By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: Bad-ass ex-Federale ‘Machete’ (Danny Trejo) turns renegade in order to exact revenge on a Mexican druglord named Torrez (Steven Seagal) – and the corrupt, right-wing political machine in Texas that he secretly controls. Along the way, Machete gets help from some angry chicas played by Jessica Alba (a conflicted ICE agent) and Michelle Rodriguez (a kind of female Che Guevara who runs a taco truck).
THE SKINNY: I never thought I’d see a boring Robert Rodriguez film, but this one is. Rodriguez apparently decided to flesh out the Machete story from the original trailer with endless plot twists, political sloganeering and exposition. Do you think Inception was hard to follow? Or Salt? Try following Machete - it’s basically impossible. At 1 hr. 45 minutes the film is at least 30 minutes too long; it’s a kind of Roger Corman version of Traffic. And the politics? Off-the-charts left wing, and trite in the extreme.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK:
• Much like Planet Terror, Machete isn’t so much a film as a series of gags or skits that Rodriguez jammed together with the idea that somehow, some way, it would all fit together in the editing. You can just imagine him and his buddies swigging Patron Silver and thinking: “Let’s have a scene where Lindsay Lohan shows up in a nun’s outfit and starts blowing people away! … or a scene where Michelle Rodriguez shows up dressed like Snake Plissken and starts blowing people away! … or a scene where Machete tokes-up with a priest!,” etc. The film is a bloated, episodic mess that never gains any momentum – and is still ‘explaining’ its impossibly convoluted plot even in the midst of the final fight scene between Trejo and Seagal.
• Rarely have I seen a filmmaker show such complete contempt for anyone in his audience who might be politically to the right of, say, Pol Pot. Eisenstein and Pudovkin were really warm, cuddly, humanistic filmmakers compared to Robert Rodriguez. [They were also more talented.] Here are a few things you will be treated to in the film: a scene of a right-wing Texas senator (Robert De Niro) and his Minute Man-style henchman (Don Johnson) murdering a pregnant Mexican woman and her husband in cold blood along the border, and topping the moment off by shouting “Welcome to America!”; a right-wing Texas businessman (Jeff Fahey) crucifying a priest (Cheech Marin) on the altar cross in his own church, even driving the final nail into his wrist. This sort of stuff didn’t exactly put me in a great mood for the rest of what Rodriguez was dolling out, which wasn’t much to begin with.
Insane nurse twins.
• Robert De Niro is apparently under the impression that he has a gift for comedy. He seems to have believed this for many years, actually – despite ample evidence to the contrary. Every scene he appears in in Machete is a disaster. His mugging and grimacing as a nasty, demagogic, murderous right-wing Texas politician is so awful and inane as to be almost indescribable. Hey Bobby, do us all a favor and retire to New York and the cannoli – so we can live off memories of Godfather II, OK? You’re currently ranking below Snooki on my Italo-meter, both in personality and talent.
WHAT DOES WORK:
• Danny Trejo and Steven Seagal, more or less, to the extent that I care. Trejo’s face is like some kind of leathery Picasso painting. I’ve never seen anything like it on screen, actually; he makes Mickey Rourke look like Max Headroom. Otherwise, there wasn’t nearly enough of Steven Seagal in the film. Seagal is who Stallone should’ve had as the villain in The Expendables but didn’t.
• Every character in a Rodriguez film is vivid, whatever else one might say about them. Even Lindsay Lohan manages to pull it together here – although she isn’t exactly stretching herself by playing a drug-addled, rich-girl/internet porn queen.
• There are a few decent, pseudo-iconic cult moments in the film that almost redeem the tedium and the obnoxious politics: Trejo’s gory escape from a hospital; vengeful Michelle Rodriguez showing up in black leather and eyepatch at the end; the final Trejo-Seagal confrontation. But that’s about it.
The final showdown.
Robert Rodriguez must be a strange, angry hombre. Most guys who start in the world of cult filmmaking – Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, etc. – don’t want to stay there. They want to move up and out to a bigger audience. They want to deal with bigger themes, create larger myths. Another way of putting it is that they have old-fashioned middle class aspirations, they want to rise.
Rodriguez is the rare filmmaker who seems intent on remaining in the cult ghetto – peddling angry niche politics – no matter how well funded he is. That’s part of the political posturing of Machete – this idea that Rodriguez is himself part of a persecuted minority here in America, when in actuality he’s a rather well-funded filmmaker with swanky friends. Nobody’s really persecuting Robert Rodriguez, so far as I’m aware. It’s just a pose on his part.
