MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2017

Radio Show Four-Walls Alamo Drafthouse For A “Dude-Only” Screening Of A Four-Year-Old Metallica Movie; “Dude Seating” Leaves One Seat Empty Between Each Man

wsj

Facebook In Quest For Scripted Programming For Under-34s That Has No Politics, News, Nudity Or “Rough Language” With Budgets Up To $3 Million Per Episode

deadline

Warner Counting On Accountant Sequel

variety

SAG-AFTRA Seeks Strike Authorization

22nd Nantucket Film Fest Announces Winners

ew

Costner, De Niro And Connery Look Back 30 Years To The Untouchables

“According to Bill Cosby’s PR team, the comedian’s upcoming “town hall” tour will not focus on teaching people about sexual-assault accusations, despite what you might have heard from Bill Cosby’s PR team.”

“Joss’s genius was oppressive in a different way. He’d come back from a weekend having written a musical, never having written music in his life. And you’d be, Fuck me. I’m not even going to try. Every once in a while someone will say to me, ‘How do you do all this?’ And I think, Oh, I’m somebody’s Joss now! I went and directed a movie while working on multiple TV shows! Somebody out there probably thinks, Fuck her. And I think: I’ve arrived!”
Profiling Writer-Director Marti Noxon

Marie Claire Cover-Stories Alison Brie

Palm Springs Shortfest Announces Winners

“When I was studying the cinema at university I watched many Australian films, including the early work of Peter Weir and Jane Campion, But especially The Road Warrior, the second Mad Max movie. I watched it more than 25 times. It has a very peculiar magic that is very, very wild. George Miller, Mr Miller, is my hero. A master of movement. I feel the masters of movement are threefold: Akira Kurosawa, George Miller, Hayao Miyazaki. They are the masters of movement, whether that means the camera or the object or both. They really have it down.”

“I remember that when I was in my 30s, a hot age for an actress, lots of offers were coming in but nothing was great and I didn’t work for 18 months. It was at a really fruitful age and I wanted to work. There was nothing coming down the pipeline that I thought was good and then I got The Piano. I have never been an easy fit. I’m a leading lady character actor, I don’t fit in one slot simply. I’ve always been used to a certain amount of struggle and that prepared me wonderfully for a mature age.”

Colorado Paying Incentives To Ineligible Productions

“While Stone has gotten a lot of grief for his interviews with Putin, this is actually the kind of argument that he has been making for decades, through movies that show hidden puppet-masters pushing the country into conflict to perpetuate their power and serve their self-interest. ‘The Putin Interviews’ is just the crude culmination of a long and singular career.”

NY Times

Dr. John E. Sarno, 93, Subject Of All the Rage (Saved by Sarno), Passes One Day Before Its Release And His 94th Birthday

“What I didn’t expect was to be overcome with emotion when Eugene Brave Rock’s character ‘Chief’ met Wonder Woman. Why? His first words to her were in Blackfoot. Even better, he introduced himself as Napi, the Blackfoot demigod who is known as a trickster and a storyteller.”

indie wire

Tom Brueggeman Offers His Interpretation Of How Rotten Tomatoes Works And An Accompanying “Degradation Of The Critical Process”

“For many, it is also a substitute religion in a secular era. The books are about the fight between good and evil, and the power of magic. They teach you that bigotry must be fought at all costs, that tolerance and difference must be celebrated.”
“Harry Potter And The Millennial Mind”: Did J.K. Rowling Shaped The Political Thinking Of A Generation

indie wire

“Things will start when someone’s cooking up a script. Describing and expressing it on occasions when we can listen and comment. It’s nice to let it brew, especially when you have a shorthand, particularly with Sofia, observing and listening and giving feedback.”
Coppolas On Coppolas

“Irma Vep is the most movie of movies. It’s a film obsessed with film history and identity — French cinema in particular, but American and Hong Kong movies too. In an era where Chinese box office receipts are as important to Hollywood as American ones, Assayas’ anxieties feel utterly prescient.”
Filmmaker Mark Slutsky On A 20-Year Fixation On Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep

indie wire

Hal Hartley On Keeping Control Of His Decades Of Work

WikiLeaks Goes Cease-And-Desist Route Against Laura Poitras’ Risk

“Whatever the outcome, it’s essential that directors like Ana Lily Amirpour get to indulge their weirdest cinematic fantasies—even if they’re not for everyone. Indulging strange impulses every so often can prove highly beneficial.”

