MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2016

William Christopher Was 84

“But need George Michael be a dirty secret pleasure? Need any pleasure be dirty or secret? And aren’t these the questions Michael himself seemed to explore (and explode) in both his music and his life?”

Beat Poet David Meltzer Was 89
With – A Survey Of His Career As “Wandering Jew, Eternal Beat”
And – A Neat 2015 Interview

At 81, Disney’s First African-American Animator Still In The Studio

NY Times

“I said, ‘Gee, this is all outdoor scenery.’ I said, ‘Gee, I’m a landscape painter!’”
Margalit Fox‘s Splendid Survey Of The Life Of Tyrus Wong, 106, Key Artist Of Bambi Among Other Achievements

LA Times

Tyrus Wong’s Place In American Art History

“The world changed.”
Toronto Says Goodbye To Honest Ed’s, Which Was 68

“Without moderators or fancy algorithms, they are prone to anarchy. Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top.”
VICE Chucks Comments

Rylance Now Sir Mark

“China’s Communist Party has tried to rescue the reputations of its big budget film makers, dismissing critics and in many cases censoring articles that slate Chinese films. On Wednesday the People’s Daily, the official Communist Party mouthpiece, targeted Chinese film review sites like Douban and Yanmao for ‘grossly inaccurate’ reviews.”

NY Times

The Three Stallone Sisters Arrive As Collective Miss Golden Globe

“One wonders when the Simon & Schuster executives came courting. Was it his targeting of Leslie Jones for being black and female that made them think they had a star on their hands? Are they looking forward to the prospect of the creeps who hacked her Web site lining up at author signings?”

David Hudson Collates A Year Of Loss For Cinema

LA Times

Child Actors Bustle Into Awards Season

NY Times

Lawrence Schiller On His Photo Of 6-Year-Old Carrie Fisher Watching Debbie Reynolds On Stage

LA Times

Directors Guild Negotiates Incrementally Higher Residuals For Streaming

Will The Federal Film Tax Incentive Be Allowed To Lapse In New Admin?

“Leia Organa, the politician and revolutionary who led the defeat of the Galactic Empire, was 60. Her life was laced with controversy from tactics to her very ancestry, but her intelligence, commitment to the cause, and place at the heart of the Rebellion remains the indisputable core of her legacy.”

Joe Dante On Working With Carrie Fisher

“Here’s the thing about Fences. It’s a relationship drama, because Denzel finally found someone who could play on his level, and Viola Davis doesn’t just hold her own, she Denzels all over the —-ing place. I’ve never seen anything like it. When she builds up a head of steam, she not only out-Denzels Denzel, she erases him, she buries him in a pile of spit, snot and tears. She’s towering. She’s like a grizzly bear in a cage match with a raccoon.”

NY Times

“A similar progression — from the basic to the rhapsodic, the material to the transcendent — happens in Paterson as days pass, details accumulate, and words turn into poetry, one line at a time.”
Manohla Dargis Gets Jim Jarmusch Just Right

China Commentator Tell Online Critics To Go Easy On Local Cinema

“I’m a part of the generation that would turn on MTV and see Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and T-Pain singing ‘I’m on a Boat.’ We pretended we didn’t think ‘Dick in a Box’ was hilarious, then kept up the act when ‘Motherlover’ debuted. So why didn’t we also want to support The Lonely Island’s newest opus? Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is no doubt the most stupidly brilliant comedy of 2016.”

The Carnegie Deli Was 79

Phyllis Nagy On Conversations With Patricia Highsmith

Bilge Ebiri On Scorsese’s Holy Men

Reasons To See Silence

Annette Bening On Letting Go

NY Times

Woody Allen Reviews Edward Sorel’s “Mary Astor’s Purple Diary”

An Enthusiastic Korean Cinema Top 15 For 2016

“How Debbie Reynolds And Singin’ in the Rain Have Brightened My Life,” By Catherine Rampell 

hollywoodreporter.com

“Every line of attack the forces of political correctness try on me fails pathetically. I’m more powerful, more influential and more fabulous than ever before, and this book is the moment Milo goes mainstream. Social justice warriors should be scared — very scared.”
CBS’ Simon & Schuster Invests Quarter-Mil Advance Book Deal With White Nationalist Banned From Twitter

NY Times

“Ms. Reynolds was, as they say, a trouper. So she did what came naturally to her: She trouped.”
Wesley Morris On “The Unsinkable Debbie Reynolds”
And – “The reason I got into filmmaking was super naïve: to change the world, you know? To really make the voices that we don’t get to hear heard, and the images and the stories that we don’t get to see seen. I would like to normalize that.”
Morris Checks In With Director Melina Matsoukas In A Year Of “Formation” And “Insecure”

Justine Smith On Gérard Depardieu, Body Of Work, Work Of Body

Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh On Draping Kate Beckinsale In Love & Friendship

A Few Of Carrie Fisher‘s Guilty-Pleasure Movies

“George Michael Was the Gay Icon We Didn’t Know We Needed”

“You know, I’m still kind of a Luddite. I carry around a notebook. I write my scripts by hand. But then my films are edited on digital equipment. Why can’t I have both? It’s one big ocean.”
Jim Jarmusch And Gabe Klinger Talk Director Tech

“Adam Driver is a leading man in an age when the definition of manhood has been completely overhauled.”

“Carrie Fisher’s Mental Health Advocacy Is A Vital Part Of Her Legacy”

Michael Sicinski & Jordan Cronk Survey 2016 In Avant-Garde Film

NY Times

Anita Gates’ Debbie Reynolds Obit

Sean Ono Lennon Remembers His Friend Carrie Fisher

nymag

“Carrie Fisher Struggled Against Being A Nerd-Boy Sex Object Her Whole Life”

“I don’t know if it’s cruel irony or pure poetry to lose them both so close together, but it feels terrible either way.”

nymag

“Debbie Reynolds Wasn’t Just a Hollywood Entertainer, She Was Also Its Self-Appointed Costume Historian”

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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