MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2016

Simon Hattenstone On The Mixed Pleasures Of Interviewing George Michael

wsj

Toshiba Says It Overstated Its Earnings By Almost Two Billion Dollars Over Past Seven Years

ny post

Get Yer Hot Takes, Hot Takes Right Here
“The liberal bent in everything goes far beyond just Broadway or Hollywood. It permeates everything. And it gets old fast.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“Thirty years ago, Steven Spielberg warned us not to lose our love of words. Sadly, nobody paid attention.”

“Full-frontal Black expressivity is generally what pays the bills out here. The poignant brilliance of Moonlight derives from the many-splendored ways it enshrines something rarer: Black male erotic repression and unconsummated desire in the face of bullying and familial breakdown. Which is to say that Moonlight’s luminously dark and lovely palette mirrors the esthetics of Miles Davis, a graphic and tonal conceptualist who long ago established the high bar for implosive, convulsive blues revelations drawn from Black America’s existential interior.”

Tim Grierson On “How George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ Made Me A Man”

Claire Bloom Looks Back

In The Gallery With Pipilotti Rist

hollywoodreporter.com

Tom Arnold Tweets About His “Apprentice” Tapes

LA Times

“I like it here, it’s very peaceful. You want the bustle when you’re younger. Of course, when you have kids, then there’s always bustle. And if you have a child when you’re older, like I did, you’re always around it. But sometimes you just want a little peace and quiet. Sometimes silence is good, even if you’re busy. I guess that’s a little bit of a contradiction.”
In The Garden Of The Bel-Air With Martin Scorsese

LA Times

Mark Olsen Talks Up Garth Jennings, The Animated Director Of Sing

“My jaw dropped. A desert setting. A group of soldiers in uniform. A surprise attack by a radical group that strongly opposes the more powerful force. This is Star Wars, yes, but it could also describe American combat in the Middle East, and as I watched Rogue One I was struck by the similarity. Thinking through the analogy, though, made for a troubling realization—if the radical rebels of Rogue One stand in for modern-day extremists, does the Empire they fight symbolize the United States?”

“The majority of Die Hard‘s interest comes through its depiction of architectural space: John McClane, a New York cop on his Christmas vacation, moves through a Los Angeles high-rise in basically every conceivable way but passing through its doors and hallways.”

AT&T Places Marketing Chief Atop $108.7 Billion Time Warner Absorption

Working Through Depression To Complete A Book About John Hughes

Screen Shot 2016-12-26 at 2.33.35 PM“Our point of departure was, we’re at an inflection point. The future isn’t some place ahead of us; we’re living in the future at this moment.”
Could The Most Relevant Film Of 2016 Be Alfonso Cuarón’s Ten-Year-Old Masterpiece, Children Of Men?

Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou Was 53IMG_1559

wsj

“How Jimmy Stewart Became George Bailey”

Award-Winning China Filmmaker Fan Jian On Documentaries Of Desire

hollywoodreporter.com

A&E Cancels At Home With The KKK Reality Series, Not Over Content But Because Hate Group Participants Were Paid In Cash

NY Times

“On the surface, Hollywood is a land of loose morals, where materialism rules, sex and drugs are celebrated on screen (and off), and power players can have a distant relationship with the truth.”
Brooks Barnes Conjures Sclerotic Clichés While Constructing Case Concerning Christian Dollars

“Those long, dark winters in Winnipeg, where Maddin lives and where Toles teaches at the University of Manitoba, must leave a lot of time for introspection. Maybe too much time.”
Guy Maddin Co-Screenwriter George Toles Inscribes A Tome To Paul Thomas Anderson

“I want stories that make me feel stuff, and they rarely do in a real way. I didn’t want convenient, pretty crying because that felt untrue. It would cheapen it. So I thought, ‘Really push to get the hard truth of it because if you do that, it becomes sad without being bleak.’ And sadness is a true thing.”
Writer Patrick Ness On Finding A Monster Calls

timeout.com

Democracy Comes To London Time Out As Love, Actually Voted Best Christmas Movie
But, From Canada – “Anyway, all this is to say that I don’t hate rom-coms because I am too good for them. I hate rom-coms because they suck and are bad for everyone in a way that has real-life consequences.”

The Year In Cinematic Smoking

LA Times

California AG Again Hits Owners of Backpages.Com With Charges Of Money Laundering And Pimping Of Children And Women

NY Times

Tracing The Long Road To Fences Onscreen

deadline

A&E Changes Title Of Ku Klux Klan Reality Series To “Escaping the KKK: A Documentary Series Exposing Hate in America” And Will Fold In PSAs

“One blatant departure from reality works in the film’s favour: in Children of Men, no one uses mobile phones or logs onto the internet.”
Nicholas Barber On Children Of Men In The Here And Now

Just In Time For Christmas, Abbey Bender On The Costume Design Of Eyes Wide Shut

Here’s A 15,000-Word Holiday Long-Read You Won’t Regret: Marc Singer‘s 1993 Profile Of Ricky Jay

LA Times

“There is a moment in Silence where Garfield looks down into a mountain stream and sees the face of Jesus Christ peering back. It’s the myth of Narcissus glimpsed through the prism of Lacan, and it’s the protagonist of Kundun likening himself to ‘the moon on water.'”

“The heroes of Silence make a brief stop in Macau before heading on to their rendezvous with fate. James Bond did much the same, in Skyfall, but the travelers in Silence visit no high-end casino, collect no earnings, and meet no mysterious dame with a Beretta Model 70 strapped to her thigh.”

“In Silence, a work of good faith in every sense, you feel the passion but none of the strain. It’s remarkable how absorbingly, and indelibly, its story takes shape before our eyes.”

“The Sanken wasn’t sounding quite right for Viola. It’s not just about having any radio mic on a person, you have to make sure you have the correct mic for their voice.”
Making The Soundscape Of Fences

Larry Karaszewski On Discovering Foreign-Language Pictures

An Appreciation Of That Plate Of Pollo A La Plancha In Moonlight

“‘The Greatest Gift,’ it seems, was waiting for an angel: Capra as Clarence, transforming the ordinary into something transcendent. 

“Stone’s combination of gameness, wry wit and ability to make an overriding aura of good-heartedness come off as magnetic rather than dull, she’s got a lot in common with another hero of hers – Tom Hanks.”
Rolling Stone Cover-Stories Emma Stone

NY Times

Monica Castillo On Three Classic Movie Musical Scenes That Inspired La La Land

“Jyn is a feminist hero we’ve needed for so long.”
De Elizabeth On The Unusual Storyline Of Rogue One

“I’m committed to only making things that I think have the potential to be great and are worth your fucking time. Why can’t everybody else commit to that?”
“Meet The College Friends Who Made Moonlight,” Producer Adele Romanski And Cinematographer James Laxton (Who Happen To Be Married)

Kevin Costner Opens Up On Cracking His Character In Hidden Figures

Friends Note Passing Of TIFF Front-Of-House Manager Winston Morgan

China Now Has More Movie Screens Than The United States After Decade Of Accelerated Construction

“If I make it look easy — without being a c— about it, that’s because I’m good. If it was all that easy, every fucker would be doing it. And trust me they’re not. They’re really not. You see an awful lot of acting going on. And if you think I’m not acting, well, fine. I’ve done my job then.”
Martin Freeman Takes The Measure Of The Man

In Wake Of Tampopo, Criterion Seeks “The Perfect Bowl Of Ramen” With Alice Waters 9’26” vid

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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

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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