MCN Curated Headlines Archive for July, 2016

“Netflix Of Nigeria” Turns To Production

NY Times

“Lachlan and James Murdoch are putting their own stamp on the (publicly traded) family business, mostly in its non-news — noncontroversial — entertainment divisions of television and film. Now, with Fox News, they are finally wading into their father’s gladiator pit, where politics is the blood sport. And, to the extent that he defers to their judgment, it could offer the first glimpse of where they would take a media empire that, under Rupert Murdoch, asserted itself into the political ethos of the United States, the United Kingdom and his homeland of Australia in ways not seen since the days of William Randolph Hearst.”

Bilge Ebiri Listens To James Schamus Unfurl The Centerpiece Of Indignation

Tom Gunning Criterion-Notes The New World

Paul Greengrass On Finding The Song That Only He Could Sing

HBO Firing Of Three Eldest “Sesame Street” Players Reversed

“I can trace my deepening love and appreciation for cinema directly from one viewing of Point Break to another. I would have first caught it piecemeal on network television in junior and senior high, swept up in the narrative and literally sensational setpieces; next, on DVD in college, enamored with its poetry and moral ambiguity; and, finally, during multiple viewings on DVD and Blu-ray, astonished anew at the total extraordinary package. It is a film firing on every conceivable cylinder, its exhilarating blend of action, morality, comedy, politics, spirituality and subversive-bordering-on-queer romance adding up to a genuinely poetic exploitation film in which every life has value.”
Stephen Cone On Point Break

the wrap

Netflix Far From Chill On Another Saturday Night In U.S., Other Countries

China Goes Real-Time Big Data Box Office To Stem Fraud

“I have something to ask him before he goes. Does the Internet need us? Werner Herzog pauses. The silence goes on for a while, like the awkward moments in one of his own documentaries when you can watch his subjects mentally feeling around for a response. ‘It’s a beautiful question,’ he finally says. ‘I don’t think it does.'”

“15 Reasons Why Jason Statham Is Awesome”

deadline

HBO Signals Buyers’ Remorse And Cancels Affleck-Damon “Project Greenlight”

Rewatching The “Almost Great” Olympic Romance Of Personal Best

Graham Fuller On The Life And Films Of Ken Loach

LA Times

Sony Sez Ghostbusters Does Not Endorse Hillary Clinton

“Even though it’s fun to describe the scene as two guys talking about God, I spent many sleepless nights getting the choreography down.”
Behind The 18-Minute Powerhouse Centerpiece Of Indignation

daily beast

Jen Yamato On “Matt Damon Saves China!” And Other Adventures As White Savior

“I cried when McKinnon pulled out her double proton guns (with that theme song playing again, oh the tears!) and in slo-mo, single-handedly defeated every ghost around her. A nerdy engineer with frizzy hair, glasses and a weird penchant for doing voices was my childhood heroine at last, in loose-fitting coveralls.”

Japanese Godzilla Returns

M.I.A. Says MTV Sexist, Racist, Classist

Checking In With Norman Jewison, Canada’s “Director Emeritus,” At 90

NY Times

Amazon Profits Up 800% 

LA Times

US Investment Fund May Pony $425 Million For UK Pinewood Studios

NY Times

What’s Your Vampire Carrying? On The Sexually Transmitted Narratives Of It Follows And Lace Crater

“Spiritually, the director Paul Feig’s version of New York City resembles the backdrop to a late-night talk show, full of lights and absent of people. Its sheer human blankness is the one genuinely eerie thing about it.”

NY Times

Egyptian Filmmaker Mohamed Khan, Given To Feminist Protagonists, Was 73

LA Times

Hyperviolent Animated Batman: The Killing Joke Slays $3.8 Million In Two-Day-Only, 1,300-Screen Release

Omer M. Mozaffar Looks At “Violence And The American Man” Through Fruitvale Station And American Sniper

NY Times

Obit Hed Of Week
“Jack Davis, Part Of Mad Magazine’s Usual Gang Of Idiots, Was 91”

this bradley cooper thing has me so upset im burning all his dvds
I have a list of celebrities that support Socialism I refuse to spend another $ on. Add this one. Boycott them all.
American Sniper Random Fans Disapprove Of Bradley Cooper Attending DNC

When Walter Mondale Made Sure Abbas Kiarostami Got To Minnesota

Werner Herzog Talks Tech

ew

Remastered Phantasm Pics Get Theatrical Outing

Peet Gelderblom On How His Fan Edit Of Raising Cain Became A Brian De Palma-Approved Director’s Cut

Noel Murray On Mel Gibson, Action Auteur

the wrap

Grasshopper+Marks Launched To Connect Nonprofits And Brands With Independent Filmmakers For Socially Conscious Movies

Is Aliens The Ideal Sequel?

hollywoodreporter.com

Venice 73 Includes Cianfrance, Ford, Gibson, Konchalovsky, Kusturica, Larrain, Loznitsa, Malick, Ozon, Seidel, Siskel, Villeneuve, Wenders 

Why James Cameron Debuted His New Short Film At The Democratic National Convention

variety

“The first thing he’d ask when a new actor came on set was, “Did you eat?” That was a big thing for him: ‘Get him some food!’ You thought you were in somebody’s kitchen, having a cup of coffee. That sets the mood.”
Hector Elizondo On Being Garry Marshall’s “Lucky Charm” On All 18 Features

hollywoodreporter.com

Disney Rocketeer Remake To Star Black Female Pilot

“This Year’s Comic-Con Wasn’t All About White Dudes”

hollywoodreporter.com

There are too many mediocre shows on television, but at a time when the industry has glut of series that fail to have an impact, we’ve been able to give fans what they want: adventurous storytelling with original voices.”
Netflix To Spend More Than $6 Billion On Originals And Acquisitions

“The only ones I would really want to work with are Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. If one of their films were suitable for me, it would be like touching the sky with my hand.”
“I am fine filming in Spanish, thank you,” Says Argentine Great Ricardo Darín

NY Times

“Jason Bourne is not really a spy thriller or even a foot-chase and fist-fight-driven action movie, but rather a somber meditation on the crisis of the Gen-X professional in the throes of middle age.”

« Older 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