MCN Curated Headlines Archive for March, 2018

“Before A Wrinkle In Time came out, you would be hard pushed to find anybody to describe what it was about. All the press centred on how great it was to have a female director of colour, to have a female protagonist of colour and how DuVernay “wasn’t just casting actresses” but “leaders – icons”. I’m not suggesting any of this is bad, by the way. This is obviously long overdue. But why does everyone have to bang on about it so much?”
Romesh Ranganathan On “Diversity”

“There was a single named complaint regarding an allegation dating back more than a decade ago in which I am alleged to have to attempted to touch a woman inappropriately while we were both riding in a transport van on a movie set. That did not happen.”
Academy Prez John Bailey Defends Against Accusation

variety

“The movie was finished, we reviewed it with J.J. and his team. We all decided there were things about it that made us have a pause about its commercial playability in the traditional matter. There was an ability for us to be fiscally prudent and monetize. For fans of Cloverfield, the fact is many, many more millions of people saw the movie. It’s a positive on every level.”

NY Times

“Red Sparrow has some of the most violent and extreme sexual messiness that you could imagine. O.K., it was made a year and a half ago. Would it be made today in the same way? Probably so. So I don’t think it affects content. I mean, if you take the effect of pornography on young people today. Pornography until recently was fairly staid. Today, online, pornography is so extreme and so varied, with such expressions of fetishism and other things that boys are seeing. The idea of normal sex and normal romance has to be adversely affected by that.”
Maureen Dowd Makes Mega With Barry Diller

“I enjoyed not having movies on my brain 24/7. I haven’t looked at anything movie-related since that notice and it felt fucking great. No Twitter, no RSS, no movies whatsoever.”
Critics Roundup Website Quits

Cynthia Nixon On Why Politics Now

“The Iowa teacher who found a priceless film collection in a farmhouse basement”

Naomi Fry Pictures “The Great Sadness of Ben Affleck”

“The end of the auteur?: Auteur theory says a director’s vision is present in every frame. What happens if they turn out to be a liability?”
So Theorizes Ryan Gilbey

Sampling The Criterion Akira Kurosawa Archive

NY Times

“I know that politics isn’t brain surgery (though Ben Carson clearly knows that even better). I also know that much of what’s going on with Winfrey and Nixon — and what went on with Trump — is about the lazy deference to celebrities in these fame-mad times.”
NYTimes’ Frank Bruni Tells NY Gubernatorial Candidate Cynthia Nixon She Should Mind Her Knitting

“Free speech in Turkey dealt fresh blow with sale of independent media outlets: Businessman with ties to President Erdoğan in talks to buy Hürriyet owner Doğan Media”

indie wire

“Blame it on the internet, as tweets break instantly after the daily morning press screenings, and online reviews follow moments later. Now, the responses will be staggered, and either tied up with the crowd responses from the premieres or arriving in their aftermath. This marks a radical departure for the Cannes press corps, who have gotten used to their daily routine.”

“Imagination cannot be categorized”
Andrea Picard. New Artistic Director of Cinéma du Réel

Marisa Mazria-Katz And Mairav Zonszein on “Israel’s War on Culture”

LA Times

$10 Million Lawsuit Filed Against Russell Simmons

“’I am comatose with boredom about myself,’ Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber announces.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“The Netflix people loved the red carpet and would like to be present with other films. But they understand that the intransigence of their own model is now the opposite of ours.”
Cannes Bigs Nix Netflix Competish

hollywoodreporter.com

Tavis Smiley “also admits to ‘probably’ telling sex jokes in the workplace and that he ‘may’ have sent pornographic images to subordinates”: PBS

ny post

“What’s Facebook?”
Elon Musk Deletes Facebook For Tesla and SpaceX

Turkey Moves to Control All Content

“Olcay said the hand gesture targeted an audience member in the front row after they made a negative comment.”
“Turkish singer, actress Zuhal Olcay sentenced to 10 months in prison for ‘insulting Erdoğan’”

“The borrowing is done artfully and meticulously. Anderson being who he is, every aesthetic detail is carefully considered. Not a grain of rice is out of place, not a taiko drumbeat is out of sync, not a kimono sash ripples without his say-so. There are affectionate references to Japanese cinema greats and homages to other Japanese arts like haiku and kabuki. But none of it really means anything in Isle of Dogs. All of these stylistic flourishes are just that – flourishes, and nothing more. If there’s some reason Isle of Dogs had to be set in Japan, if there’s something specifically Japanese about the story Anderson is trying to tell or the message it’s trying to send, I don’t know what it is.”
Angie Han Says No

hollywoodreporter.com

Cannes Bans Red Carpet Selfies, Eliminates Early Morning Press Screenings Of Competition Entries To Preempt Pre-Preem Critiques  

“Amal and I are 100% behind you and will be marching in DC on the 24th, but we both feel very strongly that this is your march. Your moment. Young people are taking it to the adults and that has been your most effective tool. The fact that no adults will speak on the stage in DC is a powerful message to the world that if we can’t do something about gun violence then you will. The issue is going to be this, anyone you ask would feel proud to be interviewed by you but it’s so much more effective if it’s young people.”

