MCN Curated Headlines Archive for September, 2019

NY Times

“I am some other kind of person, the kind of who believes that Paltrow was, for a while, the best young American actor in Hollywood. She’s still among the very last generation of movie performers — including Cotillard and Cate Blanchett, Winslet and Nicole Kidman — for whom stardom and skill seem scarily, thrillingly natural. I love the whine in Paltrow’s flirtation, the shock of her rage, how she can go from luminous to lost just like that, how she’s able to summon worry, misery and rue 70 different ways in a single performance.”
“I Love Gwyneth Paltrow. There. I Said It,” Headlines Wesley Morris

deadline

“Starting later this year and into 2020, Vidiots will also feature programming partnerships with The Black List, The Bob Baker Marionette Theater and Cinema Eye Honors. Vidiots is looking to partner with Art House Convergence, Film Independent, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Outfest, Oxy Arts and the Occidental Media Arts & Culture Department, Sundance Institute, UCLA Film & Television Archive, Women in Film and Vidéothèque for programming.”

variety

“The Irishman was made as a work of cinema to be shared in the secular temple that the movie theater still is. Yes, even with all those trailers, with the $10 Cokes and the idiots on their cellphones. I think a great many people will want to experience it that way. I would argue that this year, there’s going to be a powerful gap—in fact, you could call it a chasm—between the way The Irishman would have played at theaters had it been released by a conventional studio and the way that it will play in theaters in the glorified, seam-busting version of a limited release under Netflix.”
Gleiberman Sunday-Columns A Pack of Words, Not Limited to “I,” On The Irishman,

“Mikey & Nicky isn’t the story of two men attempting to escape the mob, nor two men reckoning with themselves—it’s the story of two boys wholly unequipped to mediate the complex emotions of male adulthood.”

Michael Chabon: “What’s The Point?”

TODD PHILLIPS: RAW

variety

Rob Cohen Again Accused Of Sexual Assault

wsj

Apple Plans to Bring Feature-Length Films to Theaters

variety

“We don’t pretend to think we would suddenly have 30 million people watching our movie in a theater, it’s just a portion of what our strategy is… stunt theatrical… event-izing… We’re really pivoting to a goal of getting these movies to the global customers as quickly as possible.”
Amazon Studios Strategizes

“This isn’t a paranoid future nightmare,” Chris Morris Says Of The Day Shall Come

“Oh, my god, of course. I mean, what the fuck – am I not gonna ask Don Johnson about Miami Vice?”
A Reader-Abusive Interview With Rian Johnson

“For much of The Irishman, the women are at the margins — wives and daughters, always around, rarely saying anything. This isn’t atypical in Scorsese’s work, which rarely centers on women. The worlds he makes movies about are built by men, for men. They see women as beloved and beautiful accessories, maybe tangentially helpful, sometimes irrational irritations. But The Irishman uses Frank’s perspective on the women in his life to remind us that his myopia has blinded him to the truth about himself.”

“There were notions Scorsese mentioned as we start3d to prep the movie. One very early on was wanting to have a feeling of the photographic memory of the past. He mentioned Super 8 or 16mm home movies, and asked me in the general sense how I thought we could achieve that feeling without literally shooting with grainy, handheld film. So I got more into emulating the still photography look of the different decades, in particular the ’50s, and then the ’60s, and then of course a lot of the story happens in the ’70s. I decided to separate those decades with those looks, emulating those emulsions: Kodachrome in the ’50s, and toward the ’60s we transition to Ektachrome (also saturated in color, but more a blue-green tendency, and the shadow). Then for the ’70s, I transitioned into a whole different look, which is not still photography: ENR, a process that was developed in Technicolor by Vittorio Storaro, in which the silver is retained on the print of film for motion pictures, and the result is high contrast and desaturation of color. I started applying levels of this ENR look, so that basically the film starts getting drained of color in the later decades. That gives a feel of nostalgia, maybe, for the past, even though the events that are happening are not necessarily the prettiest.”

variety

Sony, Disney To Collaborate On Third Spider-Man Property

“My influences happen at more of a subconscious level, I don’t dig too deep into that or analyze it myself. I may say, “That scene in that movie would be perfect for this thing.” I’ll talk to my staff and say, “Oh you have to check out this film, it had this one scene that was really great!” In that sense I’m very straightforward about what my influences are,” Takashi Miike says. “But more than being influenced by film in a tangible way that filters into my own work, I’m more influenced by things that happen in my daily life. The sunglasses that you’re wearing, somehow those sunglasses lodge in my subconscious and end up influencing me and they’ll end up in my next film and I won’t remember where they came from.”

Behind The Chicago Film Scene in Fifty Entries, Dozens Of Portraits And 23,000 Words

“I have to tell you, for me, the film is 35mm celluloid. I made all my shit on 35mm celluloid. My problem is—it’s not technical, again. I don’t care about the scratches because maybe you got an old print. The problem is, the digital picture has to be a new language. But we do not use it as a new language. People are using it to look like a fake film camera. Why do they not think about a new visual language? If you see these fucking digital possibilities, you can create a new language that is only for digital technology. It’s really stupid if you believe that a digital picture will have the same quality as 35mm. Never! But you have a totally different possibilities in a different way, but you can use it. Why don’t you? It’s not my job because I do not touch cameras any more. But there are a lot of possibilities out there.”

“In a September 18 email, the U. S. Army instructed service members to remain aware of their surroundings and “identify two escape routes” when entering theaters showing Joker. In the event of a shooting, they were instructed to “run, hide, fight.” “Run if you can,” the safety notice said. “If you’re stuck, hide (also known as ‘sheltering in place’), and stay quiet. If a shooter finds you, fight with whatever you can.”

“A lot of thinkpieces [have been] written by people who proudly state they haven’t even seen [Joker] and don’t need to. I would argue that you might want to watch the movie, you might want to watch it with an open mind. The movie makes statements about a lack of love, childhood trauma, lack of compassion in the world. I think people can handle that message… I don’t even want to bring up the movies in the past that they’ve said this about because it’s shocking and embarrassing when you go, oh my God, Do the Right Thing, they said that about [that, too]. Art can be complicated and oftentimes art is meant to be complicated. If you want uncomplicated art, you might want to take up calligraphy, but filmmaking will always be a complicated art.”

Kwame Amoaku and Peter Hawley, Heads of the Chicago Film Office and The Illinois Film Office, In Conversation

variety

“I’ve known Marty for almost 30 years,” Kent Jones says of Scorsese, who exec-produced Diane, Jones’ narrative feature debut. Scorsese’s most recent films have skipped festivals entirely because of “timing. In the past, because of Marty’s and my relationship, people were always saying, ‘Of course you’ll be opening with The Wolf of Wall Street,’ or ‘Of course, you’ll be opening with Silence. ‘Well, if the timing works out, sure.’ But it didn’t. Those movies just were not ready.”

variety

Phoebe Waller-Bridge Signs Amazon $20 Million-Per-Annum All-Round Deal

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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