MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2018

”You are my destiny, my eternity, my life.”
Claude Lanzmann Sells 112 Simone de Beauvoir Love Letters To Yale

“To the hungry boy.”
“Phantom Thread Is The Best Food Movie In Ages”

South African Jazz Pioneer And Apartheid Foe Hugh Masekela Was 78

Garrison Keillor Accuser Describes “Dozens of Sexually Inappropriate Incidents”

Teletubby Tinky Winky Was 52

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“Wiseman is not young either — Wiseman who does documentaries. He did the one about the public library in New York. He’s old also. Other people are old. I filmed Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese director. He was 102 when I filmed him. So let’s forget about age. We are old but still alive.”

hollywoodreporter.com

Will Netflix Take Latest Cloverfield Product Off Paramount Shelves?

Alex Garland Taken To Task For Not Using Information Not Contained In The Novel Of Annihilation That He Adapted 

NY Times

Ursula Le Guin Was 87

NY Times

Times Comes To Bury Historic, Now-Shuttered Sunshine Cinema

More Nominee Reactions
“The nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me by Your Name is a thrill to me.  In my mind, good writing for films has always seemed to be an elevated art, generally beyond me except in limited ways.  So as a film director, to receive the honor of this nomination now from fellow writers is a very moving thing for me.” James Ivory, Adapted Screenplay

“It’s an honor to receive Oscar recognition from the Academy for the score to Three Billboards.  I’ve had the pleasure of scoring all of Martin McDonagh’s features, and Fran McDormand and I began our film careers together almost 35 years ago with Blood Simple, so I feel I’m sharing this honor with an extended family.” Carter Burwell

“It is a great honor and joy to be here, today with a picture that remains faithful to all my convictions and the images I have loved since infancy.  I want to thank the Academy and my professional colleagues for their kind disposition towards The Shape of Water. I share these nominations with all the young filmmakers in Mexico and Latin America who put their hopes in our craft and the intimate stories of their imagination.” Guillermo del Toro

“JR and I have made our film Faces Places to be seen, shared and loved.
We felt good to have been chosen in the medium-short list of 15 documentaries of some quality…
But, being chosen in the short-short list of 5 films makes us feel good-good!
And it also means that we are now in competition with 4 other good-good films.
The competition is not that funny, but it’s the way it goes. Whatever happens, we will enjoy the party. For French artists it is an honour anyway.” – Agnès Varda and JR

 “While Logan was always going to be perceived as the last chapter in a successful “super hero” franchise, and a final performance in this role by my brilliant friend Hugh Jackman, Scott Frank, Michael Green and I always viewed the task of writing it as, first and foremost, an opportunity to make a dramatic character piece, one that just so happened to feature beloved comic book characters. We are so grateful for the nomination.” James Mangold, Scott Frank and Michael Green

Jaume Collet-Serra On His Dance With Liam Neeson

wsj

Jumanji Trois Plotted For Christmas 2019

“Take Woodcock and Alma’s first date, when he begins to fit her for a new dress. The resulting gown is a signature piece she wears again later; its shade of puce is part of the designer’s distinctive trademark palette. Rich colours and surface embellishments of beading and antique lace are the fictional house codes and much of that came from Day-Lewis himself.”

“I don’t know what he would have done if he didn’t find someone like himself. She had that spirit, that electricity that was comparable to his. She was wild in a way that he wanted to be wild. She would go off with her girlfriends in the summer and hitchhike all over the place, have adventures. She was kind of an outsider and from the wrong side of the tracks, and he was certainly attracted to that. In Hibbing, she was as bohemian as anybody in Greenwich Village.”
Echo Helstrom Casey, 75, Bob Dylan’s High School Girlfriend, The Original “Girl From the North Country”

The Academy’s Complete 90th Academy Awards Nominee List, In Fancy Form With Big Pictures And Links And Such

