MCN Curated Headlines Archive for August, 2017

hollywoodreporter.com

“When Metrocolor closed, we were collecting our material and I came across some of the original missing footage. That was really fortunate. We printed it in a different section and put it together to get the director’s cut. We scanned the disparate parts in 4K resolution and put it back together — the original negative and then the deleted scenes for the pieces we found. We had picture source material for the rest; it was kind of a checkerboard.”
Close Encounters Reissue Is “Final 1997 Director’s Cut”

“The studios blacklisted me for making Walker. Roger Ebert and his fellow creep critics working for the man, as usual. I won’t feel the least vindicated until Universal and MGM and Fox pay me all the money they owe me for Repo ManSid and Nancy and Walker.”
Alex Cox Talks Walker

NY Times

“It’s really turning into a wake. To throw out almost all of the union members goes against the grain of the Voice we love and cherish.”
Village Voice To Fire 13 Of 17 Union Employees After Final Print Edition Third Week Of September

“Her left-field masterpiece; a picture that’s antic, sensual and strange, with a top-note of menace and a malarial air. The heat is intense; the settlers go berserk. Nobody here is quite stable; nothing can be trusted.”
Xan Brooks: Zama Gaga!

“The concept of spirituality does involve a stepping away from the maelstrom of activity and the maelstrom of action and empathy. Action and empathy are the two primary tools of a filmmaker. That’s why they’re called moving pictures: picture have empathy and movement has movement. So what happens when you say, “I’m going to show you inaction and characters who have no personality so you can’t empathize with them?” Now you’re fighting against the medium and its strong points. Obviously, not many people try this because it’s not a terribly commercial enterprise.”
From March, Paul Schrader Revisits Transcendental Style And Side-Eyes “Slow Cinema”

“Schrader, one of the crucial creators of the modern cinema, seems to have made it in a state of anger, passion, pain, mourning, and desire, held together by the conflicted religious fury—blending exaltation and torment—that runs through all of his films. First Reformed has the feeling of a summation, of a teeming and roiling avowal of his longtime obsessions, from the distant pressure of family life as a child to the repellent politics currently unfolding. In his most recent films, Schrader has been showing what the later years of a career are meant for: freedom, the lack of inhibition.”
Richard Brody On Paul Schrader’s First Reformed

variety

“It’s a piece of 1970s grindhouse pseudo-psychology, applied to 21st-century violence. He’s like a graphic-novel version of Travis Bickle; he embraces ——— as a form of slumming. (And there’s a romance too!)”
Owen Gleiberman‘s Spoiler-Doused Notice Says Schrader’s Film Is Good, But Bad, But Good, But Bad

“Glass-domed Leisureland is merely America in microcosm, with all the same corruption and wealth-disparity, loneliness and strife. Neither does it exist in splendid isolation. If the outside world starts to burn, then Leisureland is all-but guaranteed to go down in flames too. What a spry, nuanced, winningly digressive movie this is.”
Grauniad Headlines Downsizing As A “Masterpiece”

MCN Curated Headlines

“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