MCN Curated Headlines Archive for March, 2018

After Violating 2011 FTC Privacy Agreement, Facebook Could Face Trillions In Fines

With Los Angeles Times Sale, Boss Ferro Quits

variety

Director And Cinematographer Michael Gershman, 73, Camera Assistant To Vilmos Zsigmond On The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, Blow Out, The Rose; Directed Ten Episodes of “Buffy”
With – Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Tribute

China Director Feng Xiaogang’s Youth Best at Asian Film Awards

Time’s Up Asks Governor Cuomo Why NY DA Cy Vance Jr Repeatedly Gives Pass To Harvey Weinstein And Other Such Men

thestar.com

Canadian Comedy Legend Mike MacDonald Was 63

“I’m sure he would prefer it if I were dead. He’s a sociopath. I am not afraid — but I should be. The people I find worse than him are his lawyers. The way they are acting has been disgusting. The people around him, that have supported him in his attempt to dominate and abuse women, are monsters, just as much as he is. There is no rehabilitation for that type of soul. They just need to fall off the planet. He doesn’t believe he has done anything wrong.”
Rose McGowan

Tech_ColorTimingOrson Welles’ The Other Side Of The Wind Is Picture-Locked; Color Correction And Sound Underway

YouTube Kids Reportedly Still Shovels Conspiracy Videos To Children, Including Ones That Claim We Are Ruled By Lizard People And, Of Course, That The Moon Landing Was A Hoax

“Although we shot on an iPhone, we still had the typical things that you would have on a movie – tripods, pan-heads, a handheld stabilisation device – but smaller versions. We used really small slates too! We had three phones. That turned out to be more than enough: we never had technical problems; we never lost any footage or had any dropouts – they all worked perfectly. The fanciest piece of gear was the drone for the shots of the hospital.”
Soderbergh On Shooting A Pulpy Quickie On iPhones

NY Times

Old Oscar Tea Leaves Still Being Brewed At NYT: Choose Best Picture Oscar, Or Choose Cash, That’s The Binary Of The Day

“Angelina Jolie Makes a Surprising Beauty Confession” (Sharpies.)

LA Times

“‘Dear LA,’ the billboard reads, ‘Which way to WeHo? Asking for a friend.’ It’s signed, ‘Love, Simon.’ To most, the ad for Fox’s film might not make any sense. That is until they discover that Love, Simon is a coming-out story. Then the unique cheekiness of the billboard becomes all the more intriguing, especially because a film in the studio system has never centered on a gay teen in this way.”

NY Times

“Vague and unsubstantiated accusations in the press.”
“An in-depth investigation… uncovered credible and corroborated evidence of sexual misconduct during his time at the Met, as well as earlier. It is shocking that Mr. Levine has refused to accept responsibility for his actions, and has today instead decided to lash out at the Met with a suit riddled with untruths.”
James Levine Sues Met Opera, Denies Stories Of Decades of Alleged Open Sexual Predation Of Students And Proteges

hollywoodreporter.com

Lucas Hedges to Star in Shia LaBeouf Film Based on Life of Shia LaBeouf

NY Times

“The Future of Time Warner, Coming Soon to a Court Near You“

“The only thing that we did not do well is get women paid the same money as men are paid for the same job, that’s the one big failure of our time.”
More Terry Gilliam

“The deluxe hotel suite – the location for the controversial sex scene, which turned out to be way more radical for its disregard for the linearity of time than it was for any sexual content. I stand in the gilded bathroom with its infinity mirrors looking forwards and backwards through time. Lives, fictional and real, blur. Each reflection an isolated possible moment, a kaleidoscopic stuttering of events.”

Irvine Welsh Says It’s Harder To Be A Bastard When You Get Older

Irish Times Sees Headless Women on Movie Posters

China Internet Dubs Timothée Chalamet “Sweet Tea” 

“‘We’re making this,’ Berlanti remembered Fox executives said to him. ‘The world needs this. We don’t need a star. This is what’s happening.'”

“It’s You’ve Got Mail for the Grindr era, but sweeter, with better playlists… It’s a perfectly fine movie. And because it’s a wide release produced by a major Hollywood studio—the first gay teen romance of its kind—it is a very, very big deal. Can’t we just leave it at that? I don’t especially want to revisit the parts of the movie that made me want to shrivel up into a skeptically uptight ball of ‘Darn.’ I don’t want to have to write the paragraph about how anyone who knows me knows how I’m apt to feel about a gay movie opening with the line ‘I’m just like you’—meaning you, straight people—in 2018. For everyone who cannot predict: This is the kind of thing that makes me liable to have an aneurysm.”