I actually think Rodriguez stays in the world of niche films with niche politics because he’s afraid of trying anything really ambitious … because he might fail. So long as he sticks to ‘cult’ filmmaking, to making expensive shlock films with leftist messages, he gets to cruise.
This is precisely the reason, ironically, that he’s never going to reach the level of the filmmakers he obviously so admires – one thinks here of Sergio Leone, in particular, whom Rodriguez compulsively copies in film after film, Machete included. [Check out the opening title sequence of Machete - it's right out of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.] At Rodriguez’s age, Leone himself was doing everything he could to break out of the Italian sword-and-sandals ghetto to which his career had been confined. He was a striver, an achiever, who longed for the type of career that big American directors like Howard Hawks had. Leone re-charged his career by creating big, mythic landscapes populated with timeless characters like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, or Eli Wallach’s Tuco. It’s becoming quite clear that Robert Rodriguez does not have it in him to do anything that. Rodriguez is essentially becoming a kind of well-funded, Latino Roger Corman – although he doesn’t have Corman’s warmth or intelligence.
Rodriguez comes across to me these days as a kind of spoiled rich kid who doesn’t want to grow up. And his act is wearing thin – microscopically thin, actually, given Machete’s incendiary politics. I’m awfully tempted to tell Mr. Rodriguez to go screw himself, but then he would claim he’s being persecuted. Which is a joke, like his film.
Posted on September 3rd, 2010 at 8:12pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Can the theocrats in Iran possibly be any more obnoxious? It’s bad enough that Iran is blocking Jafar Panahi from attending the Venice Film Festival, but now a hard-line Iranian newspaper is calling Carla Bruni a ”prostitute,” because she had the audacity to condemn a stoning sentence against an Iranian woman convicted of adultery. This paper later asserted that Bruni should herself be stoned. What pigs.
I hope you boys in Iran enjoy this picture I found above of France’s First Lady. I tried to find something smoky, sinful-Western-decadent, and sharia non-compliant … just for you! Pull up a bowl of pistachios for yourself and check out what we get to enjoy here in the West, while you boys gawk at black robes all day.
By the way, it would be wonderful if our own First Lady showed the slightest interest in these matters – you know, human rights abuses against women – while she’s busy during her frantic vacation schedule.
"Mad Men" stars on the cover of Rolling Stone.
• Mad Men is on the cover of Rolling Stone right now. Yowza! Couldn’t resist.
• We’re now learning that the Discovery Channel gunman was apparently a radical environmentalist who experienced an ‘‘awakening” after he watched An Inconvenient Truth – how genuinely inconvenient. This would also seem to imply that he actually stayed ‘awake’ during the film. No wonder he went crazy. [Did he make it through Avatar, too?]
Based on what I’ve read about this guy (he apparently thought that human beings needed to be exterminated from the Earth, in order to make room for the animals), it’s surprising to me that he would’ve been so disgruntled about cable programming these days. Didn’t he see Life After People ?
I know it’s tragic that this person has lost his life – and I apologize if I seem insensitive here – but I’m allowed to be completely unsurprised, and downright cynical, about the fact that our entertainment industry is actually instilling psychosis in our citizens, implanting lies about humanity (that we’re a curse to our planet, etc.) that are now bearing an awful fruit. You might call this process ‘inception,’ so to speak.
Talulah Riley of "Transmission."
• Variety just did a feature on Mao’s Last Dancer, and the incredible challenges of shooting that film in China. Still waiting for Fox News to do feature story #1 on this film. Anybody awake over there?
• On the sci-fi front, you really didn’t think there could be another alien invasion film greenlit, did you? Well, you’d be wrong, because we have another, called Transmission. This time it’s “a British sci-fi feature being shot in 3D and centered around an alien invasion during an solar eclipse,” with the film being described as “Pitch Black meets 28 Days Later.” Proposed cast: Bob Hoskins, Jason Flemying, Talulah Riley, Willem Dafoe. So here we go again. Why the aliens would bother to wait for a solar eclipse is anybody’s guess – but at least this film they’ll be shooting natively in 3D, as opposed to post-converting it. With respect to Ms. Riley’s presence in the film (see right), the 3D approach certainly seems like a good idea.
