MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2017

Rue Saint-Denis’ Le Beverley, Paris’ Last Porn Boîte, Set To Close

“China’s film industry received a boost in 2017 after a string of unexpected blockbusters lifted the mainland’s total box office takings 22% year-on-year, up from 2.4% growth in 2016. The buoyant box office takings offered a fillip for a domestic film industry that had until recently been written off as over-funded and under-talented, producing big budget flops that were overshadowed by Hollywood blockbusters.”

Caleb Landry Jones On The Fear Of Frances McDormand

Across The Hall With Ava DuVernay And Ryan Coogler

“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

Hungarian Theater After the Right-Wing Gov’t Crackdown

While The U. S. No Longer Allows Copyrighted Work To Pass Into Public Domain, The E.U. And Canada Tomorrow Get “Catch-22,” “Stranger in a Strange Land,””The Soft Machine,” “The Phantom Tollbooth,””Franny & Zooey,””Breakfast at Tiffany’s” And Works By René Magritte, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker And Others

NY Times

“On the Friday afternoon before Christmas, Talbot even dropped by Lincoln Plaza to catch a movie. ‘He watched the Haneke film. And he asked how business was.'”

San Francisco’s Once-Endangered Roxie, Oldest Continuously-Operating Movie Theater in the U. S., Now Thrives

BBC

“What if it was possible to use an X-ray scanner to lock onto the metal content within the film emulsion layer and turn it into a visible light image? Could we scan the film without unrolling it? Without even touching it? Any roll of film is essentially just a strip of plastic with a picture printed onto one side. The key component of black and white emulsion is silver oxide, the metal content of which is very high. In theory, this high silver content would work well for X-ray Tomography. All tomographic methods look for the difference in X-Ray opacity between two substances. In the case of ‘Morecambe and Wise,’ we are looking at the difference between the translucent plastic layer and the high metal content in the emulsion layer. If the theory was sound then the silver content should light up in the scan. Nobody had ever done this before. The idea was completely untested. And my total lack of any working knowledge of the technology gave me no confidence that it ever even could be tested.”

Ryan Gilbey Career-Profiles Gary Oldman For The Observer

“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”

India Censors Clear Padmavati On Five Conditions, Including Changing Title to “Padmavat” And Rewriting A Song’s Lyrics

“The irony in Ingmar Bergman, the humour in him is absolutely lost on Swedes. Even at his apparently most brooding and depressing, there is almost always a streak of black comedy in there which I think the British recognise and the Swedes don’t.”

“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
With – A 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

Road Rage Puts Alleged Goodfellas Mobster Vincent Asaro Behind Bars At Last, At The Age of 82

variety

John Williams To Compose Han Solo Theme For John Powell’s Solo Score

tronc Loses NY Daily News Editor-Publisher With No Replacement On Horizon

LA Times

“A powerful person has been accused of misconduct at a rate of nearly once every 20 hours since Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment and assault on October 5. Here’s where 100 accusations currently stand.”

wsj

Top Netflix Execs Among Beneficiaries Of New Tax Law; Sarandos Salary Upped To $12 Million From $1 Million

Marvel Sets Rigid Thematic And Political Strictures For A Forthcoming Make-Your-Own Comics App, Including, But Not Limited To, Farts, Death, Aliens, “Social Issues”

“Comparing the performance of The Last Jedi to the pre–Force Awakens franchise is meaningless thanks to the changes in moviegoing over the years, but comparing it to The Force Awakens also sets an impossibly high bar: Sequels in general don’t do as well as their predecessors, a phenomenon that’s become even more pronounced in the era of cinematic universes, and expecting The Last Jedi to match either the gross or the hold of The Force Awakens seems unrealistic.”

“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” 

“Hedge funds killed the newspaper industry, not the web”

R. Emmett Sweeney On Frank Borzage’s Delirious Romance, History is Made At Night, A Gem For New Year’s Eve

“Netflix does not issue viewership data and did not comment on the estimates.”
Apples to Bitcoin: “While It Is A Parlour Game,” Nielsen Asserts That “Bright,” If Theatrically Released And Viewers Had Left Home And Bought Individual Tickets, Would Have Grossed $98.2 Million

indie wire

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DAN TALBOT, 90, MIND BEHIND NEW YORKER FILMS, LINCOLN PLAZA CINEMAS

“My septuagenarian Jewish parents live in Monmouth County, New Jersey, yet still refer to this strange subterranean spot as ‘our theater.’ It’s for neighborhood people who want to take a walk and get a little cultcha.”

NY Times

1981: ”When I look at movies I don’t think of the box office,” Mr. Talbot says. ”If it appeals to my esthetic sense, if it has some artistic foundation, I take a chance with it. I looked at Maria Braun after distributing 14 other Fassbinder pictures. The timing was right. People were ready for him.” The Marriage of Maria Braun enjoyed a 52-week run at the Cinema Studio and grossed over $2.5 million nationally. Mr. Talbot says, ”I chose The Left-Handed Woman because of Peter Handke’s captivating directorial style, moreso than the acting. It failed. It was an inaccessible film.” So, even after more than 20 years in the business, Mr. Talbot lays no claim to being able to gauge audience tastes.”

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

variety

China Court Seizes Assets of LeEco Topper Jia Yueting, Investor In Le Vision Pictures

“Stop reading what Facebook tells you to read”

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

ROSE MARIE WAS 94

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

hollywoodreporter.com

The Film Focus Of Key Contenders at Awards Time, Including Dunkirk, The Post, Call Me By Your Name, The Florida Project

“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

AMC Theaters Take Down Customer Advisory For Last of the Jedi “Artistic Effect” That Was At Only Two Locations

Ten Texas Moments From 2017 Movies

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?

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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