MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2017

“I’m in an enviable position as an actor, because I’m a playwright. Some of the roles I would’ve jumped at as a younger man because I was broke, trying to make a living — I don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t have to be a guy in a suit in Geostorm.”
Tracy Letts

“I thought I was totally fucked. I was basically stoned the whole time in the 1990s. I would just lie on the sofa, watching TV. [Later], it became harder for me to maintain the persona of an average viewer saying, fuck everyone on TV, this is all shit. You’d meet people, and think, ‘Oh, they’re just trying their best, aren’t they?’  You just kind of feel like a bully after a while.” 
“Black Mirror”‘s Charlie Brooker Lunches With The FT

variety

The Post proves that even a director who’s as much of a technological virtuoso as Spielberg can’t necessarily get the wigs and the cigarette smoke right.” … “Obviously, I’m not implying I have the answer; no one does. But the point is that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.”
Owen Gleiberman Engages Bret Easton Ellis To Help Misunderstand The Post

“It matters not at all what I think, because the consensus view has already been decided: that the film is an unmissable tour de force. And when the consensus view is decreed, we must all agree. Dinner parties must be hushed with awed appreciation; Twitter must become a tide of praise and hashtags and commendation; Instagram and Facebook must proliferate with enthusiasm. There can be no ‘I don’t know…’ No ‘Actually, I couldn’t work out what the bally hell was going on.’ We must all unite in universal acknowledgment that something is either very good: the best, the most bestest thing ever. Or it must be very, very bad indeed.”
Jo Ellison Has A Fit On “Consensus”

“That’s a tough one. I’m glad we’re having this discussion about what’s happening in the world right now. Nobody gets a free pass on that. At the same time, it was a song, and I feel like in the moment, the Bellas would have come up with it — based on how a riff-off works, they have to come up with these songs spontaneously, matching the words — and to me it feels like something that would have really happened in real life.”
Makers Offer Rationale For Including R. Kelly Song In Pitch Perfect 3; Blurry On Whether The Long-Accused Performer Will Profit Financially
WithA Timeline Of A Career Of Sexual Accusations Including Child Pornography
And
Jim DeRogaitis’ July 2017 Followup

“They want atomized, broken up, sharecropper-slaves that owe that soul to the modern company store. It’s feudalism — modern, high-tech feudalism and they admit that.”
Alex Jones Critiques Last Of The Jedi

“A three-way merger would come amid a broader wave of consolidation in the media industry, from publishing to entertainment to production.”
Eldridge Industries Plans Merger Of Hw’d Reporter-Billboard; Dick Clark Productions-Golden Globes; and Media Rights Capital, Producers of “House of Cards” 

indie wire

“The point of these mini-tales is that our business is not so much a business as a casino. And in this casino the independent filmmaker must spend over 90% of his time looking for money to make his film.”
Dan Talbot’s 2004 Gothams Acceptance Speech Holds Much Lore And Truth

“The alphabet now ends at Y”
Sue Grafton Was 77

hollywoodreporter.com

“You sonofabitch, you couldn’t get it up if a flag went by.” 
“What Happened When I Publicly Shamed My Harasser” By Rose Marie

LA Times

“I got to go to the Lucasfilm archives and go through Ralph McQuarrie’s original artwork, and the creatures he designed. I think you can see some influence in this movie. It reminds me of Miyazaki; it reminds me of how you engage with the natural world.”
Jen Yamato Brings A Jedi Bestiary

“As Kruger strolls into breakfast at Manhattan’s Balthazar, her face is flush from having walked here, in skintight leather pants and a gigantic, bright-orange H&M puffer, from her new apartment in Tribeca. She’s also right on time.”
Diane Kruger On Infusing The Fade With Her Own Grief

LA Times

“There are a lot of us out here in the sticks who grew up watching ‘Siskel & Ebert’ and reading Pauline Kael. I personally travel to Toronto and Sundance every year in my capacity as a film critic, which covers a lot of the year’s big indie releases for me. But I also drive a few hours up the road to Columbia, Missouri, for True/False, and occasionally zip back to my old hometown of Nashville for its big festival. We all are also part of the fabric of America — red or blue.”
Noel Murray, Unique Arkansas Cinephile

LA Times

“We’re bombarded with social media and headlines, and people being chewed up and spat out so quickly. She’s been this villain and this punch line for 25 years. I felt there was an angle to be not so judgmental and have some empathy in life. Not that she wasn’t in the wrong; she should be held accountable. But steps are taken in terms of a life and choices she makes, and the environment she grows up in are all part of her story. We haven’t heard that.
Craig Gillespie On Why Tonya Harding Now?

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