Robert DeNiro Looks To Build Resort On Hurricane-Devastated Barbuda

“‘You used to be a comedian,’ the boy said.”
Bill Cosby Returns To Stand-Up

variety

Radio Personality Don Imus Quitting At 77

Oscar Nominee Supplied Reactions

Nat’l Hispanic Media Coalition Targets Oscar

“In the old days, there were movies – the ‘Carry On’ comedies, for example – which always had a man leering after women. And the women always outwitted him – he was a fool. We weren’t afraid of him and we weren’t afraid to slap him down. What makes it different is when the man has economic power, as Harvey Weinstein has. f you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent, and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.”
Elder Author Germaine Greer Criticizes Younger Women

Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Get Out, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, The Post, Shape Of Water, Three Billboards
DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan, Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig, Paul Thomas Anderson, Guillermo del Toro
ACTRESS: Sally Hawkins, Frances McDormand, Margot Robbie, Saoirse Ronan, Meryl Streep
ACTOR: Timothée Chalamet, Daniel Day-Lewis, Daniel Kaluuya, Gary Oldman, Denzel Washington

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Mary J. Blige; Allison Janney, Lesley Manville, Laurie Metcalf, Octavia Spencer
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Willem Dafoe, Woody Harrelson, Richard Jenkins, Christopher Plummer, Sam Rockwell
ORIGINAL: Big Sick, Get Out, Lady Bird, Shape Of Water, Three Billboards
ADAPTED: Call Me By Your Name, Disaster Artist, Logan, Molly’s Game, Mudbound
DOCUMENTARY:  Abacus, Faces Places, Icarus, Last Man in Aleppo, Strong Island
ANIMATED: Boss Baby, Bread Winner, Coco, Ferdinand, Loving Vincent

VFX: Blade Runner 2049, Guardians 2, Kong: Skull Island, Star Wars, War For The Planet
COSTUME: Beauty & the Beast, Darkest Hour, Phantom Thread, Shape of Water, Victoria & Abdul
FOREIGN LANGUAGE: Fantastic Woman, The Insult, Loveless, On Body and Soul, The Square

Michael Phillips On Steve James’ “Deep And Wide” America To Me At Sundance

variety

“The critics are pretty disconnected from the mass appeal. Most of the critical reviews you read are English language, just U.S. Critics are an important part of the artistic process but are pretty disconnected from the commercial prospects of a film. If people are watching this movie and loving it, that’s the measurement of success. And if the critics get behind it or don’t, that’s a select group of social media influencers talking to a specific audience.”
Netflix Defensive On Critics Judging “Bright”

Netflix Market Value Tops $100 Billion

“Rogers Media abandons $100-million joint venture with Vice Canada; Viceland stops broadcasting March 31”

deadline

Jason Blum To Aspiring Producers At Sundance: “Don’t Worry About Your Movie Getting A Theatrical Release” 

variety

“If Facebook wants to recognize ‘trusted’ publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee,” Just Like A Cable Operator, Writes Rupert Murdoch 

And The SAG Awards…
Three Billboards; Frances McDormand; Gary Oldman; Allison Janney, Sam Rockwell; Morgan Freeman Achievement


Last Day Of The Lincoln Plaza Cinemas

LA Times

“The tide has turned. It is seismic.”
SAG Awards Has Only Female Presenters

NY Times

“This is no longer Mr. Weinstein’s freewheeling festival, the one he blasted into the public consciousness with eye-popping deals to bring male-gaze entries like Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs to theaters. Sundance is now a prime showcase for women — films directed, produced and written by women; films with female protagonists; special events focused on female empowerment. And most of the distribution deals involve TV sets.”
“Sundance, Steeped in Weinstein Mystique, Enters a New Era”: A Brooks Barnes Explainer For Sundance 2018

“There is something about all these podcasts, the kind of thing I think is, ‘They don’t even know that I started it! They don’t even know where this came from!'”
Storytelling Savant Joe Frank’s Last Interview

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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