MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2018

“We were left with a smeary self-portrait of an asshole being an asshole. Most of the set looked like what professional wrestling fans call a “heel turn“—as if he’d made a business decision to un-ironically embrace the persona that disappointed fans had ascribed to him, and peddle it to Fox News Channel/Breitbart types who embrace the idea that calling people racist turns them into racists.”
Matt Zoller Seitz On Louis Székely

“Four reasons 2018 was a bad year for the Khans of Bollywood: Why Aamir, Shah Rukh, Salman and Saif need to change tack”

“Robert De Niro is, famously, a man of few words. In the past two years, those words have included “punk,” “dog,” “pig,” “con,” “bullshit artist,” “mutt,” “idiot,” “national disaster,” “embarrassment,” “disgrace,” “fool,” “bozo,” and “Jerkoff-in-Chief”—all directed at Donald Trump. At seventy-five, De Niro has turned political pundit, often in terms that you’d expect to find in a Martin Scorsese movie. In return, Trump has called him ‘a very Low IQ individual.'”

Canada Film’s 2018 Local Heroes

Chicago’s 2018 Film 50

“I like specialist and second-hand record shops, but these weren’t the sorts of shops I went to as a kid. I spent vast amounts of my time rifling through record browsers in Debenhams, Boots and WHSmiths, and going to high-street shops that sold a broad selection of records for a wide variety of tastes — including, of course, whatever was in the charts. These are the shops I feel most nostalgic about, a nostalgia heightened by the fact that there are hardly any left.”

Bilge Ebiri Cites His Ten Favorite 2018 Film Scores

NY Times

“What I know from a life of watching and reviewing movies is that outrage is tedious, and exhausting. Sometimes it is just easier to go with the flow, though much depends on what’s happening onscreen and off. Sometimes, I don’t want to let a movie’s banal, casual sexism ruin my good time. I make expedient and strategic bargains with myself, glossing over some of the sexism and ignoring things that bother me (or trying to). I decide that the absence of female characters is acceptable or not too bad and maybe narratively justifiable. I want to keep grooving on the virtuosity of the directing, keep loving the (male) characters, the camerawork, gripping story and mysterious light.”
Manohla Dargis

“They have an uncomplicated mandate to entertain, and that that has led to charges of them being like a Walmart because they have so much of everything, and they don’t have a particular line or objective or goal in the way that FX does or HBO. But I don’t understand this talk of talent drains. Talent will go wherever talent is given a home and it’s not about the money. I think we can all agree that whether it’s a little podcast or a blockbuster television show, spending money isn’t the secret to success.”
“The Crown”‘s Peter Morgan

hollywoodreporter.com

“It’s Time to Retire the Phrase ‘Diversity Is Good for Business'”

The Great Ringo Lam Was 63

“The psychology behind Hallmark Christmas movies”

NY Times

Taffy Brodesser-Akner On Margot Kidder

“Had the visceral and vital ‘America to Me’ aired a generation or two ago, it might have been venerated as an event miniseries on a par with ‘Roots’ or Ken Burns’s ‘The Civil War,’ the kind of once-in-an-era insight into American identity that mandates family viewing and gets recorded by teachers and shown at next-day assemblies. But in 2018, when online word-of-mouth can outmuscle corporate marketing and millions of people are desperate to know where our country is headed, this epic on the intersecting lives of select students at a wildly diverse, and divided, suburban Chicago high school couldn’t compete with sensationalized long-form nonfiction.”

Filmmaker’s Top 20 Posts Of 2018

LA Times

Jen Yamato On The Visual Panache of Into The Spider-Verse

Israeli Author Amos Oz Was 79

Kendra James On Eight Seasons Of “Bewitched” Fashion

Sandro Has Again Been Out Malkoviching

“Die Hard isn’t just a Christmas movie — it’s the best ever, according to Twentieth-Century Fox”

“Christmas movies are fucked up. Case in point: Last year, about this time, Die Hard played on several screens in several rooms at a house party thrown by a thirtyish couple I know. As the seasonal call of ‘Yippee ki-yay, mother—-er!’ rang through the halls, the hostess passed by and said: ‘Home Alone‘s more violent.’ She poured wine, and added:  ‘That’s my husband’s Christmas jam.'”

Ben Schwartz on “Bad Day at Black Rock: When the Gorillas Take Over”

hollywoodreporter.com

Record $15 Million in China Presales for Long Day’s Journey Into Night

“Why Pacific Rim: Uprising Is the Most Important Film of 2018: It Revealed We Are Now in the Chinese Moment of Capitalism,” Writes Charles Mudede

Art of the Title’s Top 10 Title Sequences of 2018

The Original “Flash Mob” Ending Of A Simple Favor

NY Times

“When we decided to strip out motion blur, the people at Imageworks said, ‘That’s not going to work, you won’t be happy.’ We said, ‘No, that’s the goal: Make us unhappy. Then figure out a new way to make us happy.’ We’re creating incredible images in this movie and we want to see them as clearly as possible, so let’s not soften them.”

“It can just get really boring watching heterosexual people, whether you’re gay or not,” Weisz says. “It’s boring, particularly when the woman is the object of desire rather than the agent of desire. That’s what we’ve been spoon-fed — that the woman is the object of the male subjectivity, of his desire and passion. Oh, I’m bored of that. Really bored.”
Rachel Weisz

“To create narratives that do not acknowledge the inescapable fact that difference is what makes queer people and the artifacts, art and traditions they have what they are, is to either buy into a paradigm of straightness and a normativity in art and society that already has existed, or to force artists to create an entirely new paradigm of how to describe difference apart from trauma. I don’t know if that can be done.”
Kyle Turner

“Facebook. Sigh. Criticize Facebook? Sure. Leave? Why?” by Jeff Jarvis 

hollywoodreporter.com

“Very important for me was to have a black family at the center of a horror film,” Peele said. “But it’s also important to note, unlike Get Out, Us is not about race. It is instead about something that I feel has become an undeniable truth. And that is the simple fact that we are our own worst enemies.”

LA Times

Screenwriter Christina Hodson on The Road From Bumblebee To Harley Quinn

The Latest Work From Tarell Alvin McCraney

“What is Bob Dylan’s Malibu holiday display trying to tell us?”

R.I.P., Jorge Grau

hollywoodreporter.com

Spacey Charged In Nantucket Felony Sexual Assault

Director’s Commentary To The “Let Me Be Frank” Video

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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