MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2019

“Tuesday was supposed to be Quentin Tarantino’s big day at Cannes — and for a while, it was, as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was well-received. But then came Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and suddenly, all anyone wanted to talk about was Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. The response to the latest from the Korean director was levitational: The film received spontaneous, rapturous bursts of applause not just at the end of its critics’ screening, but also in the middle of it. Twice.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“I was telling the story of the men. They knew a rich, bloated, flamboyant guy who owned buildings across town had said something about them. They were much more concerned with their families and their lives than some guy in a golden tower. It made him feel like a player and important. Press conferences ensued. He was on CNN. Those are all the things that we know he wanted at that time. By doing this, he got quite a bit of attention, and still is getting it for doing the same kinds of things. I don’t think it was for any real desire to seek justice for Trisha Meili, because if he did feel that way he would have sought it for Christine Blasey Ford. It was an opportunity, and he’s an opportunist.”
Ava DuVernay On Employing Donald Trump Only In Archival Footage

“Watching this story on a digital medium would feel false; it needs to look lived-in, worn, graspable.”
Cannes Reviewer Says Don’t See QT9 If You Can’t See It On 35mm

“We had no problem stopping the entire process instantly,” Reed Morano, who won an Emmy for directing three episodes of Hulu’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ said. “There is no way we would ever bring our money to that state by shooting there.”

variety

“Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida underscored the importance of Sony Pictures Entertainment to the conglomerate’s strategy going forward at a media briefing Tuesday, citing the global boom in subscription streaming services.”

daily beast

“It goes without saying that this sort of plea is a great marketing strategy. Tarantino doubtless remembers the ad campaign for Hitchcock’s Psycho: “After you see Psycho, don’t give away the ending.”

variety

“Gersh set these meetings several months ago before the strike when Mr. Reyes was a Gersh client. When the client signed with another agency, the meetings were removed from the books as is normal protocol. We wish Mr. Reyes the best,” The Gersh Agency related in a statement.

NY Times

“Not especially urgent, with lots of yammer, walls hung with exploitation-film posters and amusingly foregrounded shots of bare female feet. Then abruptly the mood and tone shift…the ache of a requiem.”
Manohla Dargis

deadline

“The film was in post-production for almost three years.”
Malick Returns To Searchlight In $12-$14 Million Deal

“Assayas’ concerns about his attractive but mixed-up women and men remain: but do the hurts and hopes of these bourgeois merchants of art and culture remain of interest now that they are no longer bright-faced newcomers? They think so, in their bruise-tender vanity; so does Assayas.”
Essaying Olivier Assayas’ Non-Fiction

variety

“The market has adjusted, prices are way more reasonable. We’re hearing it from everybody. People are saying: ‘If I buy a movie priced in the $400,000-$600,000 range, if it works, it’s great. If it doesn’t work, it won’t kill me.'”

“Having been sentenced to death for failing to pledge allegiance to the Führer, Franz is told by his priest that God does not judge a man by what he says but what is in his heart. Hitler believed that the atrocities committed by the Nazis were justified because he was being guided by a higher power. But while he may have claimed to love another human being and evidently enjoyed his downtime, his heart was irrefutably filled with hate. Malick’s message is clear: vanquishing evil requires individuals to take a stand, to recognise what is right and what is wrong. So beware of false prophets; never stop holding on to love and hope; above all, don’t let hate in.

“Malick, eschewing dialogue for the banal questioning voiceover he must consider his contribution to today’s cinema, concentrates on the clichés: “How simple life was then. No trouble could reach our valley. We lived above the clouds. What’s happened to our country?” I’d estimate there are more clichés per minute than in The Sound of Music.”
Sight & Sound’s Nick James Sighs Also

 

hollywoodreporter.com

Breaking: 69-Year-Old Todd McCarthy Loathes 75-Year-Old Terrence Malick’s Latest

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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.”

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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