MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2018

Kate Aurthur On The Divergent Disaster

Three-Hundred-Forty-Seven Features Are Best-Picture Eligible

“After decades of defining the internet, porn is on the verge of taboo again, pushed out of the public eye and segregated into dark corners of the internet. It’s a shift that feels dramatic and sudden. The truth is that these changes are part of a slowly building backlash that’s gained ground for years.”

Twenty 2018 Screenplays in PDF Format

Storied Costume Designer Sandy Powell on Dressing The Favourite

Berlinale Slots First Twenty-Two Films

“How did a man who could make entire generations of women swoon and drop ­everything to rush into his arms on screen every time he threw them wide open, end up in a string of movies with no heart?”
Could Shah Rukh Khan’s Most Expensive Film Ever Save His Career?

“Actresses are being lauded for pushing their supposed undesirability to the extreme, and it’s redefining how we see women.”
Soraya Roberts On “Hollywood and the New Female Grotesque”

“New goals needed to reach gender parity in film industry, say European experts”

daily beast

“Former extremists say they were sucked in by propaganda as teenagers.”
“How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the Far Right”

Penny Marshall Was 75

Charter to pay $174 million in fraud settlement, largest ever to be paid to consumers by an internet service provider

Academy Shortlists Documentary Feature, Documentary Short Subject, Foreign Language Film, Makeup and Hairstyling, Music (Original Score), Music (Original Song), Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film, Visual Effects

NY Times

“We have determined that there are grounds to terminate for cause, including his willful and material misfeasance, violation of company policies and breach of his employment contract, as well as his willful failure to cooperate fully with the company’s investigation,”
CBS Les Moonves Fired For Cause; $120 Million Unobtanium Parachute Is No More

“None of these studios was perfect.  Every one of them had weekends they’d love to forget. But the point is, there’s no studio at this moment that seems completely snakebit – that they just can’t open a movie for anything. As one who’s worked for snakebit companies in the past (lots of them!), I know what a drain that is on the psychology, and how it can become a self-fulfilling curse and the field is surrendered to second-guessers and backstabbers.  Here’s hoping everyone goes into 2019 feeling the wind in their sails.”

NY Times

“We’re trying to build a new studio that is exciting for artists. As we do that, it’s important to be open to criticism. When a great artist says, ‘Hey, this doesn’t work,’ then we’d better try to fix it. For some of our filmmakers, that means having a theatrical release and contending for awards. In a world where consumer choice is driving everything — how we shop, how we order groceries, how we are entertained — we’re trying to get to a place where consumers have theatrical viewing as a choice. But we also think it is critical that, if you don’t have the means or the access or the time to go to a theater, you are still able to see movies without a long wait.”
Brooks Barnes Measures Scott Stuber, Netflix’s Movie Chief

hollywoodreporter.com

“How the hell did this two-time Yale dropout make the jump from non-entity to string-pulling power behind the throne? It’s a challenge that Vice seriously embraces over the course of two hours but does so in the humorous spirit of Swift and Voltaire from one era, and perhaps the likes of Terry Southern or Gore Vidal from a more recent one; the surface treatment can seem prankish and outrageous, but beneath the foolishness lies grave consequence. This is, in other words, a dead-serious comedy, one which grapples with history and why things went the way they did, with a hungry conviction.”

Yael Stone Allegations On Geoffrey Rush
And – Geoffrey Rush’s Response

hollywoodreporter.com

“Engelhardt unspools a Zelig-esque series of adventures: partying with Iman, jet-setting with Adnan Khashoggi, dining with Stephen King, working as a personal assistant to Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire convicted for soliciting an underage girl. Following her time with Allen, she became a platonic muse to Federico Fellini during the auteur’s late-life journeys in Rome and Tulum, Mexico, then spent years as a hostess in the executive dining room at Paramount before landing her current gig, working as an assistant for Bob Evans.”
Christina Engelhardt Says She Was Manhattan Muse

“A metaphor may be a place for cows to graze, but this is bullshit.”
Follow The Path That Brought A. O. Scott To This Passage On Sam Lipsyte’s Latest Novel

NY Times

“I was like a dog going down a sand dune with his legs up. For the time that it lasts, I am savoring every moment of it because I know that soon, somebody else will be on a shortlist.”
Kyle Buchanan’s Day Out With Richard E. Grant On The Awards Circuit

Bruce LaBruce on Christmas Classic The Silent Partner

https://twitter.com/josesolismayen/status/1074746488247513094?s=21

Ingmar Bergman’s Daughter’s New Yorker Fiction Is About A Nameless Swedish Film Director Father Growing Old

NY Times

The Best Weekend Profile, Marcela Valdes On Alfonso Cuarón, Is Daunting Precision

hollywoodreporter.com

Eighteen Advocacy Groups To Share CBS’ $20 Million Post-Les Moonves Fund

An Amazingly Detailed Spec Sheet To Optimize Home Viewing Settings For Roma

Direct link.

Adrian Martin on Authorship of The Other Side of the Wind

“I want to thank my producers because they didn’t want to make a film for commercial purposes, but to tell a story. Thank god this kind of cinema is being made.”
European Film Awards: Cold War; Director, Cold War; Screenplay,Cold War; Actress, Joanna Kulig,Cold War; Actor, Marcello Fonte, Dogman;Cold War, European Comedy; Doc, Bergman: A Year in a Life

“I’m not as fast as I used to be, but I don’t give up.”
David Lynch Designs Latest Issue Of Zoetrope

hollywoodreporter.com

COOGLER A Prophet. It’s a reminder of what a movie can be. And I watch this Brooklyn gentleman’s Do the Right Thing quite a bit, too.
LANTHIMOS I find myself always watching Miklos Jancso’s The Red and the White.
LEE The films I watch are going to inform the film I’m about to do. Research. For Inside Man, we watched Dog Day Afternoon, a lot of heist films. And for BlacKkKlansman, we shot on film. I wanted it to look like what I saw growing up. We looked at The French Connection, those films of the 1970s.
THR Roundtables Directors

“I don’t think the genius of Shakespeare or Chekhov is that they were above their own time. The more acutely a playwright drills down into the centre of their own time, somehow the plays then seem able to re-exist or be reinvented for other times. But I don’t want to put Jacob Rees-Mogg jokes in.”
“Shopping and —-ing” Playwright Mark Ravenhill

“To the best of my knowledge, Clint Eastwood has never taken part in a drug deal, or ever committed any offense at all, besides talking to the empty chair and praising Donald Trump. Nonetheless, The Mule plays less like the clever action film it is than like a personal work—a movie of self-retrospection with a resonant, romantic air of regret. Even if Eastwood, who is 88, goes on to make many more films, this one feels like the closing of a very long and complex chapter in his cinematic life, and perhaps the opening of a new one.”
Richard Brody

“Von Trier has tapped into the fact that what makes serial murder a valid focus for a film is precisely the unsettling extremity and incomprehensible character of it.”
Elena Lazic Shelters The House That Jack Built

hollywoodreporter.com

“Harvey Weinstein Accusers Want to Ban Him From Disclosing Their Emails to the Media”

“I’m not going to take questions. This isn’t a press conference.”

NY Times

“Something feels off with von Trier’s sense of artistry now. Something feels stuck, like his head’s wound up lodged in his rear, which brings the movie closer to The Human Centipede than I would have thought. But this isn’t cinematic horror. It’s proctology.”
Wesley Morris Steps In To Whack Lars von Trier

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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