MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2018

NY Times

“Hulu Puts Up A Fight”

German Director Christian Petzold On “A Citizen Without Civilization”

Pico Iyer Revels In Satyajit Ray’s The Hero

Indexing Richard Ayoade

variety

Alec Baldwin Brings Podcast To ABC Teevee, Debuting Post-Oscar With Jerry Seinfeld 

Lewis Gilbert, 97, Directed Alfie, Educating Rita, You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, Shirley Valentine

Points Made In Twitter Thread About Faraci “Buddhist” Film Criticism Site

“The New York Times is in favor of capitalism because it has been the greatest engine of, it’s been the greatest anti-poverty program and engine of progress that we’ve seen.”

LA Times

Disney To Stop Filming in Georgia If Anti-Gay Bill Becomes Law

hollywoodreporter.com

“What A Wrinkle in Time will offer young girls is an opportunity to finally see herself celebrated onscreen, an opportunity to feel normalized, an opportunity to have and feel a sense of community. This is why representation matters and, most importantly, why audiences should continue to support stories featuring these black girl nerds, and demand that they become an impactful part of the pop culture spectrum.”

“Comcast attempting to gatecrash Murdoch takeover of Sky, submitting rival offer to UK broadcaster shareholders of $30.76 Billion”

“Of course, the obvious failures of the Berlinale have their roots in the ossified structure of Germany’s cultural bureaucracy, which also accounts for the dismal state of the country’s filmmaking industry, wherein lifelong—or otherwise contractually inflated—jobs are rewarded through nepotism, rather than for talent and vision… exposing the provincialism that is an enduring trait of the Prussian character.”

NY Times

“The important thing in the case of [WeinsteinCo] is that bankruptcy allows assets to be sold free of liability.”

GQ Staff Writer On How His Brendan Fraser Profile Happened; Fraser Made Groping Allegation Just Before Story Was About To Print 

variety

“Seacrest stylist was let go two weeks after she reported harassment allegations to Human Resources”

hollywoodreporter.com

Two Histories Of the Two-Minute, Twenty-Three-Second 2017 Best Picture Award Fracas
“I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a misprint.’ And then, ‘I shouldn’t foul up the show just because someone made a little error.'”

“This needs to be fixed. When Jordan Horowitz realized he was smack-dab in the middle of one of the biggest blunders in the history of live television, those five little words popped into his head. ‘It felt like there was just chaos swirling. And that’s when my producer brain took over.'”

NY Times

“As the competition for attention was rewarding ever more exploitation, Gawker was leading the way. The site routinely published thinly sourced, nasty articles that attacked and mocked people. Most of the victims didn’t fight back; Gawker could unleash both negative stories and well-funded lawyers.”
Ever-Clever NYT Editorial Page Gives Billionaire Facebook Board Member Peter Thiel Acreage To Spiel A Version of His Destruction Of Gawker

daily beast

“Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—who secretly schemed to annihilate Gawker Media, a goal he achieved in August 2016, and to force its founder, Nick Denton, into personal bankruptcy—may yet have cause to regret that he has reveled so publicly in his vengeful triumph.”

“I’ve lost the capacity to gauge the opprobrium—what’s irrational versus what’s a reasonable amount of Internet outrage these days. Look, we’re recruiting different types of writers than we have traditionally, and I’ll make some mistakes. It’s just gonna happen… Sure, Erik Prince wrote in our pages. You know who else has written in our pages? Bernie Sanders, and not just once.””
James Bennet, Editorial Page Editor And Future Contender For Times’ Top Newsroom Job

2016: “Mark Zuckerberg voted to keep Peter Thiel on Facebook’s board of directors, despite Thiel’s role in bankrupting Gawker.”