“I like to be either horizontal or vertical. I am far too lazy to exercise. I hear yoga is good and I may try it one day but I prefer to sleep. I don’t feel old and asking women about ageing is very negative. It doesn’t concern me; it’s other people’s problem, not mine.”
Bonjour, Isabelle!

Toy Story Consultant Shares Story Of What May Have Happened To Andy’s Dad

NY Times

Veteran NYC Broadcast Journo Gabe Pressman Was 93

Andrew Sarris‘ “25 Most Memorable Cult Films,” From The VOICE, 1978

What’s Behind Amazon Vision For Whole Foods? It’s Still The Barcodes

West Hollywood Landmark Formosa Cafe Will Return

hollywoodreporter.com

“The Transformers series is actually kind of brilliant. It’s the franchises reliance on a popular bastion of fiction known as secret histories, a concept that it’s used to justify the perpetuation of this franchise from a storytelling standpoint. For the unfamiliar, a secret history is a version of historical events that differ from what is commonly accepted as what happened. Simply put, what if Stanley Kubrick really did fake the moon landing in 1969 or Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination?”

variety

San Antonio Gets Into The Production Incentive Game

“A good story but sadly not true. Wishful thinking, I think.”
Does A Single Slipped Word Mean That Banksy Is Part Of Massive Attack?

timeout.com

“As a critic myself, the idea of theaters being able to make ideologically-based decisions about who they invite to review their shows gives me some pause. After all, we are hired to give our opinions. Criticism is inherently subjective, and we all bring our own biases and baggage to the theater every night. But this isn’t an issue of censorship or silencing or free speech, but rather of access. While comping press is a longstanding norm for the most part, it’s not a law. And Weiss seems to want access to be a one-way street. She’s remained mum amid the current conversation.”
Chicago Theater Critic Hedy Weiss Under Critique

“Within a matter of days, more than 3,500 Chicago theater artists were said to have signed the petition, and more than 70 theater companies reportedly have agreed to disinvite Weiss to future productions. Sun-Times Editor-In-Chief and Publisher Jim Kirk said Weiss will continue to be the newspaper’s first-string theater critic. “

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Form Meets Function As Bilge Ebiri Reviews Transformers

Tim Grierson Oral-Histories Wedding Crashers

indie wire

“I’m a brown woman immigrant, my family escaped the Iranian Revolution, I grew up on two continents, English wasn’t the first language in my home. I know what it is to be the ‘other’ very, very well. My film and my filmmaking is all about asking questions about how the system pits us against each other. If anything, this movie is about how we are eating each other. It’s fine, I get it, some people don’t see those things or ask those questions. Cinema is a private, personal experience for individual. But this felt personal against me…What is art? I find myself asking that question all day these past few weeks. I’m thinking, you shouldn’t be able to answer that. That’s the fucking problem. People think they can.”
Ana Lily Amirpour Replies

Edgar Wright Program-Notes His 22-Film “Heist Society” BAMcinématek Retro

thestar.com

Peter Howell On 10 Worst Films He’s Reviewed In 20 Years As Star Critic (With Two Already From This Summer)

“A play is not a tweet. It can’t be compressed and embedded and it definitely can’t be delivered apologetically. The very act of saying anything more nuanced than ‘us good, them bad’ is under attack, and I’m proud to stand with artists who do.”
Corey Stoll On Playing Brutus In The Park

hollywoodreporter.com

“I don’t think there’s going to be a winner. There may be a dominant platform, and I don’t think it’s going to be big screen movies.”
Young Han Solo Director Ron Howard On The Future Of Movies

the wrap

“Warm Cheddar Drop Biscuits… Roasted Veggie Kabobs…Veggie Cheeseburg” 
Netflix Enforcing Vegetarian-Only Dinner Menu During iPic Booking Of Okja

Juror Says He Distrusted Cosby Witness Because Of “Bare Midriff”

Art Of The Title Credits Wonder Woman

Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival Announces LIneup

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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