MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2017

And The Screen Actors Guild Salutes… Emma Stone, Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Mahershala Ali

“You can get technical. You can talk about grain. But here’s the big mystery for me. There are films I’ve seen a dozen times that have always affected me emotionally, have devastated me, that just do not have the same effect on me when I see them projected digitally. I can’t explain that. It’s the same movie! It’s the same story! But there’s something different. I am really struck by this. We react to these formats differently on an emotional level.”

hollywoodreporter.com

Jordan Mintzer On The Bookends Of Emmanuelle Riva’s Long Career, Hiroshima mon Amour And Amour

Picturing When Paul Thomas Anderson Came To Whitby, Yorkshire

hollywoodreporter.com

“They’ve been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize — these people are the bravest humanitarians on the planet,” But Trump Ban Will Keep Syria’s White Helmets Away From Oscar

“To Walk in Beauty”: Chris Ware On George Herriman and Krazy Kat

Why Are Cinematic Dog Deaths So Schmaltzy?

NY Times

Film Festivals And Other Artistic Exchanges In Limbo With Trump Immigration Ban

Trump Flummoxes James Bond Writers

LA Times

“Right, but change your point of view,” Shirley MacLaine offered. “Change your point of view of being victimized. I’m saying: Find the democracy inside.”
“I’m sorry,” Salma Hayek said, jumping in. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jessica Williams answered.
“Who are you when you’re not black and you’re not a woman? Who are you and what have you got to give?”
Williams took a deep breath. “A lot. But some days, I’m just black, and I’m just a woman,” she said. “Like, it’s not my choice. I know who I am. I know I’m Jessica, and I’m the hottest bitch on the planet I know.”
Women In Film Lunch At Palatial Mansion During Sundance Grows Testy

Asghar Farhadi Will Boycott Oscar

variety

Silicon Valley Co’s Offer Degrees Of Condemnation Of Trump Muslim Immigration Ban

NY Times

“There’s no ready-made definition of political film, which, unlike, say, pornography (‘I know it when I see it,’ Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart memorably said), isn’t necessarily obvious. All the President’s Men, which gave Mr. Redford one of his most enduring roles, as Bob Woodward, is an openly and transparently political film because it concerns the journalistic investigation into the scandal that eventually brought down a president. The Big Sick, a tear-splashed comedy, isn’t likely to do anything but bring down whatever house it plays in, but it’s an inherently political work because it involves a Muslim American struggling with identity, family and love.”
Manohla Dargis On Sundance: Political Or Not?

NY Times

Jane Pauley On Mary Tyler Moore

ACE Editors Laud La La Land, Arrival

And Sundance Awards…

LA Times

Producers Guild Goes La La, OJMIA, Zootopia; Boos Trump Producer Mark Burnett

“The last time I was moved was the three weeks before the death of Abbas Kiarostami. We watched his latest short films that he made at his home, and they moved me. I really respected him, and we had a very good friendship. He’s a master.”

“Trump’s actions are hurting Netflix employees around the world, and are so un-American it pains us all. Worse, these actions will make America less safe. A very sad week, and more to come with the lives of over 600,000 Dreamers here in a America under imminent threat. It is time to link arms together to protect American values of freedom and opportunity.”
Netflix Streams Trump Refugee Ban

Sir David Hare Says Europeans “Beginning To Infect” British Theater

“As supporters of filmmakers—and the human rights of all people—around the globe, we find it extremely troubling that Asghar Farhadi, the director of the Oscar-winning film from Iran A Separation, along with the cast and crew of this year’s Oscar-nominated film The Salesman, could be barred from entering the country because of their religion or country of origin.”

“Apple would not exist without immigrants.”
Apple’s Tim Cook On Trump Refugee Ban

“Twitter was intended to encourage positive interactions, but we’ve seen your platform silence others by allowing abuse.”
A Call To @Jack To Suspend Trump From Twitter

NY Times

Trump Visa Ban Likely To Prevent Oscar Winner Asghar Farhadi From Attending For The Salesman

Emmanuelle Riva Was 89

variety

China Dailian Wanda Still Hasn’t Closed Dick Clark Productions Deal

Salon

“I imagine that his fans wouldn’t want to molest him so much as respectfully throw back icy shots of his distilled essence — a toast, a swallow, and a wincing, hearty aurgh! Hurt is a toxic luxury, delicious as a nasty fruit brandy — an afterdinner vice of giddy, overpriced pleasure.”
Cintra Wilson‘s 2004 Profile Of John Hurt Is An Essential Marvel

John Hurt Reads From Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s “Guantánamo Diary” (4’51”

John Hurt Said He Wasn’t Worried Over Mortality

GRIMSBY’S OWN JOHN HURT WAS 77

And The Slamdance Winners Are…

Matthew Garrahan On “Damien Chazelle, New King Of The H’wd Musical”

Coens Make A Minute Movie For Mercedes-AMG Roadster

NY Times

Acclaimed Director Ivo Van Hove To Stage Network At London’s Nat’l Theatre With A Mad-As-Hell Bryan Cranston

“Ang Lee took this notion I had about reality and fantasy and launched it on a long strange trip through space and time, a quantum physics elaboration of the pokey arithmetic I was doing in Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk. What’s real and what’s fake? Not so easy to know in the age of the screen, and such trouble not knowing can get us into: love trouble, money trouble, geopolitical trouble – invasions of foreign countries on false pretenses, or stars of ‘reality’ TV being elected heads of state. Lee had something radical to say about this.”

variety

“You don’t want to rush in just to show how big your dick is,” said one Robinov associate. “You want your movies to succeed and he has a great lineup coming.”
What’s To Become Of Jeff Robinov’s Studio 8, With Only Billy Lynn To Its Name?

Film4 Founder David Rose Was 92; Films He Shepherded Across Nearly A Decade Included My Beautiful Laundrette, Mona Lisa

indie wire

“It’s ridiculous what the digital guys are doing to the marketplace,” said one veteran indie CEO. “The Big Sick is a great little movie but it’s a $4 million -$6 million buy. There’s no logic to this model.”

“We’re asking what scripts people love. The market requires that they answer ‘Which scripts do you think will result in a profitable movie?’ ”
Profiling The Black List’s Franklin Leonard

Gawker-Slaying Peter Thiel Won’t Say If He’s Financing Suit Against Techdirt New Site

Toronto Says Farewell To Suspect Video
And – A Memory Of A Quarter-Century In Mirvish Village

hollywoodreporter.com

“Look, Mel Gibson wants to direct this, but it will not be a Walden film. Mel wants to make an R-rated, very gratuitously violent but poignant film.”
Walden Film CEO On No “R” Ratings; Dog’s Purpose Claims; New Nate Parker Project; Hacksaw Ridge

From Sundance, Kyle Buchanan Handicaps Oscar 2018 Birth Of A Nation Flameout Candidates 

“How do you think I feel when I work on a movie for a year, and then I put it on a DCP that fits in someone’s pocket and then it’s gone? Is that what all that was for? And I was reminded, watching the movie, like, ‘Oh yeah, this was supposed to be really personal.'”

“The Day Israel Saw Shoah“

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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