By Joe Bendel. Whether you consider it an unintentional disconnect stemming from China’s rapid industrialization or outright hypocrisy, the chasm between official rhetoric and reality is wide and stark in the Communist People’s Republic of China. It might be go-go times in the big coastal commercial centers, but the rural areas are desperately poor. An estimated 130 million migrant workers leave for those cities, working long hours for exploitative wages. They only make one annual return home for the traditional New Year holiday. Considered the world’s largest migration of people, documentarian Lixin Fan examines the taxing ritual through the eyes of one struggling Chinese family in Last Train Home, which opened Friday in select theaters nationwide.
Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin are second class citizens, veritable illegal aliens within their own countries. Under the government’s restrictive residency laws, they have few formal rights and no access to social services outside their home district. Yet, they have had little choice but to seek work in China’s teeming urban centers. As a result, they have rarely seen the pre-teen daughter and young son they left to be raised by their grandmother.
Mother-daughter relationships can be difficult even under easier circumstances, but the three years Chen and her daughter Zhang Qin have been separated are taking a toll. Yet Chen cannot entirely blame her for feeling abandoned, even while lamenting that she has not been a good mother. Unfortunately, the resentful daughter spitefully drops out of school, becoming a migrant worker herself. It is a bitter turn of events for her parents, who now must face the possibility that many of their sacrifices will have been for naught. They also know only too well the rough education she is in for, especially when navigating the yearly mass exodus.
Sharing an obvious stylistic affinity with the Digital Generation of independent Chinese filmmakers, Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan is not afraid of holding long, quiet shots. However, he captured some uncomfortably intimate family drama, while conscientiously refraining from adding outside commentary. Clearly, the filmmaker built up a large reservoir of trust with his subjects. In return, he lets them speak for themselves in their own words, unfiltered and unhurried.
Train is a very personal film, but it is hard to miss the underlying point that approximately 130 million more migrant Chinese workers currently endure similar conditions. Ironically, China’s peasants used to be the PRC’s politically privileged class, but now the laws are rigged against them.
Should digital auteur Jia Zhangke ever remake John Hughes’ Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, it would probably look a lot like this. An unvarnished exercise in cinema vérité that takes on tragic dimensions, Train is a pointed corrective to the uncritical media coverage the Chinese government carefully cultivates. It is all the more difficult to shake, since it is not at all clear everything will ultimately work out alright for the Zhang family. Indeed, such is the nature of life. Uncompromising but deeply humanistic, Train opened last week in select theaters nationwide.
Posted on September 2nd, 2010 at 9:53am.
By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday, after my post on the new film Tomorrow When the War Began (which appears to be a kind of Australian Red Dawn), a reader reminded me that this new film is coming out at roughly the same time as the new videogame Homefront - which is actually written by Red Dawn writer/director John Milius, and is quite obviously inspired by the subject matter of his original film. Check out the two trailers for the game, above and below. My understanding is that Homefront will be coming out in February.
John Milius' forthcoming video game.
Homefront is actually set about 15 years from now. The idea is that North Korea has become a mini-expansionist empire, invigorated by a young new leader, and that this empire grows to consume both South Korea and Japan. Meanwhile, the United States’ economic and military profiles continue to weaken. The North Koreans then launch some kind of advanced electronic pulse weapon that takes out our defense systems. Enter North Korean invaders.
Whether one finds this scenario especially plausible, by the way, isn’t really the issue here. What’s fascinating is how prevalent this type of scenario is becoming in current projects.
We’ve been documenting these invasion scenarios here at Libertas all summer, as regular readers know. These scenarios are truly starting to appear everywhere – most prominently in science fiction films. Suffice to say that Homefront is looking not only a lot like the forthcoming MGM remake of Red Dawn, but also this new Australian film Tomorrow When the War Began, plus the forthcoming web series Red Storm, and about a hundred different sci-fi invasion stories coming down the pike. Plus, this summer we’ve seen the return of films depicting the Cold War Soviet spy threat in Salt and Farewell, and vivid depictions of communist tyranny in indie films like Mao’s Last Dancer, Disco & Atomic War, and The Red Chapel (which deals specifically with North Korea).
How big of a trend is this? It’s a very big one that’s impacting us in many different ways. Two recent films greenlit with $200 million budgets – Universal’s Battleship and the Warner Brothers Battle of Midway – both seem to partake in the trend, for example. [Midway was the World War II battle that permanently scuttled any Japanese hopes of invading America; Battleship is a World War II-style naval battle, set in the future, pitting a combined Earth navy against an invading alien force.]
We’ll keep an eye on all this here at Libertas, to be sure. I personally think these films reflect deep domestic anxieties about the direction the country’s going in … and I don’t think these anxieties are waning. They’re only growing in intensity.
One final word: I spent a pleasant evening several years ago with John Milius; we smoked cigars and talked about the White Rajah of Sarawak … and, ironically, about Mao. I want to wish him the best with this new project.
Posted on September 1st, 2010 at 4:37pm.
[Editor's Note: Recently I came across this striking video above, by New York-based filmmaker Richard Mosse. At first glance, I was shocked by what appeared to be a shahid-style terror video made by a Western filmmaker. Watching the video through, however, it occurred to me that this likely was not an actual terror video, so much as a kind of 'genre' piece or riff on terror videos. My thoughts then moved to the question of what an expert in this area might think of it. Fortunately I was able to turn to LFM Contributer 'Max Garuda,' who works in the field and has access to Arabic translation.]
“A short terror video made in Gaza. Possibly the only such video ever made by non-Palestinian producers. As a result, the representation breaks with the conventions of the Palestinian suicide video genre. In Arabic, ’shahid’ means martyr, or witness.” - Filmmaker/photographer Richard Mosse, describing his video Shahid.
By ‘Max Garuda‘. The artist’s commentary above alerts the viewer to the existence of a ‘terrorist video genre,’ and that Mosse’s creation breaks with that category. This assertion raises two questions: what is the ‘terrorist video genre’ and what conventions does Mosse’s video contest? (An argument can be made that any film belongs in any genre if anyone can make a compelling argument for inclusion. Or, said differently, film/video genres are not fixed sets of criteria by which categorizations are easily made. Rather, they are fluid, evolving bodies of work, responding to artistic practice, distribution/marketing strategies and audience expectations.)
That being said, why does Mosse desire to characterize his video within the ‘terrorist video genre’ or by comparison to it – especially when the differences that do exist are so significant enough to make a strong argument that his video doesn’t break from the genre, but rather has nothing to do with the genre. But first, a little background on the ‘terrorist video genre.’
The 'theater of terror.'
As the title might suggest, the most obvious distinguishing characteristic of the genre was originally the provenence of the video followed by content. Generally speaking, only terrorists made ‘terrorist videos,’ which were used to showcase the terrorizing act or transmit a message requiring some expression of authenticity. The terrorist act depends on shock and a visceral reaction by the ‘public’ of the terrorized. A beheading that occurs in the forest is just a beheading; a beheading captured on video and spread globally by broadcast news or the Internet is an act of terror. Videos showing murders, explosions and other deadly acts were created to broaden the impact of the terrorist act. The ‘theater of terror’ is a common framework for understanding terrorism, in which the terrorist’s act must have the paralyzing effect of fear – because the scope of the actual violence is quite limited. Even the 9/11 attacks, with their relatively high death toll, depend on the ‘theater of terror’ effect for their power–changing how Americans (and other countries and their citizens) conduct their daily lives, from intrusive security measures to a simple constant state of fear. Many early terrorist videos operated in this domain.
The other common example of early terrorist videos were simply video-based messages. Whether VHS tapes smuggled out of remote bivouacs to eager news outlets or digital videos posted to websites, the form of the terrorist video was targeted primarily at followers of the movement, to ensure them that the leadership was still alive and in control. Hence, the periodic release of a video of Osama bin Laden exhorting his followers or Ayman al-Zawahiri expounding on a facet of Islamic exegesis that fits his extremist goals. The target of these videos was generally the faithful, and secondly the ‘contested populations’ or those that don’t openly support the extremists but aren’t too convinced of the piety, competence and forthrightness of local government.
