May 18, 2024

MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2017

“My love of filmmaking came along later in life, and while I find it deeply satisfying, my heart is as an explorer.”
Says James Cameron

Story Of Warhol’s Death Not As Routine As Reported

Postwar Germany Actor Marika Rökk Was Soviet Agent

Action Master Director Seijun Suzuki Was 93

“Suzuki may be compared with any of the great mavericks who subvert the studio system by personally reinventing or restructuring popular conventions of cinema, and mostly getting away with it (think of Welles, think of Corman, think of Melville). The works of such directors knock the idea of classical perfection in grand fashion, exuding exuberance almost as an end in itself.”

Netflix Projected For Scorsese-De Niro “Irishman” After Brad Grey Paramount Departure

To No One’s Surprise, Michael Moore Anoints Self Leader Of “Resistance”

“Writers and poets are said to be the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Let’s acknowledge it.”
WGA President Howard Rodman’s Awards Comments

Oscar’s List Of Its 683 Most Recent Invitees To Join Academy

La La Land Largest-Grossing Oscar Nominee Worldwide With Nearly $350 Million

“Verizon is hoping is that it can combine AOL’s mobile and digital ad business with similar businesses acquired from Yahoo. The goal is to compete with Facebook and Google.”

Facebook Negotiating For Rights To Stream One MLB Game Each Week

Dorian Lynskey On “The Rise And Fall Of A Shallow Actor Who Played The Bad Guy For Money”

“They only care about bringing me down. I’ve never apologized for anything before and I don’t anticipate doing it again.”
Cynical Media Personality, Breitbart Protege Of Bannon, Says Downfall Over Pedophilia Remarks “Cynical Media Witch Hunt”

“We go to see them, much of the time, in search of something else — the comforting darkness of the theater, the play of light and shadow on the screen, the consolations they offer for some temporary trouble. A lot of the time we don’t give a hoot what’s playing. We are at a public event for private reasons which we don’t always recognize until later, if at all. It is the occasion, the atmosphere, that we crave.”
A Stodgy Times Obit For Richard Schickel

Shea Serrano Pens Three Odes To Mahershala Ali’s Smile

Suffolk’s Nigel Perry, 84, World’s Oldest Working Cinema Projectionist

“An interim step will be the formation of an operating committee led by president of Paramount TV and digital entertainment Amy Powell, COO Andrew Gumpert, movie division president Marc Evans and marketing-distribution chief Megan Colligan.”

“There could be no better moment to reward a work of art which tells us this story, which is the story of our common humanity.”
Salman Rushdie Takes Up Lion At Last Minute spoilers, clichés

“‘San Junipero’ was the first one I wrote for the Netflix season, and I was consciously trying to clear the decks on what ‘Black Mirror’ was. The reason it starts in California was because I thought, ‘That’s going to piss off everyone who has moaned that now we’re doing it for the Americans, the show’s going to be all American.'”

“The film was nominated for six Oscars, with me winning for best script. We grossed over $60 million, but I didn’t feel vindicated, simply proud we’d made this lovely thing.”
Looking Back At Making The Crying Game 25 Years Ago

“Magic hour allowed us to have about five takes. And usually take number 1 was too light. Take number 5 was too dark. So they basically had three chances to hit this thing. And we shot it for two nights. So we had six chances to make this happen — on an incline, on asphalt, not being dancers. I mean, it’s incredible to think what they did.”

Cutting Arrival: It’s About Time, It’s About Space

“The top one percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80% of all recorded music revenue.”

“As illuminating as 13th is, and as ‘walk down memory lane’ as [OJ: Made In America] is, this is way more relevant to what we’re facing on a day-to-day basis in terms of people trying to change our lives and put us back into place.”
Samuel L. Jackson Opens Up Oscar To Jen Yamato

Lin-Manuel Miranda On A Lifelong Oscars Obsession

“I am Mexican. And these are times in which the fact that you have given me this award proves that those barriers that people try to erect between us are false. At the end of the day, we are all peers. We are all in this together.”
Guillermo Del Toro Accepting Filmmaker Award At The Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel Awards

“I’d really like to see them use their muscle to push the studios to include more diverse voices.”
Michael Schulman Goes 6,000 Words Behind The Scenes At Oscar

“In five of my 14 novels, I’ve written about sexual intolerance — about hatred of sexual minorities and sexual differences. Whatever the protocol for Oscar acceptance speeches is, or was, the creative community has an obligation: to be intolerant of intolerance. I hope there’s no protocol governing Oscar speeches this year.”
Oscar-Winner John Irving Says Acceptance Speeches Should Be Political

“After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of ‘Dangerous’ by Milo Yiannopoulos.”

