MCN Curated Headlines

A Studio Tour With Comics Artist Bill Sienkiewicz

hollywoodreporter.com

“It is time to let this franchise finally go to the great beyond,” says Eric Handler of MKM Partners.

variety

“We have an image of the hipster. He’s generally a dude (though he doesn’t have to be), and he wears this sort of glasses and T-shirt and facial hair, and lives in this or that buzzword neighborhood (it used to be Williamsburg; I’m not hip enough to know where it is now), and drinks this brand of beer, and is religious about this kind of indie rock and that sort of hip hop, and is caustic about everything else except, you know, superhero movies (since growing up reading comic books is a hipster trope), but he somehow has a meta-cynical way of guilty-pleasuring that into the diagram of his cachet.”
The Variety Sunday Column Tut-Tuts JoJo Rabbit And Gazes Upon The Mighty “Hipster”

hollywoodreporter.com

“I think that’s not true. I think it’s unfortunate. I think myself and everyone who works on these movies loves cinema, loves movies, loves going to the movies, loves to watch a communal experience in a movie theater full of people. We did Civil War. We had our two most popular characters get into a very serious theological and physical altercation, Everybody has a different definition of cinema. Everybody has a different definition of art. Everybody has a different definition of risk. Some people don’t think it’s cinema. Everybody is entitled to their opinion. Everyone is entitled to repeat that opinion. Everyone is entitled to write op-eds about that opinion, and I look forward to what will happen next. But in the meantime, we’re going to keep making movies.”

Fourth Annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards Drop Five on Apollo 11

“’I love your movies,’ one man told Weinstein. Others shook his hand and rubbed his shoulder as he enjoyed the evening in the chic lounge styled after pre-revolutionary Cuba.”
Pre-Trial, Harvey Weinstein Returns To Exclusive Club Nightlife In NYC

“Little Women seamlessly continues the preoccupations of Gerwig’s previous work, which includes directing Lady Bird and co-writing Frances Ha and Mistress America: the terrible intimacies of sisters; the complexities of mothers and daughters; and the existential lives of women in states of becoming, their realities hopelessly exceeded by their own desires. These protagonists are caught up in an ineffable sense of want—to be someone else, to be somewhere else—that slowly, through and with the other women in their lives, sharpens into a bittersweet understanding of who they are and where they belong. The modest settings and contemporary, urban characters of the earlier films are reimagined within the grander, weightier frameworks of history and literature.”

Steve McQueen’s “Year 3” At Tate Britain in London Assembles Photographs From Two-Thirds Of London Primary Schools, Comprising Over 3,000 Photographs Capturing 76,000 Children Age 7 And 8

variety

“For Frank Sheeran, it was just you get an order, go and do it. So the camera behaves very simply. We didn’t do any spectacular angles or movements when a killing is happening. So the camera pans with him approaching a person, maybe he kills, maybe it pans back. Or sometimes the camera just sat there, static. It even extends to the cars. All the cars, we show them in perfect profile. Filming in a dry, simple, methodical way. But it’s not really that simple – it’s actually more complicated. When you shoot a profile of a car it has to be a perfect profile so it’s really not that simple.”

“How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash”

hollywoodreporter.com

“Indie Execs Say Content Is No Longer King — Data Is”

variety

Woody Allen $68 Million Lawsuit Against Amazon Studios Settled For Undisclosed Amount

The DVD Wrapup: Ophelia, Ambition, Werewolf in Girls’ Dorm, Byleth, Humble Pie, Good Omens, Yellowstone …More

LA Times

“If none of those tactics works, pay-TV subscribers could someday be required to sign in to their accounts using their thumbprints.”

“For me, the film school is like a film. The first thing is to put together a great project, a great product, that attracts money. Our priority was to attract the brightest of students. People assume they will just arrive. No, you have to make yourself look sexy vis-a-vis the competition.”
Nik Powell Reflects On Seventeen Years At The National Film And Television School (From 2017)

hollywoodreporter.com

“If theaters want to carry Netflix films once they are on Netflix, because people want the group experience, that’s great.”


“We have every right to be powerful in whatever form of sexuality we choose to have – and no one is allowed to take that away from you.“

NY Times

“He — and a host of imitators — spawned a thousand TV advertisements. ( Mr. Glass refuses to spend more than two hours on such projects.)”

On the Road To Apple+TV

“Haynes is renowned in the business for his preparation: rigorous shot lists, hundred-page editing notes, and his Image Books, which remain close at hand throughout his shoots. These books are key, Haynes has said, to his “psychic process.” Before beginning each film, he distributes a magazine-size version to the head of each department, to insure that all his collaborators have a sense of the film’s emotional terrain.”
John Lahr Profiles Todd Haynes

“At age 46, with salt-and-pepper hair peeking behind his sailor hat, Korine has chilled out a bit, spending most of his time making stoner art—trippy Op Art paintings in oil [that are] easy to get lost in. And yet, his dark streak hasn’t quit.”

variety

Roland Emmerich And The  Hundred-Million-Dollar Indie

Oscar General Entry Submission Forms Due November 15

NY Times

Style Profiles Jennifer Lee and Frozen 2

““The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems,” Hideo Kojima wrote in late 2001. “Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever ‘truth’ suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.”

“In an elegantly sterile Manhattan hotel room, dressed in the international uniform of the male director—jeans, black T-shirt, black blazer—Bong fit right in. He appeared at least a decade younger than his 50 years, and when I asked him whether his fluffy mop of hair was the result of a perm (a common procedure among fashionable men in Korea), he said between chuckles that he got this question a lot back home and that any hair salon that made a paying customer look like him deserved to be shut down. With his genial manner, tousled locks, and boyish features behind boxy half-rim glasses, he didn’t seem like some master of cinema, the man who could save the blockbuster from itself.”

“Legendary film producer turned National Film and Television School director Nik Powell, was 69. As co-founder of the legendary alternative distributors and producers Palace Pictures in the 1980s, Nik (who’d already made his mark as co-founder of Virgin Records a decade before) and his partner Stephen Woolley brought Raimi, the Coens, Jarmusch, John Waters, Wenders, Fassbinder, Jodorowsky, Herzog, Babenco, Beineix, Besson, Peter Jackson and more to British film fans’ new video shelves, as well as native works by Mike Leigh and Peter Greenaway.”

“The first thing Jane Fonda says to me after I sit down across from her in the lobby of a plush Manhattan hotel is, “What’s with the guillotine?” I look down. One of my tattoos is peeking out from under my short-sleeve shirt, and she’s noticed. As I explain that it signifies certain… opinions… I hold about the ruling class, she interrupts me: “You mean the billionaires and the politicians they’ve bought who are destroying peoples’ lives?” I nod. “Then I’m with you.”

variety

Accusation of 1975 Polanski Rape As New Film Opens In France

“I was thinking about the vindication of Michael Moore when I decided to watch his debut film Roger & Me, which turns thirty this year and which I’d never seen before.”
A Youthful Mash Note To Michael Moore

“Of course the actors are still taken care of with every small element: the light, the hair styles, the colors and the walls. Everything — everything is very important. But without hesitation, the most important thing about a movie is the actors. I mean, they are the body and the heart of a movie. And I always work a lot with them, trying to help if they have any problems and explaining, sometimes even too much, what every line means and what is behind the words and how to do it. I do take care of them like they are the most important thing in my movie, and this is still the same since I started in the eighties until now. But also when I see myself directing someone, I hate myself!”
Almodóvar

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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