Strategic messaging.
More recently, though, we see a fusion of these two goals (theater of terror and strategic messaging) into the genre of the ‘terrorist video’ that Mosse and his collaborators purport to produce. In this newer class of terrorist videos, we usually see direct address of the camera by the producing group, images of their heroes (Bin Laden, Al-Zarqawi, etc.), and sometimes images of their terrorist acts or types of acts the video implies are imminent. Because these newer videos are not as gruesome as the beheading type video, and because they are frequently hagiographic in their treatment of extremist heroes and martyrs, their access to the ‘theater of terror’ is less about instilling fear in a subject population, but rather in making a spectacle of the process of terrorism and thus improve recruitment within the contested population (particularly disaffected youth). Continue reading »
By Jason Apuzzo. It looks like MGM’s forthcoming Red Dawn remake may have some competition.
A new Australian film called Tomorrow When the War Began, distributed in Austalia by Paramount (starting September 2nd) and based on an Australian teen novel series of the same title, is getting a lot of buzz right now (see The Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog and Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood today) because the film is currently unspooling for potential distributors at the Toronto Film Festival. The film marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Stuart Beattie, whose credits include Collateral and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Here’s the HeatVision summary of the project:
“Tomorrow” is based on the best-selling Australian novel by John Marsden, which is the first in a series of seven books that have sold over two million copies in Australia and New Zealand. In a “Red Dawn” from Down Under way, it tells the story of a group of high school teenagers who decide to take an end of the year camping trip and return home to find houses deserted and phone lines cut. They soon learn that their country has been invaded, and they’re forced into a battle of life and death against the deadly occupying force.
Check out the trailer above – the parallels to Red Dawn are quite obvious. You can otherwise read some early reviews of the film here and here.
The film, and John Marsden’s original novels, are coy on the matter of who the invading force happens to be – but all indications are that they are most likely the communist Chinese, potentially with the aid of other southeast Asian forces. Tellingly, Marsden apparently dedicated the most recent book in the Tomorrow series to “the people of Tibet, East Timor and West Papua” … all of whom have been invaded either by China, or Indonesia. For an in-depth look at the controversy over this project in Australia, I strongly advise watching the interview below with Marsden – who talks about the novels and the film, and discusses the political implications of both. Expect this exact same controversy to play out once this film is released in the U.S. – assuming that’s allowed to happen.
It’s fascinating to me that films like this are suddenly getting made right now (e.g., Salt) – although certainly a great many more of them are getting made outside Hollywood (and America, generally) than from within. [In American films right now, fears of foreign invasion are currently being sublimated into the science fiction alien invasion genre. See my exchange with the LA Times' Patrick Goldstein here.]
Most recently, for example, it was an Australian production team that made Mao’s Last Dancer, which is in theaters right now (see the LFM review). Mao’s Last Dancer deals with a ballet dancer’s defection to the United States, in a much-celebrated case that even involved the intervention of (then) Vice President George H.W. Bush, and yet it was apparently impossible for that film to be made here in this country by American filmmakers.
So we now apparently have a case where a kind of ersatz remake of Red Dawn, made by Australians, may actually hit theaters before MGM’s ‘official’ Red Dawn remake (due to MGM’s complex financial situation). Personally, by the way, I’m still waiting for Chris Morris’ incredible new film Four Lions to get its U.S. release (see the LFM review); that release seems very much up in the air, sadly, due to frightened domestic distributors.
So what’s going on here? I think it’s this: that the climate for freedom-oriented filmmaking is actually better these days outside the United States than within. What a shift that represents. And what a tragedy.
Let’s hope Tomorrow When the War Began gets a U.S. release. We’ll be keeping an eye on this story as it develops.
Posted on August 31st, 2010 at 3:19pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday we reported on how both: 1) Avatar: Special Edition tanked at the domestic box office, debuting behind Piranha 3D; and 2) how James Cameron had bad-mouthed Piranha 3D’s use of the new 3D technology as “exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D.” Furthermore, and perhaps most tellingly, Cameron distanced himself from his own direction of Piranha 2: The Spawning.
Today, Piranha 3D producer Mark Canton (who also produced 300, another technically innovative thriller I liked) bites back!
As reported today at the LA Times’ 24 Frames blog, Canton has apparently fired off an open letter to Cameron on a variety of issues – including not only Cameron’s proprietary attitude toward 3D, but also the narrative problems with Avatar. Good for Canton.
Here are some choice excerpts from Canton’s letter:
“Mr. Cameron, who singles himself out to be a visionary of movie-making, seems to have a small vision regarding any motion pictures that are not his own … Let’s just keep this in mind Jim — you did not invent 3D. You were fortunate that others inspired you to take it further … To be honest, I found the 3D in ‘Avatar’ to be inconsistent and while ground breaking in many respects, sometimes I thought it overwhelmed the storytelling … Technology aside, I wish ‘Avatar’ had been more original in its storytelling.”
As you can imagine, I’m very much in agreement with Canton about this. You know what Avatar is without the cumulative impact of 3D, ILM and Weta Digital? It’s Green Zone. That’s the little secret Cameron wants to hide, and why he’s weirdly distancing himself now from his roots in the world of campy, Roger Corman-inspired cult movies like Piranha 2. Cameron’s above that stuff now, you see – because he’s got 20th Century Fox and a massive production apparatus backing him now. What a phony.
By the way, I’ve actually seen Cameron’s Piranha 2: The Spawning, and the original Joe Dante/Roger Corman Piranha – and, of course, Alex Aja’s new Piranha 3D … and I can tell you that Piranha 3D is easily the best of the three, and Cameron’s film is easily the worst.
Is that part of the subtext here? Could Cameron possibly be that venal – that he doesn’t like being reminded of his all-too humble origins … just as some younger guy borrows ‘his’ technology and makes an obviously better film?
Perhaps the true problem Cameron faces is that – unlike George Lucas, and unlike Peter Jackson – he’s just a litte too easy to copy.
[UPDATE: in the wake of Piranha 3D's surprising success as a critical and cult phenomenon, we're apparently now going to be getting Shark Night 3D, according to the Hollywood Reporter's HeatVision blog today. The film is set in the Louisiana bayou, with the usual sexy teenagers as fish chowder. Also read today how James Cameron - with Guillermo Del Toro's help - is about to ruin H.P. Lovecraft's classic sci-fi horror novel, At the Mountains of Madness, with their new 3D film adaptation. A new, highly unflattering script review of that film is out.]
Posted on August 31st, 2010 at 1:26pm.
By David Ross. Documentary film seems to shift between nature puffery with a rueful environmental subtext, vaguely condescending anthropological examinations of red state weirdos, and aggressive leftwing political polemics. As usual, conservatives have ceded the field without much of a fight. I am not in favor of conservatives answering leftwing polemics with rightwing polemics. I am in favor of conservatives answering clichés with non-clichés, answering tendentious narratives with non-tendentious narratives. With this mind – and with the caveat that my documentary viewing has been far from encyclopedic over the last ten years – let me offer my list of the decade’s best documentaries. Please note that ‘best’ in this case is a cinematic assessment; it has nothing to do with political point of view.
• Jazz (2000, Ken Burns).
• Mark Twain (2000, Ken Burns).
• Dogtown and Z-Boys (2002) is the surprisingly interesting story of the birth of skateboarding. You will come to view the annoying punks who nearly run you down on the sidewalk with a new respect.
• Stone Reader (2002) chronicles the search for the forgotten novelist Robert Stone.
• The Art of Piano: Great Pianists of the 20th Century (2002) is like a Pharaonic tomb in its wealth of archival footage: Horowitz upon his return to Carnegie Hall in 1965, Rubinstein in Moscow, etc.