In related news, there are some new set photos out of Rihanna in Battleship; and we’ve also got some new Tron: Legacy posters out today.
• Apple is re-booting Apple TV, and is now going to be streaming TV shows through iTunes. Everyone seems to be underwhelmed by this news. I think the problem here is that everyone is looking for the 1 great app that will unify all digital content consumption (TV, phone, web, DVDs, etc.) and that’s never going to happen. We’re just going to keep getting these little advancements until someone invents a Brain Chip. I assume Google is working on that.
• Perfect irony: Variety reports that an Indian (south Asian) production team will be doing a $30 million biopic of Christ; meanwhile, back in Hollywood, 3 TV networks are fighting over a series to be titled Good Christian Bitches. [Sigh.] I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. On a somewhat related noted, a new survey suggests that moviegoers by and large are still willing to watch Mel Gibson in movies. I am too – in old ones, that is.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … we thought we’d take a look at British star Talulah Riley (see above), who will apparently be battling alien invaders (who isn’t these days?) in the forthcoming British thriller, Transmission. Let’s hope she’s up to it – she may have to quit smoking, first.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on September 2nd, 2010 at 5:22pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. The ironies on display here are too much. Recently I came across this award-winning Russian film called 9th Company, which is essentially about the late stages of the Russian war in Afghanistan. You can watch the trailer for the film above; the film’s just coming to DVD and Blu-ray right now, although it actually dates from 2005.
The Russian invasion of Afghanistan was a brutal and sadistic affair all the way around. What’s so striking to me, though, is that even the Russians have apparently been able to muster sufficient national pride in the valor of their soldiers to make this relatively large-scale film about their experiences in Afghanistan.
And what do we get here in America from Hollywood about our own Afghan war? The ostensibly ‘just’ war (in contrast to Iraq, so the story goes)? We get nothing.
As I mentioned in my recent post on the new Aussie film Tomorrow When the War Began, the climate here in the United States for freedom-oriented filmmaking is really lousy. Here we have a situation in which the biggest DVD release of a war film set in Afghanistan is being provided to us by the Russians. Perhaps we should import some of their politicians, while we’re at it. I’m no longer sure it would make much difference.
And by the way, you know how I found out about this film? They were advertising on Harry Knowles’ site(!). What a country we’re living in.
Posted on September 2nd, 2010 at 1:38pm.
Michelle Rodriguez in "Machete."
By Jason Apuzzo. Here’s Machete’s Michelle Rodriguez today, speaking to the LA Times:
“I was nervous about doing a movie about Latinos. I’ve usually stayed away from it,” she told 24 Frames, saying she found most depictions of Latino culture on the big screen to be one-note and marginal. “But after I read the script, I realized this is about a symbol of hope. It was kind of the way we felt about Obama when he was first elected …”
The depiction of Machete as a symbol of hope for a Latino community, at a time when, as the movie noted satirically, immigration fears were running riot, heartened Rodriguez. And to the extent it shows Latinos and whites working together, she says, it felt even more ideological.
“It was like seeing Run DMC and Aerosmith doing that video together,” she said, referring to “Walk This Way.” “It was like, ‘Yeah, man, we can all do this together and laugh about it.’ “
All do what together? Incite a race war?
Robert Rodriguez, by the way, apparently wants to do a trilogy of these films. I’ll be telling you what I think of the first one tomorrow.
Posted on September 2nd, 2010 at 12:00pm.
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 named Psudo 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Chi Cao from "Mao's Last Dancer."
By Jason Apuzzo. • It was such a pleasure seeing Mao’s Last Dancer this past weekend. It’s an emotional, stirring film that is carried by two very strong performances by Chi Cao and Bruce Greenwood. The story of how this young Chinese dancer rose to prominence during the nightmare-period of Mao’s reign, came to America – and then fought tenaciously for his freedom – is a story that everyone should see, especially when it’s told as elegantly as director Bruce Beresford tells it here.
What I was stunned by, however, were all of the flattering references in the film to (then) Vice President George H.W. Bush, and also to President Reagan. It’s made quite plain that the elder Bush was instrumental in securing this young dancer’s freedom, and this is probably going to be the most flattering take on the Bush family and/or legacy you’re going to see on film any time in the near future. We’ve got a brief except from the film below in this context, by the way.
