MCN Curated Headlines Archive for December, 2018

Anschutz Ashcans Conservative Weekly Standard After Nine Years

NY Times

Nitehawk Prospect Park Opens In Brooklyn In Place Of The Storied Pavilion Fleapit

“Televisions are a style abomination. As countless magazine articles, design blogs and hotel rooms illustrate, no interior designer ever knows what to do with the omnipresent black box. My own solution would be to hurl it into the garden and never allow another to cross my threshold.”

Emily Blunt On Mary Poppins As Superhero

Natalie Portman On The Choices of Vox Lux

“During the years Nadine Labaki spent doing research to make Capernaum, visiting children’s detention centers and juvenile courts in Lebanon to understand a generation that had fallen through the cracks of the system, she always would bring the interviews around to one question in particular. ‘I used to ask them at the end of the conversation, “Are you happy to be alive?”‘”

“Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. is a game-changer. It’s American anime, essentially, an Akira moment for our film art that will sooner or later be identified as the definitive event where everything tilted forward. I hope sooner. More than beautiful, it’s breathtaking. More than kinetic, it’s alive. And more than just alive, it’s seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future. It’s a manifestation of optimism. There’s hope in Spider-Verse, along with a reminder that more people in these United States believe in progressive values than don’t, no matter who the President is. Empathy and compassion hold the majority; there’s a recognition we are essentially the same–the same desires, the same disappointments.”

“Sixteen Into the Spider-Verse Easter Eggs and References You Might Have Missed”

Thirty-Five Filmmakers On The Toughest Effect They Ever Pulled Off

“I love it when people notice, that’s very meaningful. Sometimes depression comes when you’ve killed yourself for something, and it seems like it didn’t matter. But every now and then something clicks, and Boyhood happens, or First Reformed connects. When it happens, it makes you a believer.”
Ethan Hawke On A Good Year

Post-Les Moonves, CBS Grants Producers Guild $2 Million To “Combat Sexual Harassment in the Entertainment Industry”

NY Times

“The settlement of these claims reflects the projected amount that Ms. Dushku would have received for the balance of her contract as a series regular, and was determined in a mutually agreed upon mediation process at the time.”
CBS Paid Eliza Dushku $9.5 Million To Settle “Bull” Contract After Co-Star Michael Weatherly Joked About Threesomes And Rape

“China will permit as many as 41 imported films this year, as many as seven more than the target of 34.”

Sondra Locke Was 74

“‘They don’t care’: Facebook fact-checking in disarray as journalists push to cut ties; Journalists paid to help fix Facebook’s fake news problem say they have lost trust in the platform“

Baltimore Collective Opens Beyond Video, A Nonprofit Film Rental Shop

hollywoodreporter.com

“I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to play with Nicolas Cage. We had long conversations where we formulated the progression of his character from scene to scene to scene. He starts off as this sort of normal, if a little bit tortured man. And then after what happens to Mandy, he kind of becomes like an animal creature. And in the third act he takes the character and he modifies it into a sort of a demigod of wrath who is enacting revenge on the mortal plain, like a sort of golem, or something, a golem.  So, yeah, I found him to be an incredibly thoughtful and methodical actor and he’s capable of going through these more expressionistic realms.”
Panos Cosmatos On Making Mandy

Sundance Institute Announces 2019 January Screenwriters Lab Fellows

“Rain Man at 30: damaging stereotype or ‘the best thing that happened to autism’?”

hollywoodreporter.com

Cybill Shepherd Says Her CBS Series Was Cancelled After She Refused Now-Disgraced Les Moonves’ Sexual Advances

variety

FX Calculates Sum Of 2018 Scripted, Original Series: 495 Total, 160 Streaming; 146 Broadcast; 144 Basic Cable; 45 Pay Cable

Natalie Portman Slams Israel’s Nation-State Law

“It has been an honor to work with such smart, dedicated colleagues, and to publish the most exciting, vital voices of our time.”
Tin House Magazine Ends After 20 Years 

hollywoodreporter.com

“There’s a lot of validation — and not just as a filmmaker but in our stories. It’s just crazy how difficult it is to validate your own story. We see that going on now with what we saw with Kavanaugh’s hearings. It’s such a hurdle to validate abuse and trauma, especially when no one talks about it, there’s a power structure. It feels good to have people really respond to my story, to my mom’s story, to Keire, and to Zack and Nina’s stories.”
Minding the Gap‘s Bing Liu On Identifying Abuse In Our Culture

MoviePass’ Parent Company’s CEO Ted Farnsworth’s $7.24 Million in Stock Could Now Be Worth As Much As $50

Poet-Novelist-Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti Still Speaking Out At 99

“Companies are interested in female filmmakers but they still think action scenes are for male directors. The first thing I asked them was maybe if they could change the special effects because there’s so many laser lights. I find them horrible. Also the soundtrack of Marvel films is quite horrendous. Maybe we disagree on this but it’s really hard to watch a Marvel film. It’s painful to the ears to watch Marvel films.”
Indian Newspaper That Once (Long Ago) Employed Rudyard Kipling And Winston Churchill Claims Lucrecia Martel Told Them

NY Times

Movies Starring Women Earn More Than Male-Led Films, CAA Study Finds

daily beast

Taylor Swift Used Facial-Recognition Tech to Scan for Stalkers at Concert

“I don’t like the rules. I used to work in puppet theater. And in puppet theater, it’s free. So it was strange, when I entered film school, and they said, “There are rules, you have to do things like that and like that and like that.” I said to them, “No! In puppet theater I can do anything; I can try to do the impossible. I was trained to make the impossible possible. Working with Jean-Luc, I rediscovered the freedom that there is in puppet theater. And I said, “Yeah, why not?””
Godard Cinematographer Fabrice Aragno

Academy Awards Go To Nine Scientific and Technical Achievements

National Film Registry Will Keep An Eye On Jurassic Park and The Shining, As Well As Days Of Wine And Roses, Eve’s Bayou, Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People, Hearts and Minds  Lady From Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, One-Eyed Jacks, Pickup on South Street, Smoke Signals and 1898’s Something Good – Negro Kiss

ny post

McClatchy Still Hopes to Close Tribune Publishing Deal

“The next thing that had to go was the endless plot description that pads most film reviews. In the 21st century, film plots are known before the movies arrive in theaters. There are few points a critic has to make that need much plot description, but critic-journalists still put everything on the record like they are preserving it for a future in which we have no way to know what happened in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”
Introducing A. S. Hamrah’s Essential “The Earth Dies Streaming”

“Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the old San Francisco, his new novel, and his first 100 years”

variety

The Screen Actors Guild Nominates…
With – “Snubs And Surprises”

“Rewriting Trauma: The Business of Storytelling in The Age Of The Algorithm,” by James Schamus

When London swallows up a city there’s a voiceover: “Children may be temporarily separated from their parents.” 
“It was added about six weeks ago. We were doing the sound mixing, the very last thing that you do, really, once you’ve shot the film. There were all the horrible stories on the news about the children being separated at the border, which we couldn’t believe. We got someone to record it and we threw it into the soundtrack. Just We were feeling very, very angry, and we wanted to make a comment on it.”
Peter Jackson Talks Mortal Engines

hollywoodreporter.com

“You never know when you’re going to give up. But I’m enjoying it.”
Clint Eastwood on Making The Mule At 88

Stephen Schaefer Sees Themes Themes

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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