• The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002, Robert Evans) is a lubricious exercise in autobiographical self-indulgence from film producer Robert Evans, a live wire even by Hollywood standards.
• Architectures (2003), a four-disc series, presents case studies in modern architecture, each about twenty-five minutes long. Much of the architecture is rebarbative, and the film itself may be a bit dry and technical for some tastes, but few films about art and culture are this detailed and intellectually serious.
• Deep Blue (2005) is underwater cinema at its most lush and exotic. The inevitable environmental message sneaks in at the end, but one can’t really call it gratuitous.
• Grizzly Man (2005, Werner Herzog). Nutcase lives with the bears and gets eaten
– go figure. Even so, the film provides a compelling critique of a certain kind of romantic idealization of nature, which poses dangers for us all.
• Ballets Russes (2005) is a moving history of one of the twentieth century’s great ballet companies, featuring interviews with many of the dancers who made the company legendary. The film becomes an examination of – and finally a paean to – artistic dedication of the highest order.
• Into Great Silence (2005) is at once silent, static, and epic, a grand glimpse of life in a Carthusian monastery in the mountains of France. It is one of the more difficult and beautiful films ever made, and perhaps film’s most sincere and respectful attempt to portray the life of religious devotion.
• Encounters at the End of the World (2007, Werner Herzog) brings the Werneresque hermeneutical apparatus to bear on the McMurdo research station at the South Pole, with reflections on the soullessness of technology and the fate of humanity. This sounds deep – and in fact it is deep.
• Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 (2007, Ben Niles) chronicles the construction of a Steinway grand piano, from lumber yard to Carnegie Hall. It is fascinating study of engineering expertise, but even more an homage to old-fashioned ideals of hand-craftsmanship. I plan to show it to my writing students, in the hope that its implicit ethic of perfectionism will teach them a lesson.
• Ballerina (2009, Bertrand Normand) chronicles the trials and triumphs of a gaggle of Kirov ballerinas at different phases in their careers. Among the featured dancers is Svetlana Zakharova, perhaps the greatest ballerina of her generation, and not incidentally one of the most beautiful women in the world. Here she is: ethereal in Swan Lake; sultry in La Bayadère; smoldering in Carmen.
Here’s an instructive documentary double-bill: The Kid Stays in the Picture and Derrida (about the French literary theorist and progenitor of deconstruction). Evans is charming, scabrous, lewd, and hilarious; Derrida is evasive and more spiritually sterile than imaginably possible. Sure, you’d rather have a beer with Evans, but with whom would you rather discuss Proust or Heidegger? I’m tempted to say Evans again. Derrida may be a genius in the strict sense, but he is a guarded genius. Personality, one realizes, is not incidental to genius; it may even be the essence of true genius.
If I had to give a decadal Academy Award, I would be deeply torn between Encounters at the End of the World, Note by Note, and Into Great Silence. The first is a film of intellect; the second a film of heart; the third a film of spirit. The latter must take the laurels, if only because its beauty is so unusual, its method so simple and yet so ambitious. Nearly three hours long, the film does not merely depict the lives of the monks, but attempts to induce in the viewer a sense of the monastic rhythm, the slowness and ceaselessness of the monks’ simple acts of toil and devotion. There seems to me a deep and central question in this, having nothing to do with matters of faith and observance. Breadth and depth exist always in opposition. Our culture has become a veritable cult of breadth, a crab-dance of scuttling lateral movement. The web is world-wide, but what remains world-deep?
Posted on August 31st, 2010 at 9:33am.
"Mad Men" star Jon Hamm (Don Draper) at the Emmys.
By Jason Apuzzo. • You couldn’t ask for a better weekend: Mad Men pulled off a rare 3-peat, winning the Best Drama Emmy for the third consecutive year, while James Cameron’s Avatar: Special Edition tanked at the box office, finishing at the #12 spot. Making this failure all the more delicious is the fact that Avatar finished behind Piranha 3D (at #11), even after Cameron recently bad-mouthed Piranha 3D (“[E]xactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s”) … even going so far as to distance himself – unconvincingly, I might add – from having directed the Piranha 2: The Spawning!
Hey, Jim, what really “cheapens the medium” is the political propagandizing you’re doing in Avatar.
• We’re apparently about to get a huge, heaping dose of World War II action coming our way because Warner Brothers has apparently greenlit a $200 million 3D Battle of Midway film, and John Woo’s Flying Tigers movie will indeed be going forward in the IMAX format, as we previously reported. We look forward to both projects.
• On the 3D front by the way, the great Werner Herzog has apparently just done a 3D documentary on the Chauvet cave paintings of southern France, called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I’m really looking forward this – I hope there’s an LA screening in the near future. What a perfect use for the 3D medium.
• If Machete isn’t enough for you … there appears to be a new genre forming: alien invasion movies set on the border … about illegal aliens of the extraterrestrial variety! Go figure. We’ve reported previously on Monsters (see an intriguing new production still for that here), and now comes the new Mexican alien invasion thriller, Seres: Genesis. The Hollywood Reporter has the new trailer for it here. Are we starting to reach the shark-jumping point in this burgeoning alien invasion genre?
The girls of "Mad Men" at The Emmys.
In related sci-fi news, there’s an interesting new rumor out about the storyline for the J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg alien invasion thriller, Super 8. According to Dark Horizons, the story for the film “revolves around a 14-year-old boy growing up in a steel town in 1979 where a train crash forces the town to come together.” The weblink from which Dark Horizons discovered this information has mysteriously vanished …
• In other random news and notes, YouTube is apparently investigating the idea of doing pay-per-view movie downloads (they’re actually already doing this for some indie projects); available for free right now on YouTube, however, is a new documentary that follows Taliban fighters as they clash with U.S. forces (why is YouTube hosting this?); and speaking of getting things for free, William Hurt will be playing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in HBO’s new movie Too Big to Fail about the 2008 financial crisis.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … wags at the LA Times ask today whether Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks (along with TV’s Sofia Vergara, and a few other gals) more or less made the case at the Emmys for 3D TVs. Answer: yes.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on August 30th, 2010 at 2:32pm.
Jessica Alba & Michelle Rodriguez talk Machete.
By Jason Apuzzo. Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez recently sat down for an interview with ComingSoon.net about their participation in Robert Rodriguez’s new film, Machete.
Here’s Alba, speaking about the film:
“I love the political message. I love the exploitative platform to kind of talk about something that I feel is so relevant. It’s been something that’s been ripe in the Latino community for a long time.”
I love the exploitative platform? I hope what she means by that is the fact that Machete is basically a 70s-style, exploitation-film knock-off … not that she loves ‘exploiting’ the platform of the cinema. [Sigh.]
In any case, ‘exploiting’ seems to be what Robert Rodriguez is doing with this film. As we reported to you on Friday, there are some extraordinary new details we’re learning about what’s in Machete, including this tidbit from The Hollywood Reporter:
Among “Machete’s” more provocative elements are border vigilantes led by Don Johnson as a kind of avatar for Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and fake political ads for an incumbent senator whose platform is built on his “hard line against wetbacks” and a description of them as “parasites.” That the two characters murder a pregnant Mexican woman to prevent her baby from being born in America and then shoot her distraught husband while uttering the line, “Welcome to America,” underlines the point.
I’m really hard-pressed to understand how this sort of thing helps matters in terms of the ongoing immigration debate. It seems more like a flaming gas can thrown on an already roaring fire … by narcissist Hollywood celebrities who themselves won’t be around to clean up the mess after they’ve helped cause it.
Posted on August 30th, 2010 at 12:52pm.
We think: "bad idea."
"Yo! Let's go for the low-blow, again!"
By Jason Apuzzo. Someone needs to get to Sly Stallone and tell him to stop digging.
On Sly’s Twitter account from three days ago, he indicated that he wants Bruce Willis playing a “super villain” in Expendables 2.
