MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2017

hollywoodreporter.com

“Can’t you see, the Jews are behind everything — the banks, the media, even _____!”
Target Withdraws Jewish-Themed Self-Described “Despicable And Awkward” “Cards Against Humanity” Deck

“One freshly minted hero, a mechanic named Rose Tico, blows into the movie with a fan’s enthusiasm, a can-do spirit, and bracing undercurrents of proletarian rebellion. Just as Rey’s internal confusions pour through the urgent expressions on Ridley’s open face, Hamill’s grizzled looks and scowling mien convey a self-immolating intensity.”
Michael Sragow On The Last Jedi

“My company that I’m sitting in right now, which primarily is advertising, is 50 years old this year. Fuck me. I’m like an old rock ‘n’ roll band. If I knew I was going to last this long, I would have taken better care of myself. I really loved The Counselor, which should have been fucking huge! With that cast, we should have had a $50-million weekend. After the marketing and advertising on that, I was ready to kill somebody. You don’t preview films like that. You keep them in a box. Are you fucking kidding me? Whoever wrote the slogan for Nike, ‘Just Do It’ is a fucking genius.”
Could It Be… Sir Ridley?

NY Times

Taffy Brodesser-Akner Looks Into The Creative Soul of Mary Tyler Moore

“In the same vein as All the President’s Men, this is an exemplary film that blends facts, suspense, and entertainment value into not only the best film of the year, but one of the best films ever made.”
Rex Reed Lives, What Else But. For Another Year-End List, The Rex Reed Life

NY Times

“The blistering growth has prompted new criticism from theaters and studio owners — namely that MoviePass will never be able to make money by charging $9.95 a month when a single ticket can cost almost twice that amount. They say that will cause MoviePass to either raise prices or go out of business, disappointing audiences and ultimately hurting the fragile multiplex business.”

“Saoirse Ronan is eyeing the lobster salad at Spago and has a difficult decision to make regarding cherry tomatoes. She doesn’t like them, but she also doesn’t like asking for special accommodations. ‘It’s so Irish,’ Ronan explains. ‘In Ireland you feel so guilty for requesting something to not be in the dish. No one would ever do it. But I like that they do it over here. I like the gutsiness!’ After deliberation she decides to go full American and ask the waiter whether or not it might be possible to hold the cherry tomatoes. ‘Absolutely,’ he says without pause. .America,’ she sighs, smiling.”

“Our social media channels, website and monthly newspaper each demand a lot of care that is best done by critics and scene watchers nestled deep in our community. We’ve had a nice run with a staff driven model and needed to finally say goodbye to an era.”
Atlanta Former Alt-Weekly Creative Loafing Fires Staff And Promises Fantastic Freelance Product

Another Restaurateur Steps Aside Over Decades Of Sexual Harassment 

“I love male coming-of-age stories, and I have nothing against them, but I’m always interested to see what the female version of that is. What is Boyhood for a girl? What is The 400 Blows for a girl? I felt that I had not seen that as much as I wanted to, so I wanted to make something that was about not only a young woman, but about a mother and a family and a place.”
“Greta Gerwig On Why We Need Women in Film”

“I don’t like you either! You just watch yourself! We’re wanted men. I have the death sentence on twelve systems.”
Actor Alfie Curtis, 77, Threatened Luke Skywalker At Star Wars Cantina

“If issuing cantankerous statements about relatively small slights is a hidden step in 12-step programs, my friends in recovery have not heard of it. But silence does not seem to be an option for Weinstein. And someday soon, he will no longer be in hiding, and will likely try to re-enter the world (assuming he doesn’t go to prison). He might do a high-profile interview to tell his side of the story. He may even try to make movies and television again. He will be followed by the paparazzi at every turn, and in ubiquity, will become a specter that haunts his accusers.”
Kate Aurthur Says “Harvey Weinstein Will Not Go Quietly”

“i don’t appreciate being taken out of context to make me seem super sexist”
Vanity Fair Writer Displeased With Being Called “Sexist” For Viral Video Directed Against Hillary Clinton

“I’m going on the record here to express my concerns about this whole process. Nothing about this deal feels right to me.’ But it was too late. The money had changed hands.”
“Inside Harvey Weinstein’s Other Nightmare”: Dealings With AmFAR AIDS Charity To Bankroll B’wy “Finding  Neverland”

“The moments we see in the photographs feel like sacred snapshots of lives lived in defiance of authority, while at the same time Larry Clark and his boys are seamlessly absorbed into the gendered order of things. They objectify women, they hurt themselves, they play together. These images are confessional, and reveal a moral paradox. It is difficult for the audience to accept the possibility that boys can be simultaneously victims and perpetrators, products and consumers, powerful and powerless, tragic and heroic. This paradox is the core of audience discomfort about Clark.”

Kristin Thompson on The Ten Best Films Of 1927

“Music has gotten very girly. There are some good things about that, but hip-hop is the only place for young male anger at the moment — and that’s not good. When I was 16, I had a lot of anger in me. You need to find a place for it and for guitars, whether it is with a drum machine — I don’t care. The moment something becomes preserved, it is fucking over. You might as well put it in formaldehyde. In the end, what is rock & roll? Rage is at the heart of it.”
At Least Bono’s Latest Breathless Interview Isn’t Installed On Your Phone Without Your Permission

“I recently asked Mark Bridges, the Oscar-winning costume designer who created all the clothing in Phantom Thread, how much he had looked to the life of Charles James when creating the garments for the House of Woodcock. We were eating French onion soup at a brasserie in Soho. Bridges was dressed in a natty gray suit and a vintage silk tie printed with red and yellow hexagons.”

