MCN Curated Headlines Archive for November, 2018

Chris Lee Erects Spoilers Bared Penises Brandished In Awards-Contending Motion Pictures; Imagine The Jolly Office Banter

The Complete Paul Schrader BAFTA Screenwriter Lecture 

variety

“Environmental Horror” Takes Place Of “Moby Dick” On Lynne Ramsay Slate

Tavi Gavinson’s Essential, 5,800-Word Closing Editor’s Letter: “22-year-old me has enough”
“One woman venture capitalist told us, after hearing my very nervous pitch, “I hate to say this because I hate that it’s true, but men who come in here pitch the company they’re going to build, while women pitch the company they’ve already built.” The men could sound delusional, but they could also sound visionary; women felt the need to show their work, to prove themselves.”

Terrence_malick

Happy 75th, Mother… Father… Terrence Malick

hollywoodreporter.com

Nick Nolte Joins Star Wars Teevee Series

“The MPAA’s possible sanctions — revoking The House That Jack Built’s ‘R’ rating, halting the rating process for other IFC films, or banning the distributor from the ratings process for 90 days — represent a kind of nuclear option for the trade association. It almost never imposes such punishments on movie companies for violating what is essentially a voluntary agreement to have the association rate their films. So if IFC is facing those consequences, the MPAA must be seriously concerned.”

 

NYFCC: Roma: Film, Director, Cinematography
Ethan Hawke, First Reformed
Regina Hall, Support The Girls
Supporting: Richard E. Grant, Regina King
Best Nonfiction Film: Minding the Gap
Best Foreign-Language: Cold War
Animated: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Mic Cut

“Bertolucci was an extremely curious man, sweet and sincere, cultured and unpredictable, and, I repeat, frighteningly intelligent. His was a free and razor-sharp intelligence, like that of a great jazz musician. He knew how to make people feel welcome, even the silly and the indolent. He would not fight them, but would study them. After a night out surrounded by fools he would sometimes phone me and, with a liberating laugh, tell me about their idiocy. But not in a way that was spiteful. Instead, he would describe how they might bend to his eventual, future, entirely artistic advantage.”
Sorrentino On Bertolucci

hollywoodreporter.com

Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia “can take command; she doesn’t take any shit instead of just a beautiful woman that schlepped along to be saved.”
Gloria Katz, American Graffiti Co-Writer,  Star Wars Script Doctor, Was 76

“I’ve often tried to put into words what I felt after that initial viewing, and I’ve come up with some different formulations over the years. But recently it occurred to me that the answer is quite simple: The Conformist was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. It was beautiful not just in the sense that it was gorgeous, though it certainly was gorgeous. No, this was a different, more fearsome beauty — one whose surfaces only hinted at something far more complex and enthralling.”
Bilge Ebiri On The Conformist

ny post

NYPost Editorial Board Comes To David Edelstein’s Cause

Salon

O’Hehir on Edelstein

hollywoodreporter.com

Schwartz, Bocco, Vanco Take Reins At IFC Films On Sehring Departure

deadline

“I put it in the movie,” Adam McKay said. “My cameo is my actual heart attack. There is a scene when Cheney is getting all the unfiltered intelligence, and they’re like, ‘sir, this isn’t verified.’ He’s like, ‘no, give it all to me,’ and his paranoia is going through the roof. There’s a shot, it almost looks like an octopus, people don’t quite know what it is. That’s my heart attack! We were going to put a shot in there of a heart, anyway. This is crazy, and it also looks really creepy and kind of scary, like the black and white of it. At first my editor was like, ‘this is a little morbid. I’m not sure I want to do that.’ I said, ‘it’s a personal movie and I put everything into it.’”

“How in 2008 could a serious critic write about film without deferring to “the entertainment industry’s terms,” especially in a form—the short capsule review—so closely associated with the “consumer-guide approach”? Hamrah’s answer was to find a literary voice so coiled, combative, and ironic that no marketing department could find its way into or out of it. Plot description and potted career summaries were off-limits, he explains, as was anything “that could be extracted and used for publicity.” His prose would survive by buzzing and nipping around the film industry’s centers of power.”

deadline

Adult Swim Launches Blade Runner 2049 Anime 

Sundance Anoints 112 Features

“NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ has parted ways with contributor David Edelstein after the film critic made a joke about a scene in Last Tango in Paris on his Facebook page following Monday’s death of Bernardo Bertolucci.”

NY Times

“I’m no novice to the award-season beat, and that informs my answer to the second question, about the Oscars’ relevance. As your new Carpetbagger, I’m not going to spend these column inches pondering whether the Oscars continue to matter. I know they do, and from the start of my tenure here, I’m going to tell you why.”

 

hollywoodreporter.com

Warner Signs Ava DuVernay To Multiple-Year Cross-Platform Overall Deal In “High Eight-Figure Range”

“A surprising dose of children in violent jeopardy, which is always a welcome addition to any film.”
QT’s 350-Word Review Of Henry Hathaway’s Shoot Out May Or May Not Have Had An Editor (Hi, Peter “Bogdonovich”!)

IsaBéla

The Mysterious Old Board Of Review And Its Mystery Crew Say:
Green Book
Best Director: Bradley Cooper
Best Actor: Viggo Mortensen
Best Actress: Lady Gaga
Best Supporting Actor: Sam Elliott
Best Supporting Actress: Regina King
Best Original Screenplay: Paul Schrader
Best Adapted Screenplay: Barry Jenkins
Best Animated: Incredibles 2
Best Directorial Debut: Bo Burnham
Best Foreign Language: Cold War
Best Documentary: RBG
Best Ensemble: Crazy Rich Asians
William K. Everson Film History Award: The Other Side of the Wind and They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead

Why Pencils Are Yellow

Jonathan Lethem Asks “Does The Magnificent Ambersons Exist?”

GOTHAMS
The Rider
Doc: Hale County This Morning This Evening
Toni Colette; Ethan Hawke
Screenplay: Paul Schrader
“This is really just another award for Elsie Fisher.”
Breakthrough Director: Bo Burnham
Breakthrough Actor: Elsie Fisher
Ensemble Special Prize: The Favourite
Audience Award: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

“Bertolucci was not a director who responded to the ‘Me Too’ movement with strategic silence or contrition or self-questioning, still less an emollient attempt to reconcile the liberal intentions of his work with interpretations of sexism and arrogance in his career. He clearly felt that as an old soldier of the movie business, he didn’t have to explain himself. Yet none of this expunges the memory of his brilliance and his audacious creativity.”

Gurus o’ Gold Tap Best Picture, Director, Cinematographer

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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