Problem: In The Expendables Willis played a CIA front man who goes by the name ‘Mr. Church.’ [By the way, isn't the name a little interesting there?] So it’s apparently the CIA guy again who gets to become the “super villain” in Sly’s next Expendables film.
Memo to Sly: since you’re such a patriotic guy, who believes that “America apologizes too much,” maybe the “super villain” in your next film could be … a terrorist? Or Kim Jong Il? Or one of Castro’s thugs? Or Chinese communists? Instead of the American CIA operative, again. Just a thought.
Regular Libertas readers know I haven’t been falling for this ‘Stallone has wrapped himself in a flag of patriotism’ nonsense that’s been coming from certain quarters of the media recently. The Expendables is a nasty hit-job on the CIA, pure and simple. Now we’re getting a sense of just how committed Stallone is to this anti-CIA plotline as a cornerstone for his new, mini-franchise – despite his unconvincing denials to that effect.
On the box office front, by the way, Stallone’s film slipped to third place over the weekend, against weak competition. Oh, and three weeks in Expendables still isn’t performing as well as Salt (compare the two films here and here), as Salt had made about $9 million more by its third week.
I promise to stop posting on this Salt-Expendables comparison, because it’s becoming quite obvious who’s coming out on top here.
Posted on August 30th, 2010 at 11:52am.
[Editor's Note: Mesrine was the #1 film at the indie box office this past weekend.]
By Joe Bendel. Jacques Mesrine was white and bourgeoisie, but he wanted to be the French Iceberg Slim. A veteran of Algeria, Mesrine became France and Canada’s “Public Enemy #1,” eventually getting his wish, dying in a hail of bullets. Before the inevitable, he glamorized his exploits in two memoirs/novels, making him something of a cult hero to the French-speaking counter-culture. As a result, he became a very PR-conscious public enemy, who would be delighted to know his story has now been adapted in Jean-François Richet’s two-film bio-epic, the first of which, Mesrine: Killer Instinct opened Friday in select theaters nationwide, with Part Two to follow a week later.
In Algeria, Mesrine killed and tortured without a second thought. Returning to France, he is incapable of following in his timid father’s footsteps of working, middleclass respectability. Of course, he has certain talents to offer, which the “establishment” gangster Guido recognizes. While Mesrine takes to racketeering like a fish to water, his wild streak is an obvious liability. He also has issues with women. While his conquests are many, he also seems primed for some rather ugly misogynistic violence.
Vincent Cassel as Mesrine.
Despite his unruliness, Mesrine eventually finds himself married with children. When he even gets a straight job after an early prison stretch, it appears Mesrine might be ready to settle down. Unfortunately, when he is laid off during an economic downturn, Mesrine soon returns to Guido’s organization.
Ironically, as the violence of Mesrine’s criminal endeavors escalates, his press becomes increasingly favorable. He became the gentleman bandit, with a strict code of conduct and New Left street cred. When things get too hot for Mesrine in France, he takes a sojourn to Quebec, falling in with French nationalists – further refining his revolutionary persona.
Killer Instinct is a decent gangster movie on its own, but it is really meant to establish the characters and storyline that continues in Public Enemy No. 1, the second film (that confusingly has the number one in the title). True to its function, Instinct handles the heavy-lifting of character development, setting up the slam-bang action sequences of Enemy. Yet, Richet presents a compellingly unvarnished portrait of Mesrine in the first film, never ameliorating his abusive behavior.
The bulked-up Vincent Cassel is like a French old school De Niro as Mesrine, vicious yet undeniably charismatic. Gérard Depardieu also adds plenty of color as the Jabba the Hutt-like Guido. Unfortunately, Mesrine’s women (even his Spanish wife) are not well delineated either in the script or in the various supporting performances, problematically seeming to exist only as plot devices. Still, Instinct is not bereft of humanity, thanks to Michel Duchaussoy’s touching turn as Mesrine’s father.
After a tour-de-force opening, Richet allows Instinct to lag somewhat in the middle. This is definitely not a problem with the next installment opening September 3rd. Essentially, Instinct sets up the pins and Enemy knocks them down. Altogether, it is an ambitious, shrewdly executed crime drama worth the investment of two trips to the theater.
[Note:This article contains SPOILERS. I love Leave Her to Heaven, but I was spoiled for one of its biggest scenes. Ideally you should watch it first, then come back and we’ll peel the face off the Technicolor mask.]
By Jennifer Baldwin. Is there a better movie about romantic obsession than Leave Her to Heaven? Is there another movie as disturbing and unflinching in its portrayal of a woman obsessed as this film, this nightmare vision in Technicolor? To see the film only once is to remember it forever. It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve been obsessed with Leave Her to Heaven for over a decade. It’s a movie not only about obsession, but one that invites obsession on the part of the audience. We are invited to obsess over the colors, the beauty, the horribly evil acts committed by Gene Tierney’s Elle Berent. That Ellen is a deadly enigma only makes it more fascinating to obsess over her.
I blame Martin Scorsese. One night, many years ago, I stumbled onto his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies playing on TCM. Three movie clips from the documentary stayed with me long past that night, haunting me, nagging at my mind: clips from Cat People, Scarlet Street, and Leave Her to Heaven. As time went by, it became a kind of quest to track these movies down. First came Cat People and I was spooked by the shadows and the dreaded suggestion of horror. Next came Scarlett Street and I was shocked by the brutal violence and even more brutal cynicism.
When I finally saw Leave Her to Heaven it was almost too overwhelming to describe. The colors, the murders, the pounding tympani, Gene Tierney’s eyes – all the lurid perversity of it burned forever into my brain. I loved it. It was the most delirious melodrama I had ever seen. It still is. It’s woman’s melodrama with a black soul. It pulls the mask back on the notion of romantic, all-consuming love and gives us the horror underneath. And yet, it is achingly beautiful to look at, the beauty and the horror intertwined so that it becomes more than just the story of a monstrous, murderous woman – it becomes a tragedy. Fitting that the title should be a line from Hamlet.
Leave Her to Heaven is essentially two things: Leon Shamroy’s color cinematography and Gene Tierney’s lead performance. Bringing these two essentials together, of course, is the underrated director, John M. Stahl. It is Stahl, in an act of alchemical wizardry, who is able to fuse Tierney’s subtle, disturbing performance with Shamroy’s wild, unrestrained use of Technicolor (all with a handy assist from the set design, art department, and costuming).
Stahl’s film is popular art at its best, a finely balanced creation that melds melodramatic, expressionist visuals with naturalistic, subdued, almost mannequin-like acting styles, so that the effect is a kind of hallucinatory hyper-reality that nevertheless remains remote and mysterious. We never quite know what to make of Ellen’s character.
Why does Ellen act the way she does? Why is her love so ruinously obsessive? Is she evil? Is she merely insane? Is it possible to feel sympathy for her even as she scares the hell out of us? What about her love? Was her love completely rotten and selfish to the core or was there some small piece of it that was true and human and only later became twisted?
Gene Tierney doesn’t get enough credit either as an actress or as a movie star. As far as Leave Her to Heaven is concerned, she is the whole movie. The film loses something – some spark, some energy – when her character dies and Tierney has left the screen. Only Vincent Price’s theatrical courtroom shouting saves the last quarter of the film from collapsing into anticlimax.
And lest anyone doubt Tierney’s performance or her star quality, answer this: what was 20th Century Fox’s highest grossing movie of the 1940s? Leave Her to Heaven. You don’t deliver the studio’s highest grossing picture of the decade if you’re not a star. And who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in 1945? Gene Tierney. It’s a shame that she is not more well known today.
Leon Shamroy’s cinematography won the Oscar that year, deservedly so. But it really should have been a double win for Shamroy and Tierney at the Academy Awards of 1945, because Shamroy’s cinematography is merely an extension of Tierney’s performance and vice versa. No one can fault the Academy for giving Joan Crawford an Oscar for Mildred Pierce, but I think in a perfect world it would have been Tierney.