“Facebook’s biggest challenges are reinventing its core product and repairing its reputation.”
That Unsurpassed Deadpan “Humour” For Which The Economist Is Best Known

variety

E! Stylist Details Ryan Seacrest Harassment Claims

hollywoodreporter.com

“We sit on top of a broken system. I’m an anomaly. Ryan Coogler is an anomaly, Barry Jenkins is an anomaly, Dee Rees is an anomaly. When you can name us all on two hands, that’s not change.”

wsj

“This is an extremely unfortunate outcome for our employees, our creditors and any victims [but] the Board has no choice but to pursue its only viable option to maximize the Company’s remaining value: an orderly bankruptcy process.”
WeinsteinCo Bankrupt; Only Offer Was Illusory

LA Times

Inside Harvey Weinstein’s Posh Scottsdale Spa Life

NY Times

China Abolishes Term Limits; Xi Jinping Regime Expected To Enforce Harsher Limits On Investment, Data, Artistic Expression, Etc.

variety

“With Whedon’s exit, the door is now open for a female director to take on the job of forging a ‘Batgirl’ for our time. And let’s be explicit about why that would — and hopefully [sic] will — be a fantastic thing, quite apart from the obvious and essential moral issue of equality in hiring in Hollywood. Superhero movies are fantasies, but the best of them have found a way to overlap the real world. Like Batman, she’s a night stalker with no superpowers, emerging from an impulse of dark nobility. So for this movie to work, she needs to be not just a bat-eared icon, but a character with layers, a mistress of the night who can speak in a larger-than-life way to the experience of women.”
Owen Gleiberman Peter-Barts For A Bit With His Extended “Batgirl” Hiring Advice

hollywoodreporter.com

“Black Panther dropped a narrow 47% in its second weekend. That’s one of the smallest declines ever for a superhero title, as well as one of the smallest for a film launching north of $200 million.”

variety

AMC, Color of Change Partner to Give Wrinkle in Time Tickets to Underprivileged Children

“Independent filmmakers irate after Amazon slashes royalties by 60% on its self-distribution platform”

Groundhog Day Plagiarism Allegations, Again, Again

“Sridevi was the nation’s lover, friend, kid sister and then in the 21st century – when she extended her celebrity yet further as a TV sitcom player and reality show judge – she became the nation’s mum, though a mum with an undimmed romantic life.”

“Guangxi Normal University Press published the complete lyrics of Bob Dylan (1961–2012) in eight volumes, which include both the original English and the Chinese translations. In distinctive Chinese fashion, the marketing of these books involved a meme-able, if easily misunderstood, quirk: each volume came packaged in potato chip wrappers.”

“Can a craft cocktail and lobster roll with your movie help defeat Netflix? That’s partly the idea behind iPic Entertainment, the Boca Raton-based luxury movie theater chain that recently launched an IPO with a plan to expand beyond its 16 U.S. locations, all of which offer gourmet food and cushy leather seats.”

Bollywood Superstar Sridevi Was 54

hollywoodreporter.com

“We wanted to award prizes not just for what cinema can do and where it is but where it could go in the future.”
Tom Tykwer On His Berlin Jury’s Selections

Charlie Phillips Sees A Boom in Doc Shorts

“I’ve got a reputation for being difficult – it’s bullshit.”
A Delightful Interview With The Great Lynne Ramsay

Pixar Mainstay Bud Luckey, 83, Co-created “Sesame Street” Shorts, Toy Story Concept Artist; Voice Of Agent Dicker in Incredibles, Chuckles in Toy Story 3, Eeyore in Winnie The Pooh

The Alligator King: Directed, Animated and Sung by Bud Luckey

variety

Academy Expresses “Solidarity” With Last Men in Aleppo Producer

deadline

“We definitely thought that this was going to be the one that killed us. This seemed like such an unlikely thing. It’s interesting because if you look at any of the movies that are nominees this year, until they succeed, they don’t look like obvious films to make, necessarily. Once you know that they’ve succeeded at the box office or critically, you sort of forget how risky they were, potentially, in the first place.”
Emma Thomas: Producer

Nate N’ Al Delicatessen May Get Beverly Hills Landmark Designation

Sacramento Lady Bird House Bombarded by Enthusiasts

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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