Simon & Schuster Cancels Book By Breitbart Editor—Earlier Accused Of Racism, Sexism —After Pedophilia Comments Surface

“These things are troubling, and we could almost write them off—almost—as jokes falling on the deaf ears of liberals. Humor and trolling are, after all, two of Milo’s hallmarks, and lack of humor is one of his main critiques of PC liberals like me. We can’t take a good joke about rape, or about black women looking like apes.”

“I’ve been continually shocked by the willingness of many in the publishing industry to stifle Milo’s opinions. The right to speak freely, even if your opinions are unpopular, should be the bedrock of our industry.”

Lars Von Trier Teases His Serial Killer House That Jack Built

“I have this fundamental block — maybe I’ll always have it, maybe I’ll get past it — but I am essentially Chiron, I grew up like this kid and there are just certain ceilings that I never can imagine myself breaking through.”

“It was never a play. It was always scripted in a way that was about the visual life of it. So for example, there are no ‘Lights up on’ or ‘Curtain opens on’ or ‘Enter stage left’ sort of instructions. All of the instructions in the original script ‘In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue’ are like ‘CUT TO: Black washing his face,’ and ‘CUT TO: Little standing in the middle of a field.’ So to try to put that on stage would be — crazy, I think.”

“The enforcement of stricter copyright terms on video essayists has [had an effect] on output, not in terms of number of videos produced but in terms of quality. Instead of moving towards film criticism, many of the newer Facebook-first videos from Fandor merely relay information.
“Video Essays In The Age Of Social Media”

“So obviously I want to talk about women in cinema, but I don’t want to reduce what you’ve done down to just viewing it through that lens. That said, I’ve been thinking a lot about representation, and even though the horror genre has a very embattled relationship with women, people of color, and the queer community, having the opportunity to empower those demographics in the very amplified context that horror provides feels like a really great opportunity. Is that something you consider?”
Karyn Kusama Entertains The Question

“James Baldwin Should Make You Uncomfortable”

Ten-Minute Sequel To Love, Actually Debuts On NBC In May

First American Independent Film Awards Go To Krisha For Film, Director, Screenplay, Lead Perf

At WGA Awards, Oliver Stone Comments On “The Military-Industrial-Money-Media Security Complex”

NZ Appeals Court Removes Step To Kim Dotcom Extradition

Keanu On A Fourth Matrix Movie: “That’d Be Weird, But Why Not?”

“Whether I agreed or disagreed with his verdicts, he made me appreciate the skill involved in sketching a concise but thorough portrait of a moviegoing experience. And he was especially good at drawing the reader’s attention to films that weren’t big deals yet but were about to be.”
Matt Zoller Seitz On Richard Schickel

MCN Curated Headlines

Archives Comments Most Recent

Gary Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Ophelia, Ambition, Werewolf in Girls' Dorm, Byleth, Humble Pie, Good Omens, Yellowstone …More

rohit aggarwal on: The DVD Wrapup: Ophelia, Ambition, Werewolf in Girls' Dorm, Byleth, Humble Pie, Good Omens, Yellowstone …More

cool on: "At the beginning of this process, Jim handed us all this list of disconnected ideas for action scenes. One of them kind of turned into the underwater Humvee scene. He had always wanted to do this action scene where a car fell through the ice in a river and was washed along the river underneath the ice. That was the genesis of the dam scene. It was pretty cool to get this list of, "What if a tank drove down main street and then went through a mall?" All these ideas from Jim Cameron that he always wanted to see that were not connected to anything in particular. They were just his little personal list of "cool shit I'd like to see some day."

liza antelo on: Farewell Andrea Gronvall, Critic, Journslist, ‘Siskel & Ebert’ Producer, Longtime MCN Contributor

Troy on: Jan-Michael Vincent Was 73

eht% on: Kubrick by Weegee

Thawn Chwithy on: Topix Forums Deep-Nixed

Some Random Troll on: Topix Forums Deep-Nixed

Trenton Moore on: Philadelphia Film Critics Circle Nod Roma as Best Film, Cinematography and Foreign Film

Celia Ann Harrison on: Topix Forums Deep-Nixed

“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