I’m fascinated by the decision to shoot the film in color. Most color films in the mid 1940s were musicals or big budget Westerns. A melodrama like Leave Her to Heaven would ordinarily be a black and white affair. Except Leave Her to Heaven was based on a bestselling novel by Ben Ames Williams – a novel that was wildly popular with audiences, resulting in one of the most highly anticipated film adaptations of the day. It was the kind of prestige picture – and potential moneymaker – that could justify the extra cost to shoot in Technicolor.
What Stahl and Shamroy did with that color is nothing short of breathtaking – not just in the look of the color, but in the way color was used. I’m hard-pressed to think of another movie that depends so much on the use of color to affect mood, theme, and character. It’s been said that the color cinematography in Leave Her to Heaven is so powerful that it’s almost a character in its own right. I think a better way to put it is that the color cinematography isn’t a separate character so much as an extension of one character, the central character of the story: Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent.
Gene Tierney was one of Hollywood’s greatest beauties, but one thing I’ve heard is that the camera didn’t quite capture how beautiful she was. Part of this had to do with the fact that she made a lot of black and white films and those films weren’t able to display one of her greatest features: her blue-green eyes.
No such problem in Leave Her to Heaven. In fact, the color scheme of the film – dominated by blues, greens, reds, and pinks (along with an eerie amber glow that hovers over most of the film) – is primarily dictated by Tierney’s appearance. Her blue-green eyes and striking red lipstick are used as a template to color almost every frame of the picture. Everywhere there is blue, green, and red. Just as Ellen promises Richard (Cornel Wilde) that she’ll never let him go, so too do Ellen’s “colors” never let the film go– they dominate to such a degree that her presence is felt in almost every frame, even when she’s not there. Continue reading »
By Joe Bendel. It is 117 A.D. and the Roman “conquest” of Britain has been a miserable, blood-soaked experience—for the Romans. Just ask Centurion Quintus Dias, whom we first meet running for his life from a very ticked-off war party of Picts in Neil Marshall’s Centurion, which opened this Friday in select theaters nationwide.
Posted to the most distant Roman outpost, Dias is miserable in Caledonian Britain (what is more or less Scotland today). Things only get worse when his fort is over-run by a Pict surprise attack. The sole survivor, Dias escapes his captors, making his way to what just became the newly Northern-most Roman outpost. Tired of taking a beating to his prestige back in Rome, the local governor commands General Virilus to hunt down the mysterious Pict leader Gorlacon with his vaunted Ninth Legion, to which Dias is now attached.
Virilus is not thrilled with his assignment, but he supposedly has the advantage of the services of Etain, a Pict tracker ostensibly civilized by the governor. Given the way her eyes smolder with hatred, following her into battle is probably a bad idea, but they do it anyway, with predictable results. Now Dias must lead the remnant of the Ninth as they try to rescue their revered General behind enemy lines.
Centurion is a fairly straight-forward historical hack & slash, with maybe a hint of the fantastical. At one point Dias and his men find refuge with Arianne, a woman shunned by the Picts as a purported witch—not that she really is one. She just seems to know a lot about healing herbs. Neil (The Descent) Marshall definitely has a knack for gritty battle scenes, and the clever symmetry of his opening and closing scenes perfectly suits the story of ancient (if misplaced) heroism. Unfortunately, the film lags a bit in-between, with too many scenes of rock-climbing and weary shuffling through the Caledonian forests.
Michael Fassbender is one of the few actors working in film today with potentially movie star-like screen presence. Yet in Centurion, the grizzled badness of Dominic West’s Virilus somewhat outshines him. Still, he has some credible chemistry with Imogen Poots as Arianne the witch. Unfortunately, Ulrich Thomsen is a bland villain as Gorlacon (probably because the film is too conscious of its alleged modern parallels), while as Etain, former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko looks distractingly blue, almost like she walked out of Avatar. Oddly, the Centurion’s Romans are played by Brits, whereas the Britons are mostly played by Scandinavians, Slavs, and even the Belgian Axelle Carolyn.
Centurion’s craftsmanship is definitely above average for action films. Cinematographer Sam McCurdy’s dazzling vistas make the Caledonian mountains look like the Alps. It also boasts one of the cooler opening title sequences of the year. Still, its heavy-handed “occupiers” versus “insurgency” themes often sabotage the film’s momentum. Ultimately, it is an okay summer diversion, but it is effectively limited by its reluctance to definitively pick a side and stick with it.
Posted on August 28th, 2010 at 9:55am.
LFM Co-Editor Govindini Murty was on Lars Larson’s national radio show yesterday, talking about the big new movie releases this weekend – including the Avatar re-release.
Special thanks, as always, to Lars and his staff for inviting Govindini on. Govindini always has fun appearing on his show.
Lars’ show runs at different times across the country, so be sure to check out his website here.
Posted on August 28th, 2010 at 8:04am.
Danny Trejo & Steven Seagal go at it in "Machete."
By Jason Apuzzo. • The Hollywood Reporter is running a big article today on the controversy expected from Robert Rodriguez’s forthcoming Machete, which comes out next week. Essentially, the film is landing smack in the middle of the ongoing immigration debate (particularly, re: Arizona), and here are some of the delightful episodes we can apparently expect to see in Rodriguez’s film:
Among “Machete’s” more provocative elements are border vigilantes led by Don Johnson as a kind of avatar for Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and fake political ads for an incumbent senator whose platform is built on his “hard line against wetbacks” and a description of them as “parasites.” That the two characters murder a pregnant Mexican woman to prevent her baby from being born in America and then shoot her distraught husband while uttering the line, “Welcome to America,” underlines the point.
What complicates this sort of thing, of course, is that Rodriguez’s films tend to be done in a tongue-in-cheek manner … but it’s difficult to understand how the murder of a pregnant Mexican woman and her husband – mixed with the genuinely cheap, gratuitous “Welcome to America” crack – is really all that conducive to an amusing storyline.
Or to put it another way: this isn’t very funny.
Rodriguez has made quite a nice career for himself in America. Does he ever reflect on that, at all? I’ve generally been a fan of his – even through the weird, 9/11-related anti-military subplot of Planet Terror - but I’m getting the sense he might be pushing the envelope a bit too far in this film. Why? Why does he feel the need to do this?
• In related news, Machete’s Jessica Alba says she’s going to try to start taking more family-friendly roles, now that she’s a mother. It’s getting a little late for that, frankly. The family-friend roles, that is – not the motherhood.
• On the family-friendly front, by the way, the LA Times has a nice little article today on Disney’s new ‘Tinker Bell’ movie series, which Pixar’s John Lasseter and a variety of other talented people are involved in … so check that out.
Earth in the world of "Avatar."
• One of the things I neglected to mention yesterday in my remarks on James Cameron is that he also gives away too much in his interviews. Even if I was interested in seeing in Avatar: Special Edition – which I’m not – it’s become quite plain that a much longer, fuller version of the film is headed to DVD and Blu-ray. This version of the film, which will include about 16 new minutes (instead of the 9 new minutes in the current version heading into theaters today), is apparently going to include a prologue featuring Sam Worthington’s character on a “polluted, dystopian Earth … shots of lead character Jake in a sports bar” with “polluted, crowded cityscapes.” The picture to the left, taken from this website, apparently gives you the flavor of what Earth looks like in these scenes. I believe the phrase here would be ‘Blade Runner-esque.’
Beyond all this, the new Avatar DVD is also going to have about 45 minutes of unfinished and/or deleted scenes, apparently – so there doesn’t really seem to be much reason to sit through the 3 hours this weekend, except for the fetishists and/or completists.
• No surprises here: a Karate Kid sequel is coming our way. Will the Chinese government get to edit this one, too?
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Katy Perry talks career vs. Christianity today over at Access Hollywood. Sorry, no pin-up today! I promise to make up for it next week …
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on August 76th, 2010 at 2:37pm.
