MCN Curated Headlines Archive for July, 2016

deadline

“With great power there must also always be great responsibility.”
Marvel CEO’s Family Donates At Least $400,000 To Trump Campaign

Michael Pattison On The Punches Given In John Cassavetes’ Films

Outspoken Pakistani Model Qandeel Baloch Strangled In “Honor Killing”

Idris Elba May Break Record For Being Highest-Grossing Actor In A Single Year

Nick Pinkerton On MoMA’s Leo McCarey Retro

Space-Fixated Billionaire Cameos In Latest Star Trek (spoiler)


Scorsese Remembers Kiarostami (11’52”)

“V. F. Perkins’ ‘Film As Film’ is like that invisible little kid in the last bench who stuns the class one day. The smallest of all the books in the pile on my shelf, Film As Film nevertheless offers insights and information that perhaps the others, put together, can’t.”


Film Scholar V. F. Perkins, Author Of “Film As Film,” Was 80

J. Hoberman ‘s Exemplary Overview Of MoMA Bruce Conner Retrospective

Life, Animated‘s Roger Ross Williams On How Growing Up Gay And Illegitimate in a Religious Community Made Him The Filmmaker He Is

“I don’t have much regard for how it’s going to filter out into the world because of how little control I have. Every conversation I have is completely personal, and if a question is asked by someone who cares, I will fucking go there with you. But if I have someone sitting in front of me who’s prodding into details that will make their websites really popular that night, I just don’t engage. And then they’ll criticize that and be like, ‘Oh, you’re so guarded. That must be sad, to live like that.’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s just with you, actually. I have really good conversations with your coworkers. You’re bad at your job.'”
Kristen Stewart On The Additional Job That Is Publicity

“A movie like this has to at least get to like $500 million worldwide, and that’s probably low. But the thing I care about most is the industry looking for an excuse to say, ‘See, a tentpole can’t be carried by female leads’ over 40. I cashed in all my chips. I had to use every chip to make this happen. And if this doesn’t work, I will probably have to go back to movie jail.”

Not Having Dan Aykroyd’s “Ghostbusters 3” Saved Us A Trip To Hell, And Donald Trump As Satan

Stuart Gordon On His Brief Time With Honey, I Shrunk The Kids And Jeffrey Katzenberg

Did you have problems with producers?
Not really. Remember that I had lived under a Stalinist regime, so I knew how to deal with little Stalins in America.
Ronald Bergan Catches Up With 83-Year-Old Ivan Passer At Karlovy Vary’s Grandhotel Pupp

“After setting fire to one million pounds on a Scottish island, what can pop star-prankster-filmmaker Bill Drummond do next?”

Criterion For October Includes Boyhood, Del Toro Trilogia Box Set And Olmi’s Great Tree Of Wooden Clogs

“I talked to my colleagues, my fellow owners, and said, ‘Look, we’re not going to do any more of these ourselves – we should find a way to work something out with Sony where we get taken care of forever, and our children get taken care of forever, and let them be free to find ways of doing something with this wonderful brand. That went smoothly, believe it or not. And that’s what led to Ghost Corps.”

Slits Guitarist Viv Albertine Defaces British Library Exhibition On Punk That Neglects Women’s Role

“This Hollywood Vampires cash-in concert tour stopping over in a casino ballroom owned by the Chippewas of Rama Mnjikaning First Nation in rural Ontario is as rock ’n’ roll as a pair of Rolling Stones boxer shorts.”
John Semley Goes Gonzo On Johnny Depp

wsj

Wheels Move Toward Second Coming Of Harry Potter

“Ghostbusters serves as a perfect demonstration of why internet movie ratings are inherently a problem. Most fundamentally, single-number aggregations — like those used by sites such as Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and IMDb — are a pitiful way of explaining the diverse views of critics.”

LA Times

“These brilliant women don’t need love, protection, approval or pity, least of all their own. They just need some troll repellent and a better script.”

“Did somebody think here that, in order to take on the boys, women have to toughen up and tamp down any traits stereotypically thought of as feminine? If so, is that really a step forward for anybody?”
Joanna Langfield Has A Movie “Meh” Over Ghostbusters 2016

“The Original Ghostbusters Was Pretty Sexist,” Video-Assays Kevin B. Lee

“Harold Ramis was a kind, generous, and gracious person. Professionally, he was always about sharing the spotlight and making the other guy look good. Please, stop using my dad as an excuse to hate the new Ghostbusters. It degrades his memory to spew bile in his name.”
Violet Ramis Stiel On Her History With All Ghostbusters

“Ghostbusters refutes sexist sentiment not by hopping on a feminist soapbox to fulminate against the haters, but by strapping on a proton pack and taking care of business.”
Dana Stevens: Team Ghostbusters

“Word to the studios: We lack penises, not brains! Taking a creaky but beloved Bill Murray franchise and recasting it with chicks isn’t progress. And shaming men as fanboys or misogynists for not embracing this dreck doesn’t help.”
Thelma Adams Not Team Ghostbusters

wsj

Viacom Move To Offload 49% Of Paramount To Wanda A Dauman Move To Regain Power?

“I can’t tell you how many times this happened. Because he’s going to be playing a CIA guy in a movie? That’s the criteria now? You just have to be a friend of the agency and you can come in and walk around headquarters? In the meantime, people who are undercover are having to walk through the halls with their hands over their faces because these people aren’t cleared. It’s insane.”

NY Times

A Post-“Brexit” Gab On AbFab

“When Stewart’s green eyes gaze at the camera, your heart stops. In Allen’s 1930s glitterati comedy, those eyes are warm and catlike, the look of a pet who’s overfed on cream. For Doremus’s sci-fi dystopia, Stewart is scrubbed raw, almost translucent.”

NY Times

NYT T Magazine Illustrates Thoughtful Emails Between Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer And Director Natalie Portman With A Suite Of Fetching Shots Of Bikinied, Barelegged Portman, Only Once Perking Her Butt

“There are now big conversations at Oberlin about cultural appropriation and whether the dining hall sushi and banh mi disrespect certain cuisines. 
The press reported it as, ‘How crazy are Oberlin kids?’ But to me, it was actually, ‘Right on.'”
Lena Dunham Talks To Food & Wine

variety

China Gets Bourne

Trailering Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply

indie wire

An Oral History Of Indiewire’s Start 20 Years Ago

Hector Babenco, 70, Directed Pixote, Kiss Of The Spider Woman

telegraph.co.uk

“Rumours were circulated on social media that critics had either been bought off by Sony Pictures or were part of a feminist conspiracy. When my own review was published, the Telegraph was described on the IMDb talk boards as ‘a well-known leftist UK rag,’ which must be a first.”

“The Privileged Are Taking Over The Arts”

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas On Five Films With Female Ghostbusters

Mayukh Sen Celebrates Mickey Rourke’s Face

“Cimino’s life work is a cinema of mourning, an art of grief, a nightmare of memory that finds its sole redemption in ecstasy—the heightened perception that transforms experience into a grand internal spectacle, which finds its embodiment in Cimino’s own profound visual imagination.”
Richard Brody Recollects Michael Cimino

LA Times

Chinese Conglom Dalian Wanda Group, Owners Of AMC Entertainment And Legendary Entertainment, Want 49% Of Paramount

variety

“It would be intellectually careless to equate the actions of the Dallas shooter with the retaliation of slaves against their oppressors. They’re not at all one and the same. But there is shared DNA between the emotions that sparked the two events.”
Kris Tapley On The Moment And Birth Of A Nation

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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