MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2019

Bryan Wendorf On Running The World’s Longest-Lasting Underground Film Festival

“‘Deadwood: The Movie’ feels like the best TV episode of 1997.”

https://twitter.com/girlsontopstees/status/1133420267278086144?s=21

https://twitter.com/donaldclarke63/status/1134220671393902593?s=21

Sphinx, The Property Used By John Boorman In Hope and Glory and Queen And Country, On A Private Island On The Thames Near Shepperton Lock, Surrey, Which Belonged To Admiral Lord Nelson, Yours For $2.83 Million

NY Times

“As I prepared for my role on the show, I got to know you a lot better. I read about your lifetime devotion to public service and your respect for the rule of law. I watched how you presided over the special counsel’s office apparently without leaks. And you never wavered, even in the face of regular vicious attacks from the president and his surrogates.”
Mr. De Niro Addresses Mr. Mueller

“This brisk two-hour feature is the culmination not only of ‘Deadwood’’s three seasons and the years it languished in seemingly permanent hiatus, but also a lifetime of turbulent, star-crossed brilliance.”

variety

“The audacity of the Fox Searchlight deal — $12 million for a three-hour Terrence Malick art film — is that it felt like more than just a deal. It felt like an act of faith, a vote for nothing less than the unique transcendent appeal of movies.”

“Who do I have to fuck and kill to get a good erotic thriller? One of the first publicity stills from ‘What/If,’ the Netflix series starring Renée Zellweger, had the actress in a white dress, legs crossed, smiling enigmatically, her surroundings moody. It was a transparent reference to Basic Instinct, the vulvular Verhoeven from 1992 that marked the climax of the golden age of erotic thrillers, particularly the titillating cross-examination in which femme fatale Sharon Stone sits in a white dress, no underwear, legs alternating between crossed and uncrossed, smiling enigmatically, her surroundings moody.”

“Somehow I became respectable. I don’t know how—the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called ‘Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot,’ which is composed of close-ups from porn films, yet a museum now has it in their permanent collection and nobody got mad. What the hell has happened?”

Visiting Some Of The 350 Drive-Ins That Will Still Be Open At Least One Summer Longer

“73% of Netflix users say they won’t subscribe to Disney+”

“The elephant in the room is that Will Smith is black—and casting a black man as a slave, in a Disney movie, no less, is fraught, almost impossibly so. I mean, The Toy-fraught. The tangle of implications this casting raises drowns out nearly every other consideration. When Genie’s eventually freed, his shackles fall off his arms, he shrinks, he loses his blue pigment in favor of Smith’s natural complexion. For Smith to not “hear” the problem implicit in his casting as a slave is astonishing, especially given his famous rejection of Django Unchained. Smith is an extremely powerful player in Hollywood. He is broadly beloved. History will ultimately unpack what to make of these moments where his choices are appalling. I think it’s interesting that Genie loses his powers when he becomes black. Interesting in the same way as how blonde hair is magical in Tangled, but not brunette.”

deadline

“As riveting as Malick’s E.E. Cummings visual cinematic movies are, so too are their commercial prospects risky. For the most part, his movies don’t make money.”
Deadline Weighs Malick, Finds Malick Wanting

NY Times

Geoffrey Rush’s Defamation Case Against Rupert Murdoch’s Nationwide News Ends With Largest Payout to an Individual in Australia’s History

“Nollywood Is Ready to Go Global Thanks to Netflix”

“I kept a diary the whole time, and it’s inadvertently hilarious. I wrote everything down in this matter-of-fact way, which ends up making it seem even more preposterous: “Woke up, watched ‘Grandstand.’ Wrote ‘Candle in the Wind.’ Went to London, bought Rolls-Royce. Ringo Starr came for dinner.”
Sir Elton On His Life Story Onscreen

NY Times

“We were sitting in a suite at a swanky Beverly Hills hotel that was all genteel charcoals and dove grays. Against it, Thompson was a kinetic pop. Her platinum plume of hair was in a state of floppy disarray suggestive of multiple rakings by harried fingers, and she had on her famous Stella McCartney sneakers along with an ensemble the color of lime sorbet, which I murmured appreciation for; it was a palate cleanser, just like her! ‘It’s pistachio, darling,’ she corrected.”
“Emma Thompson Gets a Shock at 60”

variety

Stan Lee’s Former Business Manager Awaiting Extradition to Los Angeles

Cannes Goes Bong

Fox Searchlight and Malick Reunite

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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