Blue female: Beau Garrett as Jem in "Tron: Legacy."
By Jason Apuzzo. • It would be very easy these days to devote a post per day to James Cameron. He’s everywhere, commenting on everything, seeing analogies to Avatar everywhere, and apparently not turning down many interviews. Perhaps this is what working out of the public eye for so many years does to you. In any case, Cameron is in the news again today for many different reasons on the eve of the Avatar re-release. In the LA Times he indicates that he wants Avatar to compete with Star Wars, Star Trek and the Tolkein ‘franchise’ on a macro-pop culture scale (it won’t, for many reasons). He also sees analogies to the despoiling of Pandora in the BP oil spill, and now comes word today – and this certainly is no surprise – that the Iraq war represented a major impetus behind Cameron’s writing of Avatar.
Mr. Cameron strikes me as being something akin to a mad scientist from a 1950s sci-fi film, in that there is undoubtable genius at work in what he does … yet this ‘genius’ (which is of both a technical and narrative variety) is put to ends that are, ultimately, insane in their basic conception. The irony is that Avatar reverses so many things that Cameron’s films seemed to stand for in the past in terms of the basic justness of American military interventions abroad – whether one thinks here of Aliens or True Lies or even Rambo II (which Cameron co-wrote). Cameron has gotten lost in his own technology, his own personal Pandora of anti-Americanism, pseudo-mysticism and eco-extremism – and it’s becoming increasingly unpleasant to watch.
• In related sci-fi/fantasy news, check out this interesting interview featuring Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, circa 1980, in which we learn that George Lucas was, indeed, planning his Star Wars prequels even back then (down to the 20 year timeline interval between trilogies). George is nothing if not methodical. Also today: someone has put together a ’silent film’ version of The Empire Strikes Back, which is a lot of fun; there are also indications that big news will soon be coming out about Peter Jackson’s Hobbit; and Tron: Legacy has a new international teaser poster out, featuring Beau Garrett. I’m really looking forward to this film, and hoping it’s been worth the wait.
Blue female: Riley Steele at the "Piranha 3D" premiere.
• The Wrap thinks movie ticket prices are too damn high. They’re right. The major culprit? 3D. It’s true; I caught a 10am screening of Piranha 3D last week and the ticket cost $9, which is crazy. For that price, the underwater ballet should’ve been at least 5 minutes longer.
• The Academy will be giving honory Oscars out this year to Francis Ford Coppola (Irving Thalberg Award), Jean-Luc Godard, Eli Wallach and Kevin Brownlow … all richly deserved, in my opinion. Coppola and Godard are among my all-time favorites, Kevin Brownlow is easily one of our best film writers … and who doesn’t love Eli Wallach? The funny part of all this is, though, that nobody can find Godard to tell him! Typical Godard. He’s probably living in Alphaville.
• Did you like Frank Miller’s Gucci ad from the other day? Not to be outdone, Martin Scorsese just shot a slick new ad for Chanel.
• Katy Perry looked and sounded great on Letterman’s show yesterday. We’re eager to promote her stuff, in the midst of this bad economy, because we recently learned from the LA Times that the ‘real’ subject of her music is “consumerism.”
• Christina Hendricks is now doing ads for London Fog, which provides trenchcoats for Mad Men. I didn’t think trenchcoats could fight so tightly on a gal.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Piranha 3D’s Riley Steele has a birthday today, which is appropriate considering that she’ll be wearing her birthday suit on screens all across America this weekend.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on August 26th, 2010 at 6:57pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. Earlier today I read what has got to be one of the most unintentionally funny excrescences from a Hollywood liberal that I’ve ever encountered. Jeffrey Wells today over at Hollywood Elsewhere, a site renowned for its faux-insider musings on the industry – not to mention Wells’ retro-ducktail haircut – engages in some decidedly breathless speculations over whether Angelina Jolie might be … a closet right-winger!
Jolie gets 'politically profiled.'
Who is ‘Salt,’ indeed!
But that’s not all! In conspiratorial tones redolent of his apparently deep, penetrating insights into female psychology, Wells also speculates on whether Ms. Jolie’s alleged conservatism is somehow responsible for her legendary sexual prowess in bed! Well!
Even if I tried, I couldn’t make this stuff up.
Some context here: we’ve been talking-up Jolie’s Salt for months here at Libertas (see here and here) because of that film’s blistering critique of the communist cause – a cause which lingers on today, as we all know, in other guises … both domestic and abroad. And as regular Libertas readers know, it remains astonishing to me that the right wing media in America continue to ignore Salt while promoting Stallone’s anti-CIA hit job The Expendables, which still isn’t even doing as well at the box office as Jolie’s savvier, more pleasurable film.
So here comes Jeffrey Wells stumbling into the mix, with his conspiratorial musings on whether Jolie is some kind of puppet for her “saliva-drooling Tea Party nutter” father (Jon Voight), along with some Rat Pack-level psychology on the female of the species. [By the way, all of this comes fast on the heels of the LA Times' Tom O'Neil political 'profiling' of Ernest Borgnine, based solely and exclusively on Borgnine's refusal to see Brokeback Mountain.]
Here’s Jeffrey Wells, sans irony:
Angelina Jolie isn’t just the once-estranged daughter of Hollywood’s worst saliva-drooling Tea Party nutter, Jon Voight. She may also be a closet ally of Voight’s, at least in terms of despising Barack Obama. (Call this a flimsy maybe.) She also seems to be a supporter of America’s military adventures in Iraq and perhaps also Afghanistan and…well, basically anywhere that the poor are suffering due to the deprivations of war. …
I only know what Jon Voight has said and stands for, and that I saw him standing near his daughter and Brad Pitt inside a roped-off area at the Salt premiere after-party. And the old cliche about the acorn not falling too far from the tree flew into my mind, especially considering her rep as a closet rightie (including her alleged support for McCain during the ‘08 campaign) and that “stay the course in Iraq” Washington Post article she posted in ‘08. And being…okay, maybe she’s more of an Ayn Rand libertarian, given her interest in making a film version of Atlas Shrugged.
It’s fair to say that if Rush Limbaugh is singing your praises, something stinks in the kingdom of Denmark.
The basic conservative impulse is to bow down and show total allegiance to authority. This obviously links up with the old cliche about right-wing women (like Rand) being especially passionate about worshipping strong males, which is incidentally why they’re said to be so great in bed. This could be one possible explanation for those reportedly overheard sounds that suggested “an animal being killed.”
I’m not one to take unsourced Us magazine quotes as anything to rely upon, but combine the Washington Post op-ed piece with this 11.09 non-attributable quote that Jolie considers Obama to be a “closet socialist,” and I’m at least thinking “hmmm.”
The term “closet socialist”….well, what’s so bad with that? FDR was one, and he had it right in my book. Anyone who uses such a term is clearly a closet rightie. I mean, that’s a symmetrical way of looking at it.
“‘She hates [Obama],” a source close to Jolie told an Us reporter, according to the article. “She’s into education and rehabilitation and thinks Obama is all about welfare and handouts. She thinks Obama is really a socialist in disguise.”
So let me summarize some of what we’ve learned from Mr. Wells here, because it’s really quite fascinating.
• One of the reasons Jolie might be a right winger is that Mr. Wells spotted her standing next to her father at the premiere of Salt. My, that does seem incriminating!
• Another reason she must be a conservative is that she was interested in playing the Dagny Taggart role in Atlas Shrugged … which, apparently unbeknownst to Wells, famous Hollywood liberals like Charlize Theron and Julia Roberts have also been attached to because it’s a great female role. Does that make them ‘closet righties’ too, Jeffrey?
Right wing women: "great in bed."
• “The basic conservative impulse is to bow down and show total allegiance to authority,” asserts Mr. Wells. And blissfully unaware of the ironies involved, just a few lines later Wells goes on to praise the presidency of FDR. I’ll leave that fun little contradiction alone because I don’t believe in shooting turkeys while they’re squawking in a barrel.
