’re not safe.”
Stephen Galloway Argues H’wd Hari-Kiris Each Decade

Terence Davies Tells Steve Erickson About “Nostalgia Without Sentiment”

Fat Polynesian God In Moana Prompts Preemptive Criticism

“What a perfect topsy-turvy relationship for the age of Trump: by making his most splattery, toxic, self-consciously wacky and absurdly punk-rock movie, Schrader assured that he would be received with the calmly respectful applause of an old master.”
Dog Eat Dog Screenwriter Matthew Wilder On “My Struggle With The Cannes Film Festival”

The Heavy-Duty Working Class Documentaries Of Michael Glawogger, Seen By Jonathan Kiefer

Brexit Could Convulse British Broadcasting, Including Forcible Relocation of Channel 4 To Birmingham

Chicago Tribune Edit Board Finds Five Silver Linings To Vamoosing Of George Lucas’ Memorabilia Museum

“Lucas himself was the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz — the unseen force pulling the levers, known to everyone but accountable to no one. He did not deign to speak to reporters. He denied their requests to see the collection of traditional and digital art that would be housed in what many wrongly thought was solely a Star Wars museum. He wouldn’t consider sites west of Lake Shore Drive, even though plausible ones were offered.”
Architecture Critic Blair Kamin On Lucas’ “Arrogance” 

NY Times

“To see a Bill Cunningham street spread was to see all of New York.”
26CUNNINGHAM-master768New York Times Fashion Photographer Bill Cunningham Was 87

NY Times

“You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs, arms or balls, major and lasting disfigurement — the whole rotten deal — could come in on the freaky-fluky as easily as in the so-called expected ways, you heard so many of these stories it was a wonder anyone was left alive to die in firefights and mortar-rocket attacks.”
Bruce Weber‘s NYT Obit Of The Great Michael Herr

Filmmaker Peter Hutton Was 71

With – A 2009 Career Interview With The Sailor-Cinematographer-Filmmaker

daily beast

Two Faces Of The Daemon
“I did this Gucci campaign with Blake Lively and that’s how I suddenly got this thing in my head. Something happened there that suddenly gave me a very specific image. It gave me a very specific… thing. And that thing basically became the whole movie. I was like, ‘This is the way into it.’”
And – “Refn paints a lurid, confused portrait of girlhood and the fashion industry that is flashy, loud, and gory but unfortunately fails at all turns to touch on anything close to truth.”

NY Times

Jon Pareles On The Late Bernie Worrell’s Influence On Funk And Hip-Hop

variety

Owen Gleiberman Listicles His Resurgence Disdain

deadline

Academy Member Peter Bart Expects No Surprises From Board Of Governors Voting

hollywoodreporter.com

Keyboardist Bernie Worrell Was 72

Michael Herr, 76, “The War Correspondent’s War Correspondent,” Wrote “Dispatches,” Co-Wrote Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket

Herr’s Vanity Fair Portrait Of His Late Friend, Stanley Kubrick

“Hell Sucks,” A 1968 Expanse Of His Esquire ‘Nam Coverage That Became “Dispatches”

“Like its predecessors, The Neon Demon is aesthetically seductive but distinctly distant, like a beautiful lover who rolls over and leaves your side of the bed feeling empty. Although I’m sure Refn wants people to enjoy his film, it feels like something that’s not begging for the viewer’s approval.”

“Nicolas Winding Refn never for a moment lets the viewer forget his authorial presence. It’s tempting to say his fingerprints are all over the movie, but truer of its immaculate aesthetic to say that they once were but have been wiped clean. Still, Refn’s fuss-and-feathers doting is there in every just-so shot of The Neon Demon, a few of which are, admittedly, quite striking.”

British Film Production Likely To Be Demolished By “Brexit” Choice

thestar.com

Peter Howell On A Meh Movie Season

variety

Canal Plus Intends To Increase Finance For French Films

Abbey Bender On The Swimsuits Of Éric Rohmer

NY Times

Why Disney Let Life, Animated Use Its Images

Senate Committee Hopes To Stem Spy Agencies’ Cooperation With H’wd

“No one benefits from continuing their seemingly unending litigation to protect a parking lot. The actions initiated by Friends of Parks have effectively overridden approvals received from democratically elected bodies of government.”
George Lucas Tells Chicago He’s Taking His Memorabilia Museum Elsewhere

deadline

Netflix Tinkers With Logo But Keeps Old One, Too

“While lesser storytellers would have neatly kept that in the subtext, Swiss Army Man threatens to turn into a full-blown same-sex love story between two people who use the other to reach themselves. It’s simultaneously a selfish and selfless relationship, and the line between the two blurs as the film pushes to its conclusion.”

“I thought about it. What did I really want the seagull to do? I just wanted the seagull to be a seagull. I actually didn’t want the seagull to do anything, other than what the seagull wants to do. If Blake interacts with the seagull and the seagull does nothing, well, that’s what the seagull chose to do. So it’s his choice. I give him freedom, or whatever.”
A Restive Kyle Buchanan Cheers The Seagull In The Shallows

« Older Entries
Newer 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