MCN Curated Headlines Archive for July, 2017

Henry Blodget Says We’re “Deeply Underestimating How Big Digital Media Can Be” In The Next Decade”

Ben Lerner Introduces “Chris Marker: Studio”

 “It’s a Trojan Horse effect. The studio has been very supportive of Baby Driver, but the general sense is that with the more original, cutting-edge, idiosyncratic things in the film they’re like, “That’s all great, but can we cut together a trailer with car chases and shootouts?” They were very specific about it: ‘We need five trailer shots.’ If you can give people a commercial trailer then you can sneak in all this other stuff.”

“I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario. The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened.”
Angelina Jolie On Vanity Fair Cover Story

Vanity Fair Linked To Film Music Reporter (below), Apparently Crashing The Smaller Site: Here’s Their Bloggy-Blog Adding Not Much At All

Blade Runner 2049 Supplanting Jóhann Jóhannsson Score With Music By Hans Zimmer And Benjamin Wallfisch

NY Times

“They Live by Night was a favorite of my college film professor, and as a class projectionist I saw it many times — running scenes in slow motion or playing only the soundtrack. As a result, I know the movie nearly by heart. And its emotional power is undiminished. I may be recalling my own youth (as well as Ray’s), but just thinking about this film can choke me up.”
Hoberman On Nick Ray

LA Times

“Netflix is burning through cash at a growing clip. The company is pouring money into expensive prestige projects and expects to spend at least $6 billion in content this year. Its net cash outflow this year is forecast to grow to as much as $2.5 billion, up from $1.7 billion last year.”
Netflix Is Carrying $20 Billion In Debt

Josh Marshall Muses On Leslie Nielsen And The Meaning Of Life

“We view access to internet in China as a human rights issue, and I would expect Apple to value human rights over profits.”
Apple Removes VPNs From App Store In China To Facilitate Gov’t Censorship

“The thing is, I just don’t think Dunkirk is a very good movie—if your definition of the word movie is ‘moving images held together by a plot.’ It’s as if Christopher Nolan (sorry, “Nolan”) plucked out the war scene from a script, and was like ‘let’s just make this part extra long and call it a movie, lol.’ It’s so clearly designed for men to man-out over. And look, it’s not like I need every movie to have ‘strong female leads.’ To me, Dunkirk felt like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness—which apparently they don’t get to do enough. Fine, great, go forth.”
Get Yer Hottakes Here
Marie Claire’s Mehera Bonner Puts Up Her Dukes

Andrei Tarkovsky Gets A First Monument In Suzdal, Russia, Also Marking Andrei Rublev

hollywoodreporter.com

Sir Anthony Hopkins Models For Brioni

Wrangling Two Separate Large Formats In Dunkirk Post

NY Times

“I don’t think my name could sell anything now. It used to mean — bylines used to mean something in journalism. Most people have forgotten about so-called powerful people like me; we served our time.”
“Celebrity Accomplice” Liz Smith Still Wants Work At 94

variety

Netflix Takes Additional $750 Million Line Of Credit

NY Times

J. Hoberman Puts Menashe In Context Of The History Of Yiddish Cinema

hollywoodreporter.com

“‘Confederate’ also has drawn comparisons to two other prestige alt-history dramas, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘The Man in the High Castle.’ Yet they’re not the same, many argue. To understand why the former show is acceptable and ‘Confederate’ isn’t is to grasp the complicated concept of intersectionality, which is the interplay of multiple categories of identity.”
The Reporter Explains

Annapurna Incorporates Trump’s Friday Call For Increased Police Violence Against Suspects Into Instant Detroit Spot

Holy Moly: Mapping The Opening Car Chase Of Baby Driver

Eddie Schmidt On How He Became A Documentarian

“I don’t accept the argument that Valerian flopped because it wasn’t good. I’m not talking about its actual cinematic/narrative merits. While it bears aesthetic resemblance, at first glance, to similarly out-there (and wildly successful) visions like Avatar and the Guardians wing of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Valerian actually belongs to what has become a nearly nonexistent subcategory of would-be blockbuster: a (1) wide release; (2) fantasy/sci-fi; (3) non-franchise/first of a franchise. Basically, films of the scale and ambition of a Star Wars or Marvel release without the brand power.”

Ben Sachs Revisits George A. Romero’s Martin, A “Masterpiece Of Independent Filmmaking”

“Can it still have relevance now where so much of our world is catching up to what was science fiction in the first two films? We live in a world of predator drones and surveillance and big data and emergent AI.”
James Cameron Has Ideas For A Terminator Trilogy After Some Rights Revert To Him In 2019 And If David Ellison Is Up For It

Ranking Stephen King Deaths

“Aiming a botnet at Netflix would be like shoveling dirt into Carlsbad Caverns. But Behrens conceived of a different type of DDoS, one that turned Netflix’s application programming interface against itself…”

How Silent Screen Vamp Dagmar Godowsky Nearly Drove Her Ghostwriter Mad

“The first dish is a promising broad-and-green-bean hummus, light and slightly acid, with a beetroot purée spiced with crushed hazelnuts, purple basil and sesame oil.”
12 Courses With Isabelle Huppert

“The Village Voice’s Liberal Savior Owner Is Trying to Crush its Union”

NYTimes Styles Section To Be Edited By Choire Sicha

thestar.com

Peter Howell Impatient For Shorter Movies

variety

Joe Leydon Peruses His 12 Favorite Bad-Ass Action Heroines

Laurene Powell Jobs Nonprofit Buys Majority Stake In Atlantic Media

“Pity Daniel Craig – playing James Bond really is the toughest job in the world”

hollywoodreporter.com

Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel Will Be Amazon Studios’ Debut Self-Distribution, Getting Bob Berney Directly Into The Fray

“She ready! She bad!”
Girls Trip‘s Tiffany Haddish Pleased To Have Arrived

“Coming to Terms has screened a few places, as usual, to almost no one.  To my – and that of others’ – observation, this kind of cinema is more or less dead. People continue to make it, as I do, but the audience now is almost nothing, and along with it any sense of cultural meaning or value. Zombie cinema that dies and keeps coming back, albeit for an ever shrinking audience. Which leaves little to say. But, the other day…”
Jon Jost On The Release Of His Latest Work

hollywoodreporter.com

Disney Imagineer Marty Sklar Was 83

Gothams Will Be Awarded November 27

“New technologies are giving rise to a phenomenon of more varied access to public discourse. That something we have in a bag or a pocket can document images and sound allows us to imagine that more people will access the production of an audiovisual discourse. Sadly, history shows us having low-cost pens is not enough to create writers. You have to find ways of preventing single, exclusionary visions from being established.”
Zama Director Lucrecia Martel On Staying Productive

NY Times

J. Hoberman On Le Gai Savoir And Godard’s Initial Retirement

hollywoodreporter.com

Barry Levinson On The Legacy Of Wag The Dog

NY Times

“H’wd is aggressively adapting material that doesn’t have a narrative or even any characters. But not all intellectual property is created equal.”

Venice Competition Has A Single Entry From A Female Director; But Is It A Reflection On Programmers Or Financiers?
And – Cinema Scope Magazine Tweets 21 Films It Considers Better Than Lucrecia Martel’s Latest, Which Was Not Selected

NY Daily News

“Only one director among the twenty-one is a woman — China’s Vivian Qu, whose Angels Wear White centers on two girls assaulted by a man in a seaside town.”

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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