• This is my favorite Wells-ism, though: that right-wing women worship strong males, and for this reason are “great in bed.” Well! Among other things, we’re learning here about what Mr. Wells himself apparently thinks makes a woman “great in bed”: namely, the worship of “strong males” … like him? Fascinating! It’s amazing how retro some of these ‘liberal’ guys can be!
• I also like Wells’ efforts to tie Jolie’s right-wing politics to celebrity gossip about some apparently loud lovemaking (the “animal getting killed” stuff) between Jolie and Brad Pitt at an African resort, from five years ago. Apparently in Wells’ mind that’s a strong journalistic lead in the hunt to uncover Jolie’s secret, reactionary worldview!
I could go on here, but I think you get the point. I’m less interested here in whether Jolie is actually a right-winger (I doubt that, frankly) than in a typical Hollywood liberal’s image of what a conservative must be like.
I’m also intrigued by what Mr. Wells’ heated musings suggest about what the average Hollywood liberal really thinks of the female of the species, by the way. Who’s really the caveman here? It sounds like it’s you, Jeffrey. Or maybe you’re just not getting your ducktail stroked enough.
Posted on August 26th, 2010 at 2:02pm.
Betty & Edna.
By Jennifer Baldwin. After two blessed Betty-free weeks, the former Mrs. Draper returns in this week’s episode. And wouldn’t you know it, this episode gave us Betty at her worst (the vindictive, Sally-smacking, “I’ll cut your fingers off!” mother from hell) and at her most sympathetic (Betty in the therapist’s office).
I’ve always been sympathetic to Betty when she’s in these therapy scenes. In the first season, her vulnerability with the (duplicitous) psychiatrist was heartbreaking; it was Betty at her most likable and human. Whenever she gets talking on the therapist’s couch, Betty often reveals more about herself than she knows — there’s a very wounded and messed up human being in there beneath the cold, aloof, shrewish surface. This is Betty at her most honest (even if she’s unaware of the honesty bleeding through her pretense) and as a result, it’s hard to hate her in these scenes. Perhaps that’s why I was so anti-Betty last season — we were only given the surface pretense and the outward coldness and very little of the inner, human Betty.
Well, we get human Betty again this week — after a long absence. In a meeting with a child psychiatrist (for Sally), Betty unknowingly starts having a therapy session with the shrink herself. This makes sense, of course, since Betty has been much more of a “child” than the other adult characters on the show (recall her twisted, sometimes tender, but ultimately creepy relationship with young Glenn Bishop). Betty doesn’t really reveal much outwardly, but the little pauses, the half sentences, the tone of her voice and her demeanor all show just how much pain Betty is in — and how much she’s trying to suppress and disguise it. Eeesh. Betty is so screwed up.
However, Betty does make a good point, re: Don. Why did Don plan a date when he knew he’d have the kids? Of course, Don reveals later to Faye in the break room that he doesn’t see his kids enough and he doesn’t know what to do with them when he does. He feels relief when he brings them back to Betty – but then afterward, he misses them. Eeesh. Don is so screwed up.
This episode had weird shifts in tone, from strange and disturbing (the Betty/Sally storyline) to comical and bouncy (all the stuff with Don and Miss Blankenship and the caper involving a rival agency and the Honda account). An uneven episode, and probably the season’s weakest overall (also: the first episode this season to not be written or co-written by Matthew Weiner).
Miss Blankenship.
Which is not to say it doesn’t have some spectacular moments. The trick Don and Co. pull on rival agency CGC is pure delight — accompanied by the kind of swinging mid-60s music that makes it all seem like a Tony Curtis comedy. And everything involving Roger’s WWII service and his continued animosity toward the Japanese is precisely the thing that makes historical drama fascinating. It’s a peek inside the mind of a WWII vet, twenty years after the war. It’s hard for us to imagine now — that lingering hostility towards our WWII enemies — but Roger’s words and actions show how hard it was for some men to forget. Plus it gives us another perfect scene between Roger and Joan. Forget Peggy and Pete, and Don and Betty — Roger and Joan are my all-time favorite pairing.
Other points and observations:
On the weekly Pete front, I must say, Pete’s vocabulary always amuses. Vincent Kartheiser rolls out lines like “A Deerfield chum of mine” as if he’s been saying it his whole life. Also: “Christ on a cracker!” Seriously, where does he get this stuff?! And Pete speaks for many of us when he asks: “Who the hell is Dr. Lyle Evans?” (Is the line a red herring?).
I might be in the minority opinion, but I find the never-ending vaudeville comedy routine between Don and his new secretary, Miss Blankenship, to be a hoot. Yes, it’s rather low comedy, but it’s added a bit of levity to a show that sometimes takes itself too seriously.
Also good for some comedy gold: The Japanese, their translator, and one Joan Holloway Harris.
Honda Honcho (in Japanese, while staring at Joan’s breasts): “How does she not fall over?”
Joan (to the translator, noticing the Japanese staring eyes): “They’re not very subtle are they?”
Translator: “No.”
Bethany — who looks like Virginia Mayo — makes a reappearance this week. Also, who knew Benihana was around in the 60s? Apparently I need to bone up on my cultural knowledge!
Pete & Ichiro.
Continuing Cultural Reference Watch: “A Margaret Dumont-sized disaster” (note that she died just about the time this episode took place); Man from U.N.C.L.E.; and of course, the title of the episode: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
It’s interesting how the Japanese this season are playing the role the British played last season. Culture clash and the growing influence of Asian culture on American culture: business and entertainment, Honda and Godzilla.
Also of note: I was indeed right — Dr. Faye was wearing a wedding ring. But … she’s not married! It’s basically a “keep away” sign for all the wolves. Of course, now that Don knows the ring is a fake, how long before he and Faye are “doing it,” as Sally would say? I predict it happens in two weeks.
Finally, the closing credits song was “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” as sung by Doris Day. “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” of course, is from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song, made into a film in 1961, and starring James Shigeta and Miyoshi Umeki. Both Japanese.
Posted on August 26th, 2010 at 10:05am.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Sean Connery turns 80 today, and we want to wish him a Happy Birthday. Connery’s done many great films and created many great characters over the years, but his lasting achievement is obviously going to be having created the most memorable characterization yet of James Bond. Indeed, due to the combined efforts of both Connery and Ian Fleming, 007 probably became the most iconic literary and /or filmic character of the Cold War era.
Sean Connery.
I just recently was watching Goldfinger and Thunderball, and the thing that struck me most about those films was the studied ease with which Connery mixes machismo, and a dry, urbane wit. Very few actors have ever been able to combine those things as well as Connery did in his prime. Daniel Craig and Sam Worthington, please take note: you become an action star by doing more than just sneering at the camera and head-butting your co-stars. It takes a dash of intelligence, and more than a little humor. The key factor with Connery is the fun he’s having along with the audience as his character is put into increasingly more insane situations. That fun is utterly infectious, and is what makes the early Bond films so droll and delightful. Happy Birthday to the estimable Scotsman.
In related Connery news, somebody in the UK recently dug up a previously-thought-lost copy of the BBC Anna Karenina that Connery did in 1961 with Claire Bloom, just one year before Connery became a megastar with Dr. No. It will be out on DVD next month.
• There’s apparently going to be a Hurt Locker-based reality TV series that will be following a bomb-disposal squad in Afghanistan. The show will be titled “Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan,” and will take viewers behind the scenes of a U.S. Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit.
I didn’t think reality TV could be more frightening than “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” but this surely is. The courage of the men and women who do this sort of thing for a living is beyond anything I can imagine.
• You all know that we’re fans of Frank Miller here at Libertas, and now there’s a bit more to see of Frank’s forthcoming new ad series for Gucci … which has a bit of old-fashioned James Bond flair, perhaps? Check out the new ad below. It’s very sexy, love what Frank’s doing here.