“James Levine and Charles Dutoit, two of classical music’s most lavishly praised maestros, and Richard Meier, the wizard of white-steel-and-clear-glass buildings, have all ended their careers in ignominy. In each case, a revered elder appears to have leveraged his talents into mystique, and mystique into power, which he then abused in the usual tawdry ways. Sexual coercion happens in every field and at every level of society, and yet Levine, Dutoit, and Meier could indulge themselves as they wished because they spent decades nestled in a comfortable bubble of fame, their nastiness buffered by rarefied reputations.”

 

 “’We’re Not Like Other Places’: How Janet Pierson Transformed SXSW”

Jedi “Religion” Tax-Exempt. And Now?

nymag

“As soon as they were alone in his office, he reached out, two-handed, and groped her breasts. She told him to stop, but he put a hand on her left thigh, moved it up under her skirt, and asked for a kiss. When she refused, he told her he was a very powerful man, boasting that he could make her $2 million a year. The meeting ended with Weinstein telling his receptionist to get Battilana a ticket to that night’s performance of ‘Finding Neverland ‘on Broadway.”
“The NYPD’s top sex-crimes investigator tried to bust Harvey Weinstein three years ago. Then DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. stepped in.”

“We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens. We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior.”
Facebook Bars Trump-Affiliated Political Research Firms SCL And Cambridge Analytica 

Everlasting Blog Monster Kottke Turns 20
And – Last Blog Standing, “Last Guy Dancing”: How Jason Kottke Thinks About Kottke.org At 20

wsj

“They’re deep cuts for a business that isn’t in trouble. It’s taking money out of the digital business, which is roughly running at break-even, to shore up the declining ratings at Univision.”
Univision, Leveraged By Massive Hedge Fund Debt, Faces Slash Of One-Third The Budgets Of Ambitious Fusion Media Group, Which Owns Fusiob Network, Deadspin, Jezebel, The Root, Splinter,  Gizmodo, And Has Stakes In The Onion And The AV Club

“The stereotype of African Americans comes from American movies, so the depiction of Eric Killmonger is pretty close to the stereotype Egyptians have of African Americans, as violent and thuggish.”
“Black Panther and the Anti-Black Racism of Egyptians,” By Mona Eltahawy

Disinterment Demonstrated Dali Stache Intact

Matt Dillon, Kyle MacLachlan, Linda Cardellini, Kathrine Narducci And Tom Hardy Join Josh Trank Written-and-Directed Al Capone Biopic

“Of course, the working class is not such a sexy and commercial subject, I understand from the popcorn audience,” Kaurismäki says drily. “But I couldn’t write dialogue for upper-class people because I wouldn’t know what they say. I don’t know if they talk at all. Maybe they are just shopping. And selling and buying stocks. Stocks and stockings. I find rich people boring.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“A truly inclusive industry would give a pass to DuVernay as it has to so many white male directors (not that her career is now in any sort of trouble). Diversity that demands all people from marginalized groups never make a mistake is no diversity at all. It’s also annoying that advocates of diversity are forced once again into a defensive posture, making a case for one of our own, when the problem has always been the scarcity of opportunities, not the merits of inclusion.”

“Terry Crews Is Not Going Down Without A Fight”

“Few outfits became imprinted in the public consciousness as powerfully as Givenchy’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s ensemble. Perhaps its success is in its slyly provocative allure — the thrill of an evening gown worn in the day, and a black one at that. In the early 1960s, in a world only warming to the sexual revolution (and when most sartorial fantasies were still wrapped in nuptial lace), Givenchy’s take on womanhood is the antithesis of virginal white. It’s refined — but also risqué.”

thestar.com

“My fondest childhood memories growing up as one of eight Howell siblings in Scarborough are of piling into my dad’s huge green Rambler station wagon and seeing whatever was playing at the Northeast Drive-In, Toronto’s first, which used to sprawl near the corner of Sheppard and Victoria Park Aves. The family went often — it was something five bucks a carload — and westerns and war movies were by far my dad’s favourites…”
Peter Howell Sources His Movie Bug

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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