MCN Curated Headlines Archive for April, 2018

$31 Billion Comcast Bid For U.K.-Based Sky Complicates Murdoch Moves

“From Seattle to Luxembourg: How Contrived Financial Arrangements And Tax Schemes Are at the Heart of Amazon’s Success”

“I’m not sure anybody has ever seen DETOUR looking so good, and it’s still one of the most revered and beloved noir classics.”

“When Thor: Ragnarok came out, Feige remembers reading articles declaring ‘”Marvel is committing to a surrealist, silly tone.” I thought, “We have Black Panther coming out in three months! They don’t even know what’s coming. We’re always thinking ahead. Just when people think they can pin us down, we go somewhere else and that’s going to happen again after Infinity War in the build-up to the next Avengers film. And we had meetings earlier today about 2024 and 2025.”

daily beast

“I Warned You About Bill Cosby in 2007,” By Mark Ebner

variety

“Qualifying songs may not be performed live solely for HFPA members… Non-English-language dubbed versions of motion pictures originally filmed in English may not be entered for the best motion picture – foreign language award.”
Golden Globes Adds Some Rules

hollywoodreporter.com

What Comes After John Lasseter’s “Sabbatical”?

Grauniad Infographs “Bezos’ Empire: How Amazon Became the World’s Biggest Retailer”

hollywoodreporter.com

“Netflix is burning cash to create and acquire content, so it is borrowing another $1.5 billion by way of issuing high-yield (“junk”) bonds, just five months since the worldwide leader in subscription streaming issued $1.6 billion in bonds. Netflix’s thirst for cash is directly related to content costs as the company ramps up production.” 

“Netflix is still coming to grips with the film industry’s secret weapon in its ongoing struggle for relevance: snobbery.”

For Oscar 91, Academy Issues More Rules Arcana

Cannes Classics 2018 Includes  Welles, Bergman Docs But No Netflix Product

“Facebook has told the Australian competition regulator that news makes up just five percent of the content shared on the platform, and the social media giant is helping journalism by providing a free global distribution service for publishers.”

indie wire

Critics Essay Their Fave Films On Filmmaking

LA Times

“I’d say I’m flexible within the world of art. I see art in everything.”
Grace Jones, Documented

NY Times

NYC’s Rue St. Denis, “Longtime Outfitter to TV and Chic People,” Is Closing

“Why isn’t there more critical consideration put into what the Avengers & Co. are wearing when they’re not avenging? Why is it that we’re so fixated on Jessica Jones’s denim, yet throughout the MCU’s decade-long box-office dominance, we’ve never once engaged in a serious takedown regarding how many of our heroes are committing the crime of dad jeans?”

Oscar 91: February 24, 2019

“If this came out two decades ago, it’d feel revolutionary. Back then, the bravest beauty standards comedy beauty hailed Jack Black for willingly bone Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit, who mostly just got to look like, well, Gwyneth Paltrow. We’re still not really ready for an ordinary woman to play an ordinary romantic comedy lead, which is why even Schumer’s attempts have come at the genre askew.”

“I thought it would be amazing, when Renee meets her boss, that she has revered from afar, for her to be in this puppy dress. Who could be intimidated by a woman in a puppy dress? Commenting on it would dilute the visual and subliminal impact. The audience has to make their own sense of it!”

variety

Philip D’Antoni, 89, Produced The French Connection, Bullitt

Bill Cosby Will Not Take The Stand

“Sinclair Broadcast Group executives reprimanded and ultimately ousted a local news reporter who refused to seed doubt about man-made climate change and “balance” her stories in a more conservative direction.Her account, detailed in company documents, offers a glimpse at the inner workings of a media giant that has sought to both ingratiate itself to Trump and cast itself as an apolitical local news provider — a position the documents undermine…”

Members of Legally Embattled Netanyahu Gov’t And Ruling Party Attack Natalie Portman, With One Member Who Is Expelled From Knesset Calling For Her Israeli Citizenship To Be Revoked

“Bringing inclusion riders from Hollywood to HMRC could put a rocket booster under the industry that pays lip service to diversity, but hasn’t always delivered. With Cannes just weeks away, it’s important we start an international conversation about the ways in which policy-makers can contribute to the urgent need for greater diversity.”
Future British Film Tax Subsidies Under Labour Would Require Diversity Hires

NY Times

“It wasn’t just the film world on which R. Lee Ermey’s character left an impression. The Gunny’s persona saturated military culture, especially that of the Marine Corps. The boys who wanted to serve believed that intimidation and humiliation were essential to the formation of their warrior selves. And drill instructors were happy to oblige.”
Anthony Swofford Suggests “Full Metal Jacket Seduced My Generation and Sent Us to War”

