MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2016

“Underwhelmed by I, Daniel Blake. Preachy and poorly made. A povvo safari for middle class people… Poor Ken Loach. I’d be fucking angry if I wasn’t Mike Leigh, too.”
Murdoch Sunday Times Film Cricket Goes After Ken Loach

“The DVD and Blu Ray market worldwide has dropped 80% in the last three years. I just cannot afford to make movies.”
Dr. Uwe Boll Says He’s Quitting The Motion Picture Racket
With – Dr. Boll At His Most Sentimental (language; 1’26” vid)

“In 20 or 50 years, taking a personalized blue pill you just hallucinate in an entertaining way and then a white pill brings you back to normality is perfectly viable. And if the source of human entertainment in 30 or 40 years is pharmacological we’ll be in real trouble.”
Netflix’s Reed Hastings Looks To The Future Of Entertainment

“He’d just be with his people and walk away. People would come and then he’d stand there. There was a guy who held his chocolates in a little Tupperware. Whenever he needed chocolate, he’d come running over and give him a chocolate. That’s what divas are like, I guess. Or people who need therapy.”
Not Breaking News, But Good To Know Anyway: Mike Myers Was A Shit On The Set Of Cat In The Hat

variety

“It’s a reminder of the big-movie movie ability that Hollywood has and how that can translate to European subject matter. And you can see there is still a great appetite for Tom Hanks in that character and for the way Ron Howard interprets it.”
Inferno Slated As Latest H’wd Attraction Meant As Much For Overseas As Downhome Consumption

NY Times

“’Since he’s a billionaire [sic], he would like the line changed accordingly,’ the note read. In the end, Mr. Jacobson changed the script to say ‘zillionaire.’ He also framed the note. ‘It’s so bizarre and so narcissistic that somebody would want something like that changed. It’s a sitcom.”
“How Donald Trump Used Hw’d To Create ‘Donald Trump'”

“In order to fully appreciate Moment by Moment, one has to understand three fundamental concepts of ‘queer”’cinema that seem difficult for critics and audiences alike to grasp: camp, classical Hollywood female melodrama, and feminism. A close examination of the film reveals how deliberate, adept and self-conscious the film is in its utilization of all three.”
Bruce LaBruce Anatomizes Jane Wagner’s Most Personal Picture

“While Chinese films have mastered delivering the action the country’s swelling audience loves, they fall far short of knowing how to pull off ideology. What is superhero ideology?”
Why Does China Find It Hard To Create Cinematic Superheroes?

“Keep that love close to your heart, and you will make a difference; cinema needs people like that.”
Terrence Malick Talks

indie wire

“Compare and despair is a useless time suck. Nobody has it together. Nobody has the answers.”
Producer Effie Brown Keynotes Film Independent Forum

MCN Curated Headlines

“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