• Did you know that vampire-related entertainment properties have brought in about $7 billion to the Hollywood economy? That’s what the Hollywood Reporter is claiming today. I’m going to assume for the moment that it’s young female audiences who account mostly for this. As I’ve been saying here for months, I think that the Harry Knowles-style fanboy is slowly in the process of being displaced by romance-starved young women as Hollywood’s primary consumer. This is just another sign of it.
• Speaking of romance-starved young women … do you remember the satiric review I did the other day of Piranha 3D? The purpose of that review was to satirize how a progressive-Marxist style intellectual might react to that very silly, very fun little film. Well, would you like to read what an actual, progressive-Marxist style reading of Katy Perry’s new album looks like? Read the LA Times review of Perry’s new Teenage Dream album. I kid you not: the LA Times reviewer is convinced that Perry’s music is essentially a paean to rampant American consumerism.
Here’s an excerpt from the review below:
More than her Christian background or the chick-lit limits to her take on sexual liberation, what makes Perry a controversial artist is her essential hollowness. “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?” she sings in the power ballad “Firework.” Perry felt like that bag, but then realized what a bag was for: to be filled up with shiny, purchasable things.
Though her lyrics generally recount familiar scenarios on the road to romantic fulfillment, Perry’s real subject is consumerism. [Emphasis mine.] From the bouncy-house Scandinavian beats provided her by super-producers Max Martin, Stargate and her mentor Dr. Luke to the childlike enthusiasm with which she embraces lyrical clichés to the vocal style that combines sports arena chants with karaoke croons to her Halloween store look, Perry is the living embodiment of what it means to be bought and sold.
Her songs are like ads, with hooks that hit like paintballs and choruses that exhort like slogans; she delivers them with the gusto of a pitchwoman. On “Teenage Dream,” the songs alternate between weekend-bender celebrations of hedonism and self-help-style affirmations encouraging listeners to get an emotional makeover. Either way, acquisition is the goal: of a great love, a happy hangover, a perfect pair of Daisy Dukes.
I think Prof. de Molay will be emailing this reviewer shortly, as they probably have a lot to talk about.
Owen Wilson & Carla Bruni. Note baguette.
• IN CLASSIC MOVIE NEWS … Everybody’s talking about Josef von Sternberg right now because a series of von Sternberg classics are coming to DVD (see here, here and here), and there are some screenings coming up in New York of some of his classics. I’m a big fan of von Sternberg’s work, particularly his films with the great Marlene Dietrich. In other classic movie news, there’s a new biography out of Cecil B. DeMille that looks quite good (although I strongly recommend C.B.’s classic autobiography); the LA Times interviews Gone With the Wind’s Ann Rutherford this week; there’s a new rumor about a forthcoming Stanley Kubrick Blu-ray collection; there’s some fun speculation about what deleted scenes might be available on the forthcoming Star Wars Blu-rays; and our friend Patrick Goldstein at the LA Times talk about the new Liz Taylor-Richard Burton biography, Furious Love.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Woody Allen says in an interview that French first lady and Libertas favorite Carla Bruni was “very professional” on the set of his new film Midnight in Paris – and that working with her was “smooth and pleasant.” We expected no less. Carla apparently plays a guide at the Rodin Museum, and she was so good Allen’s going to keep all her scenes in. This may be the first Woody Allen film I see in years.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on August 25th, 2010 at 11:45am.
Scott & Ramona.
By Patricia Ducey. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is an action-packed, coming of age adventure that even non-gamers – or those unfamiliar with the original graphic novel – can enjoy. Pilgrim is adapted from Canadian Brian Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels of the same name by writer/director Edgar Wright (of comedy classic Shaun of the Dead) and remains true to the visuals and the spirit of O’Malley’s story. But Wright grabs every film and cultural reference he can and brings the novel to life in a bold and raucous romp through 20-something slackerdom and redemption.
Michael Cera, of Superbad fame and present day reigning filmic geek, graduates in Pilgrim vs. the World into action hero and possibly into mature manhood. Cera plays a 22-year-old bass guitarist living in a one-room shack with best friend/gay roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin in a fine performance). He and his buddies are trying to break into indie rock stardom with their garage band Sex Bob-omb, while Scott manages or mismanages his complicated, feckless love life. (The band is actually pretty good, with songs written by Beck.)
Scott lives partly in Toronto and partly in his own fevered dreams. He is a serial heartbreaker who refuses to take responsibility for the trail of tears he leaves behind when he bails. He negotiates the vagaries of a multiculti, multi-sexual limbo of 20-something slackerdom; he and his buddies are adrift, jobless, unable to commit to anything or anyone. His chaste romance with a 17-year-old (and thus unavailable) schoolgirl Knives Chau personifies that emotional paralysis.
His hesitant heart explodes, though, when he spies the beautiful and aloof Ramona Flowers, a woman his own age, whose disinterest proves the headiest of aphrodisiacs. After one date, he discovers the roots of her melancholy withdrawal—a string of mean ex-boyfriends who have wounded her, she fears, for good. To win her, he must first defeat these 7 jealous ex-boyfriends, now allies in the nefarious League of Evil Exes (Axis of Evil?) and release her from the past. Scott easily vanquishes first ex Mathew Patel, an Indian-Canadian hipster, who then breaks into a Bollywood danceoff accompanied by his demon chick backup dancers. After defeating an angry lesbian and a vegan rock star, Scott approaches the last level and last ex, Evil Exes ringleader Gideon, the one who still holds sway over Ramona’s affections. In a nod to the classic Rushmore, Gideon is played by the grandfather of all lovelorn nerd heroes, a now grown up Jason Schwartzman.
Canadian O’Malley’s Toronto, filmed in lovely tones of winter black and white, proves a lovely palate cleanser when sequences of dazzling special effects and primary-colored graphics threaten to overwhelm. Wright borrows visuals from PacMan to Wii, the original TV show Batman, manga, comic book split screen close-ups, and even inserts of O’Malley’s original pen and ink drawings from his Scott Pilgrim novel series.
Pilgrim has been described as the first movie for the joystick generation, and it may well be the first ‘post-liberal’ film, as well. The characters exist in the fullness of well-developed character, not as motes in some polemicist’s eye. Wallace’s sexuality is but one facet of his character: he is neither Magical Gay nor Victim Gay. The racial identity of Knives Chau or Mathew Patel is as important to the narrative as Scott’s — which is to say, not at all. Pilgrim also merrily and mercilessly jabs at a few PC targets like vegans, in a laugh-out-loud sequence involving one of Ramona’s exes.
Pilgrim vs. the World at almost two hours may be a couple of villainous exes too long — O’Malley claims they structured the story like a game, with confrontations that lead to higher levels or to doom — but its heart and its values redeem it all in the end. Pilgrim is probably safe for teenagers, with a few sexual references and excesses, but Scott and his buddies learn a few lessons about responsibility and empathy, and the world rights itself.
Kudos to Wright for keeping it PG and exploiting fully the dispensation from cynicism that Hollywood grants to Young Adult fare; for all its techno razzle-dazzle, Pilgrim v. World honors a very traditional narrative that respects its ‘message’ and its young viewers both.
Posted on August 24th, 2010 at 3:29pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. I’m curious as to what people think of this preview (above) for NBC’s forthcoming series, The Event. Here are the main elements I’m getting from this trailer:
• Heroic, charismatic young black President.
• CIA conspiracy involving illegal detainees.
• A secret detention facility in Alaska?
• Some sort of 9/11-type event.
I believe this is what is referred to as ‘on the nose’-style filmmaking. And we apparently now have the Obama Administration’s own version of The West Wing.
Somehow you knew this was coming, didn’t you?
[Special thanks to LFM's Patricia Ducey for tipping me off about this.]
[Special thanks to Hot Air for linking to this post.]
Posted on August 24, 2010 at 2:20pm.