“Music is not a subsidiary, luxury, minor industry for the United Kingdom. We are the second biggest provider of music to the world after the US. Music is of enormous benefit to us as a country. That is a fact, not an opinion. Nor is it special pleading. For a modern, developed country to deliberately, willfully strangle one of its lead exporters [through “Brexit”] is bordering on insane. Indeed, the Creative Industries as a whole are the fastest-growing sector in our economy, worth last year just under £100 billion to our national coffers.”
And – The Creative Industries Federation On The Domino Effects Of “Brexit”

“For too long film critics have focused on the drugs actors and directors are taking, when they should be looking at the audience.”

“Useful amnesia is what enabled ABC to use the slogan ‘A Family That Looks Like Us’ when selling ‘Roseanne’ to advertisers, a dog whistle so strong that it might have brought Lassie back from the dead. have brought Lassie back from the dead.”
Emily Nussbaum on “Roseanne”

NY Times

“Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match”: A Look At Sri Lanka, Where Facebook Pits Muslim Against Buddhist In Murderous Fervor

“That’s a discussion that’s only being had in rich countries. The world is not just the United States and Europe. It’s a debate of spoiled children. I couldn’t care less about the Weinstein affair – it hasn’t changed anything for women. Egyptian or Yemeni women don’t give a damn about Weinstein. They have to deal with bombs, they don’t have running water in their kitchens, they get raped in buses.”
Claire Denis

“Children of Men, its budget was $80 million, maybe. It’s not cheap to make that film. You’re making a film really worth seeing on a big screen. But there’s no Children of Men cinematic universe. There’s no franchising. No tie-ins. No sequel possibilities. That’s a one-off and that’s the type of thing that won’t get made anymore. It’s also a kind of thing that’s tough to replicate for a streaming service. It’s the kind of movie we’re losing and that’s a bummer.”

“What if Disney bypassed the middlemen and put a highly anticipated film like Black Panther on its streaming service the same day it opened in theaters—or made it exclusive to subscribers? The lifetime value of subscriptions—which renew automatically until actively canceled—quickly becomes profound. If the debut encouraged just over 4 million people to sign up for an annual subscription to a $10-a-month Disneyflix product, Disney would earn a net revenue of nearly $500 million in just the first year. Black Panther was a massive hit as a theatrical release; it could have been even bigger had it been used to transform onetime moviegoers into multiyear Disneyflix subscribers.”
The Atlantic Expresses Concern

“Whore. Liar. Traitor. Opportunist. I have been called all of these things and more since I began to speak out about being raped in 1997, when I was 21, by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. For speaking my truth, I have been slut-shamed, victim-blamed, bullied, and threatened on a daily basis. And I am not alone.”
Asia Argento

Sight & Sound Signals Concern: “Atlantic drift: the great British filmmakers working in America”

Tom Carson On The Ever-Timely, Too-Too Timely Battle Of Algiers

hollywoodreporter.com

A Neverending Survey Of The Neverending Publicity Leading Up To Neverending Infinity War

“Ready Player One’s quixotic ideas about the future of online life aren’t unique, because nothing is unique to Ready Player One. It’s a haphazard mishmash of more meaningful and resonant pieces of culture, a callow pastiche that stands on the shoulders of more interesting works and demands the applause they’ve earned for itself. But Ready Player One is also worse than that…”

variety

Verne Troyer Was 49

hollywoodreporter.com

Samsung Wants Exhibitors To Replace Projection With Their $800,000 LED Television Screens That Would Require Yet Another Deliverable From Producers

TIME 100 Has Multiple Notable Filmmaker On Filmmaker Matches


Ed Note: Current MoviePass Subscribers Are Still Under The Structure For Which They Signed Up

variety

Writers Guild Seeks to Reshape Talent Agency Business in Proposed Deal To Stop Potential Conflicts of Interest

larsy“‘I understand Hitler. But I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end. He’s not what you would call a good guy but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit, yes. I’m not for the second world war, and I’m not against Jews… OK, I’m a Nazi.’ I remember the tirade well, because I asked the question that sparked it, about Von Trier’s German roots and his declared admiration for the ‘Nazi esthetic’ in a Danish Film Institute magazine. It’s not the sort of question the press asks at Cannes; the male auteur is expected to be treated with reverence, and actors remain on their celebrity pedestals.”
Kate Muir

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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