MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2016

David Hockney On What Turns A Picture Into A Masterpiece

“The Enigma Of Edward Yang”

“Lazarus” Playwright Enda Walsh On Working With David Bowie On His Final Project

hollywoodreporter.com

“Libel me, I’ll sue you. If you die, I will follow you to the bowels of hell.”
James Woods Takes To Twitter To Celebrate Death Of Anonymous Troll He Sued, Will Continue Lawsuit

Nick Pinkerton On “Genre Terrorist” Lucio Fulci

wsj

“A deal would unite AT&T’s portfolio of wireless, broadband and satellite TV services with Time Warner’s entertainment empire, which includes cable networks TNT, TBS, CNN, the coveted premium channel HBO and the Warner Bros. film and TV studio.”

“AT&T, which bought the DirecTV satellite service in 2014, is rushing to complete a Time Warner deal as it fears a rival offer may emerge.”
AT&T May Absorb Time Warner This Weekend

“We reserve the right to reject a volunteer based on business considerations.”
Wall Street Journal Offers Buyout To Everyone In Editorial

LA Times

How Moonlight Began With MacArthur-Prized Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney

“It’s important to us that our heroes not become silhouette-perfect cutout icons. All Marvel characters have flaws, all have a deep humanity. With Captain Marvel, she is as powerful a character as we’ve ever put in a movie. Her powers are off the charts, and when she’s introduced, she will be by far the strongest character we’ve ever had. It’s important, then, to counterbalance that with someone who feels real. She needs to have a humanity to tap into, and Brie can do that.”

Vulture Seeks, Finds Writer To Quibble With And Pick At “Black Mirror”

Danny Trejo’s Tacos Opens Third L. A. Location

Seattle Int’l Names New Director

NY Times

“Too Bad You’re Latin”: Career Advice Given John Leguizamo

“The Internet Of Things” Exploited To Shut Down Big Chunks Of U. S. Web

North Dakota Demands Decades In Prison For Docmakers Covering Anti-Oil Pipeline Protests

Samsung Issues Copyright Violation Notices Against YouTube Videos Mocking Their Recalled, Exploding Galaxy 7

SAG-AFTRA Members Declare Video Game Actors’ Strike

“Very fast. Very fast. I won’t say it because people will judge it if I tell you that, but after it opens I’ll tell you how long it took. I’m not starring in Schindler’s List. It’s Madea. It is what it is.”
Nick Allen Has A Sitdown With Tyler Perry Pre-Boo!

NY Times

“A far-right political party based in the state of Maharashtra has warned all Pakistani performers working in India to leave within 48 hours or ‘risk being beaten up.'”
India Moves To Restrict Release Of Movies With Pakistani Actors

A Daunting Deep Dive Into “Moonlight, Me And Identity Politics” By Juvenile Cinephile

variety

PGA And Dana Brunetti Over Odds Of Fifty Shades Darker Producer Credit

In Mumbai, Jia Zhangke Says Political Turmoil Always Affects Filmmakers

“We’ve said over the last five years, three or four times, ‘God, we can’t go any further, we can’t go any further.’ And yet we always have been able to.”
Canada’s National Post Chain Set To Cut Expenses Even More Deeply Than The Past Year’s 800 Jobs

Twitter Troubles May Tighten Spending

NY Times

“I write scripts the way a lot of people play Angry Birds. In my head, I see a movie. If I don’t write the script, there’s no chance that movie will exist. If it doesn’t exist, I feel like I’m failing. I feel like this pit inside of me is rapidly growing and expanding. And I’ll disappear and be nothing. So clearly I have to write something. Otherwise I’ll die.”
NY Times Catches Up To Max Landis And His Motorized Mouth

“Black Mirror”‘s Charlie Brooker Avoids All Sci-Fi

Shailene Woodley Essays Her Pipeline Protest Arrest

“Hollywood, which is famous for its storytelling, apparently is not as good as it used to be in telling stories. Those sequels might have worked before, but Chinese audiences are more sophisticated now. If you want to participate in the growing Chinese market, you must improve film quality.”
Nigel M. Smith Wonders What China’s Richest Tycoon, Wang Jianlin, Wants From H’wd

John McNaughton Looks Back At Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer On Its 30th Anniversary Digital Restoration

David Tang Says It’s OK To Fall Asleep At The Movies, Especially Girl On The Train

Mira Nair On Being An “African Cinderella”

“The props seemed too real. When Billy’s unit gets invited to a lush buffet inside the owner’s box, the limpid, high-res food—glistening kielbasas, ripe chunks of cantaloupe—disrupts and dominates the scene. You can’t take your eyes off of those kielbasas!”

variety

Dante Ferretti On Designing A Rock Opera, Silence And Scorsese’s (Maybe) Next Picture

NY Times

Spotlight‘s Tom McCarthy Penning Mini-Series On The Abrupt Downfall Of Fox News’ Disgraced Roger Ailes

NBCUniversal To Sock Another $200 Mil Into BuzzFeed And Its Video Ambitions

“I started working on Moonlight about three and a half years ago. Within the first year, I had the script. I had more doubt than anyone else: Can I make this film as my second film and still have a career? I had friends say, ‘The script is good but are you sure you want to do this right now?’ Sometimes you just have to be bold—I was thinking of this Goethe quote: ‘Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.'”
And – “If there was anything that drew me to the piece, especially after making the decision that we should tell the stories in turn, it was that there was going to be a definitive stance on nature versus nurture, and a representation of how the performance of toxic masculinity can affect these boys in these neighborhoods.”

Film Society Of Lincoln Center Goes Total Verhoeven

variety

Béla Tarr To Head Marrakech Fest Jury

AT&T Toying With Time Warner Takeover

Poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly Was 65

“I think a lot of that is because they don’t like the idea of a Trump candidacy, and that’s just a projection of ‘How could you have [Lewandowski] on the set?’ Well, someone’s got to represent the 14 million people who voted for the guy. I understand that there are people who might not like that, who might not like those people who are supporting him, but that’s what happened.”
The Baffler Has Words For Jeff Zucker, Who Nurtured Donald Trump And Reality TV While Programming NBC, And Now Heads CNN

“Peter Thiel is a contrarian, first and foremost,” Bezos said. “You just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.”

John Malkovich Puts On A Show In Buenos Aires

indie wire

“I think a filmmaker like me isn’t on the outside in the same way that I was in 2008, even though the work itself feels very, very outsiderish. It’s completely fucking crazy, because it didn’t used to be that way.”
Barry Jenkins On Finding His Moment, Again

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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