Cosby Defense Calls for Judge to Step Down Because His Wife Works With Assault Victims

LA Times

Anton Yelchin Parents And Fiat Chrysler Make Confidential Settlement

hollywoodreporter.com

“It’s disappointing to see Boyega, so impressive in Detroit, not taking advantage of his recently acquired star power to look for more challenging material.”
Pacific Rim Uprising Prompts Odd Critiques

“Here’s the terrifying part, for the competition, and potentially the industry as a whole: Black Panther is doing this at the expense of other would-be event movies. Black Panther has pulled these kinds of legs and this level of domestic box office by beating movies that presumed themselves to be tentpoles. When Titanic did its thing twenty years ago, the ‘victims’ were mostly smaller-scale studio programmers that weren’t do-or-die releases for their respective studios.”
A Controversial Notion Is Floated

“There’s a part of me that thinks and believes every single person is great, amazing, vital, and likable. But I’m torn between wanting to help each and every person in every possible way. Torn between that and wanting to erase 6 billion of them, or even more… I like Donald Trump a lot and am extremely proud he is the American President. And I’m sorry if that offends you. The reasons why I do things are difficult for me to understand and difficult for me to explain. This has been uncomfortable and embarrassing and I do not feel anything productive will come of it.”
A Lengthy Open Letter From Vincent Gallo

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Outspoken At Ninety-Nine

Matt Patches Banters With Bob Balaban

“Watching overhead shots of a chef slicing and plating assorted sea creatures, it hit me: I think he’s turning Japanese, I think he’s turning Japanese, I really think so!”
David Edelstein, Flying Editor-Free on Isle Of Dogs

“I am a vocal opponent of Mr. Tarantino’s film. He has yet to reach out to me to talk to me about anything to do with my sister or her depiction in his film. Why? Because I believe it’s negative. If his depiction was positive, he’d have a dialogue with me. Mr. Tarantino even demanded a release date based on the ‘anniversary’ of my sister’s devastating murder, Aug. 9, 2019. How is this not vulgar? Or sick? THIS IS NOT A CELEBRATION.”
QT Manson Family Murders Movie Faces Opposition From Sharon Tate’s Sister

“First Reformed,  pulls together threads of what I’ve been thinking and doing for almost 50 years. The first serious writing I did on film was about spiritual cinema, ‘Transcendental Style.’ I never thought that I would make that type of film. I was interested in action, empathy, sexuality, violence: these aren’t in the transcendental tool kit. The first script I wrote was Taxi Driver. Now, forty-five years later, I made a film that combines the thinking in that book with the narrative drive of Taxi Driver. So I have my first philosophical book and my first screenplay combined in this film. That has been intimidating because it’s difficult to think of what to do next. I hope that First Reformed is not my last film, but if it is, it’s a very good last film.”

Jason Bailey On Making Sense Of Friedkin’s Cruising

DigitalFirst Quickly Makes Money Moves At Boston Herald

“Opening Arguments Begin In AT&T And Time Warner Merger Case”

LA Times

“The ever-contentious subject of cultural appropriation has haunted Isle of Dogs since before its recent premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Anderson won a directing prize. Bluntly put, does this white American filmmaker’s highly selective, idiosyncratic rendering of an East Asian society constitute a sincere act of homage, or a clueless failure of sensitivity?”

Wes Anderson Among The Stop-Motion Sushi Chefs

“Here’s the irony of it all. I don’t need an Emmy to tell me to go to work. I’ve been working. I’ve been writing, I’ve been developing, I’ve been putting pieces together and I’m bullets, you know what I’m saying?”
Vanity Fair Cover-Stories Lena Waithe

Spielberg: “Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie. You might deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar. I don’t believe that films that are just given token qualifications, in a couple of theaters for less than a week, should qualify for the Academy Award nominations.”

variety

Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios Acquires Weather Channel

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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