MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2019

variety

“China is still a good place to work in the cinema industry. Every country has its own political system. China has a huge population of nearly 1.4 billion people and therefore needs good, strong governance,” says Gong Li. “At the Golden Horse Awards I was the president of the jury, and it was a matter of principle. I did not want this to become a complicated issue. What is lacking in China today is a film classification system, meaning that even a 5-year-old child can currently go into a cinema and watch violent and bloody scenes. I’m not happy about that. China needs a classification system and warning system to alert people when there are extreme scenes. The tax issue is a universal one – everybody needs to pay their tax and be responsible for doing so.”

NY Times

“Because Mr. Tseden’s films touch on issues related to ethnic minorities, they are vetted through a stricter-than-usual censorship process. Every line in the script is scrutinized. For inspiration about working within the constraints of overwhelming censorship, Mr. Tseden studied the work of Iranian filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Despite the intense scrutiny, all six of Mr. Tseden’s feature films have received the official “dragon seal” of approval from Chinese censors — a testament, critics say, to the subtlety of his cinematic expression. (His films have had limited box office success in China, though, in part because of their slow pacing and art-house aesthetic.)”

“Iranian theaters pay tribute to Kiarostami on his birthday”

DC Comics Erases Vertigo Imprint

New Frames In Greek Trailer For OUAT … IH-QT9

LA Times

“Lionsgate is neither abandoning Anna nor fully promoting it. The film is expected to open in 2,200 theaters nationwide, but Lionsgate is doing minimal publicity — opting to not host screenings for movie critics, press junkets or red carpet premieres. Nonetheless, previews for the movie have appeared on television and in theaters ahead of movies, including the latest John Wick sequel… The filmmaker has a track record for spotting star quality in models: Milla Jovovich became a Hollywood name after Besson cast her in The Fifth Element — the two would go on to have a short-lived marriage — and he has worked with Rie Rasmussen and Cara Delevingne.”

“Besson gets even the most basic period details wrong: ordinary Muscovites have IBM ThinkPads and WiFi, CIA situation rooms have flat-screen displays and everyone’s mobile phones are considerably smaller than they would have been. A USB drive becomes a major MacGuffin in the final act (USB drives weren’t in use until 1999). I wondered if all the tech was a stylistic choice – a way of suggesting Anna takes place in some alternate super-cool spyverse like the Bond movies; eventually I realized the answer was much more prosaic: nobody gave a shit.”

“Thousands Petition Netflix to Cancel Amazon Prime’s ‘Good Omens'”

NY Times

“I don’t want to sound like an old idiot, because I try to keep up with what’s happening on YouTube, and it’s a lot of people talking to camera, very personality-driven,” Kumail Nanjani said. ” I grew up watching Ghostbusters and Gremlins and Indiana Jones. If I had grown up watching YouTube, I don’t know if I would like movies.”

NY Times

“In a world where everything is on demand, I think that’s what makes movies special: Exactly because it’s harder is why it’s a more significant leisure choice,” says Tom Rothman. “Guess what? You can’t see Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood on your phone right now! If you want to see Leo and Brad together on the screen — the biggest star pairing since Butch and Sundance! — you gotta get a babysitter.”

NY Times

“We had a screening of Beale Street in Washington, D.C., at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a fire broke out,” Barry Jenkins said. “So, irony of ironies, we had to go across the street to the Air and Space Museum, where there’s an Imax theater. To see Regina King as a black mom trying to save her family on that larger-than-life screen, in the Air and Space Museum — where, when you walk out, all you see are images of white men going into space — I thought, “Okay, this is what it was like when people sat in a movie chair and thought a train was coming toward them.” I can’t get that feeling on my flat screen at home, so we’ve got to figure something out.

NY Times

“There were 350 more movies released theatrically in the United States last year than there were when Avatar came out in 2009,” Joe Russo said. “The same thing’s happening on television. There just used to be fewer of everything — fewer movie stars, too — and when the numbers start to get up this high, you start to lose the trees for the forest.

variety

Blumhouse And Paramount Up For Seventh Paranormal Activity

Forty-Sixth Telluride Film Festival Announces Guest Director Pico Iyer

deadline

Marvel Mandates Avengers: Endgame Button Scene And More Stuff To Game Box Office Record Asterisk

Surveying Pauline Kael At 100

David Remnick Picks Six from the New Yorker Archives

the wrap

“There’s nothing that he says or does in relation to this case, in relation to the lives of five people of color, that really has any weight to it or truth to it,. It’s not our reality, it’s not truthful. We already know this, so it’s kind of like, why do we keep banging our head against the wall about it? I’m surprised it took him so long. I was waiting every day to get a tweet.”

deadline

“Why do you bring that question up now? It’s an interesting time to bring it up. You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt [sic]. If you look at Linda Fairstein and if you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case. So, we’ll leave it at that.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“The California legislature is considering a proposal that takes aim at Uber, Lyft and others using independent contractors — but it could render the entertainment industry’s tax-lucrative loan-out companies useless.”

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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