NY Times

“George Wayne has a theory about why his celebrity column has been a hit at Vanity Fair for more than two decades: sex. ‘When you read my interviews, I want you to have a good laugh and I want you to learn something you didn’t know about these people before’  he said as he dipped his spoon into a bowl of butternut squash soup over lunch in Chelsea recently. ‘So, of course, I am always going to ask about sex. That’s my No. 1.'”

NY Times

“It is like giving up your Nobel, rejecting your Oscar, pushing back on your Pulitzer: Jérôme Brochot, a renowned and refined chef, decided to turn in his Michelin star. He is renouncing the uniquely French distinction that separates his restaurant from thousands of others, the lifetime dream of hundreds. But Mr. Brochot’s decision was not a rash one, born of arrogance, ingratitude or spite. Rather, it was for a prosaic, but still important, reason: he could no longer afford it.”

William W. Graham, 69, Son Of Katharine Graham, By Gunshot

Remembering Radical Film and Media Scholar Chuck Kleinhans, Co-founding Co-editor of 43-Year-Old JUMP CUT

NY Times

Tibetan Filmmaker Escapes To U. S. After “Arduous” Trek From China

Male Supporters Of Golden Globes Who Customarily Wear Black Also Expected To Wear Black

Steve Jobs’ Doomed 35-Year-Old Apple Lisa OS Will Be Free To Download

“Dalian Wanda’s Mr Wang and his fellow countrymen are in retreat from Hollywood, part of a Chinese crackdown on capital flight. Paramount’s $1 billion three-year film financing deal with Huahua Media has been scrapped, which the Viacom-owned studio said was due to ‘recent changes to Chinese foreign investment policies.’ Wanda’s planned billion-dollar purchase of Dick Clark Productions, the company that produces the Golden Globes awards show, was also pulled. Mr Wang, meanwhile, has not been seen in Hollywood for several months: in the summer Wanda denied rumors that he had been forbidden from leaving China.”

NY Times

“In my experience, and the experiences that I’ve seen of the people around me, there is a never-ending shift of power in a relationship: Who’s driving? And who’s criticizing the driver? That’s kind of a natural thing that we all deal with if we decide to share this life with somebody. In the movie, we just crank it all up to 10 as a way to highlight and underline it.”
Paul Thomas Anderson

“I rediscovered painting, because I was at college with Hockney, Kitaj, all those fucks. I mean, it was a serious college! I would watch Hockney fuckin’ paint. So I’ve been painting a lot.  Painting is like writing a book. Are you writing anything, a book or anything like that? Do you go over what you did yesterday like, ‘Fuck, that’s good’? Painting is worse because you go over what you did and go, ‘Fuck,’ so you adjust it. The worst thing is when you had it really good and you fuck with it, and you fuckin’ fuck it up.”
Sir Ridley On A Practiced Process

Cahiers du cinéma L.A. Correspondent Bill Krohn On Meeting Jerry Lewis

Academy President John Bailey On A Trek To CamerImage 2017, Showing Mishima, And Getting Lost In Permutations Of Philip Glass’ Score

variety

Composer Dominic Frontiere Was 86; Work Includes Themes For “The Outer Limits,” “The Flying Nun,” “The Rat Patrol”; Freebie and the Bean, The Color Of Night, The Stunt Man

“You plan, you know exactly what it will look like, and I think it helps me enormously that I still do something as basic as storyboard my own stuff. It forces me, on paper, to make decisions. My boards are now insured for $6 million! I literally draw wide shot, medium cross, long shot, in detail. I’ll get a great frame, snap my fingers, and move on to the next one. You’re filming on paper before you even begin, so when I walk on set, I know exactly what I’m going to do. That gives me a confidence with the actors, and the actors smell it. I do two a year. We did Alien: Covenant, which is a very complicated film, in 73 days. That would normally be 130 days. What the fuck are you doing, you know?”
Sir Ridley Kicks Out The Jams

“Have any of those 90’s/00’s Internet utopians — Kevin Kelly, Chris Anderson, 0r earlier ones like Stewart Brand — have ANY of them written a ‘hey sorry I was wrong the place turned out to be a terrordome’ mea culpa essay yet? Any of them?”

Danny Peary Goes Almost 15,000 Words In Conversation With Joseph McBride On A Long, Winding Career And His “Two Cheers for Hollywood”

Vietnam Adds 10,000 To “Cyber Force” Stamping Out “Wrong Ideas” On Internet

“Those who have peddled hysteria and misinformation over the last three weeks suggesting for example that the internet as we know it is about to end, that democracy is threatened, that free speech and expression online are at risk. And when folks wake up and the internet is the same and we have returned to the free market framework that has governed the internet for most of its existence, hopefully [sic] we can return to a more rational discourse about the future of this terrific online platform that has delivered so much digital opportunity to Americans and to people around the world.”
FCC Commission Ajit Pai Says He Still Believes This

All 29 Films Of Marilyn Monroe, Vitally Ranked By Angelica Jade Bastién

Acquisitive China Conglom Fosun, With Stakes In Cirque du Soleil, Club Med, May Offload Robinov Studio 8 Inc.

2017 FYC (For Your Consideration) Screenplays Now Up To 36 Titles

NY Times

“The character of Woodcock comes straight from the book of fashion fables. Behold his custom-made George Cleverley shoes; his purple papal knee socks, Anderson & Sheppard suits and carefully coifed mane of salt-and-pepper hair; his refusal to tolerate anyone else’s opinions on fabric but his own; and his collapse after the heightened emotional and inventive stakes of a collection! And then there are obsessive eating habits: No loud chewing during breakfast — it interrupts the sketching process; no butter on the asparagus — shock, horror.”

NY Times

Hiep Thi Le, 46, Vietnamese Refugee And Star Of Heaven And Earth

ew

Olivia Munn On Sexual Assault “Zero-Tolerance Policy”

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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

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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