I cannot recommend this film highly enough, as it expands into wider distribution next weekend. Mao’s Last Dancer is not only a compelling indictment of the communist system, but a rousing testimony to the opportunities available to high achievers in free societies like our own. Make sure to see it.
On the box office front, Mao did over a $192,000 in business on 31 screens in 10 markets. It opens to 15 new markets this upcoming weekend. Make sure to check out the clip below.
• From the sublime to the ridiculous … the other film I saw this past weekend that involved a ballet sequence (ahem), Piranha 3D, finished #6 at the box office this weekend with over $10 million … which is actually only about $6 million less than the #1 film, The Expendables. Despite the strikingly positive reviews this film received (Rotten Tomatoes currently has it at an 81 rating), the rather obvious problem this film faced is that its intended audience – namely, teenagers – for the most part couldn’t see it due to its R rating. [Personally I think the film easily could've received an NC-17.] Still, I think Alex Aja has created a genuine cult masterpiece here that will live long and prosper once it reaches its natural milieu of unrated home video. 
And, indeed, word is now breaking late today that Aja and Dimension films are already planning a sequel to the film, possibly to take place in Thailand.
From "Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader."
• Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks may be teaming on an adaptation of the post-9/11 Jonathan Safran Foer novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This project looks interesting, and we’ll keep an eye on it. I haven’t read the novel, but Entertainment Weekly has a brief summary of it here.
• Angelina Jolie has announced that her next project will be a low-budget love story set at the height of the Bosnian war, for which she wrote the screenplay … and which she’ll be directing (she will not be acting in the film). ”The film is a love story, not a political statement,” Jolie asserts in a recent statement about the project.
Good for her. How odd that at this point I feel more confident in how she’ll handle this material than, say, how Stallone might. Salt, by the way, has thus far grossed $216 million worldwide.
Turning heads at the Creative Arts Emmys.
• The annual article about ‘Hollywood Reaching Out to Christians’ has come out … this time from The New York Times. It’s a little tiresome reading these articles each year. Basically the only reason films get made that appeal to Christians these days is because Christians themselves – usually working outside the confines of the Hollywood system – pony up their own money and get them made.
By the way, in this context there are some new clips out today of the next Narnia film.
• The LA Times’ Tom O’Neil questions whether SAG should be honoring the great Ernest Borgnine simply because O’Neil doesn’t like Borgnine’s personal politics … which O’Neil is apparently able to divine simply because Borgnine didn’t feel like seeing Brokeback Mountain. Mr. O’Neil, this is what’s called blacklisting. It’s an ugly, retrograde practice and you should stop this immediately.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Mad Men va-va-voom star Christina Hendricks made a striking appearance at this weekend’s Creative Arts Emmy Awards. Did you really think we were going to miss this? The striking Ms. Hendricks will be competing for a Best Supporting Actress Emmy when the big-time Emmy Awards roll around this upcoming Sunday.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on August 23rd, 2010 at 6:02pm.
"It's true - Jolie's kicking our butts."
By Jason Apuzzo. I’m going to keep harping on this point until people get the message: namely, that Sylvester Stallone has not revitalized the action genre, but merely his own career (sort of), with The Expendables.
As the entertainment media continues to harp on Stallone’s Expendables being #1 at the box office this past weekend (although more honest types like the UK’s Guardian are admitting Stallone’s doing it against no serious competition), it’s worth pointing out that in head-to-head comparison Stallone & Co. still aren’t faring as well as Angelina Jolie’s Salt.
In its second weekend The Expendables has currently taken in $65 million, which is less than the $71 million Jolie’s Salt had by its second weekend – when that film was playing against Christopher Nolan’s box office juggernaut, Inception.
In fact, as Box Office Mojo notes today, even the Brad Pitt/Quentin Tarantino/men-on-a-mission Inglorious Basterds (which didn’t feature the CIA as an enemy) had taken in $73 million by its second weekend.
So sorry, Sly, we’re still not buying your film’s sham ‘patriotism,’ its ‘re-invention’ of the male action genre, or its box office prowess. And you and your action buddies are still getting your clocks cleaned by a girl.
Posted on August 23rd, 2010 at 3:56pm.
From "Avatar: Special Edition."
By Jason Apuzzo. Most of the attention surrounding the re-release of Avatar in ’special edition’ form has centered around the extended ‘alien sex scene’ – which is sounding pretty tame, frankly. [Having recently seen Piranha, of course, pretty much everything is seeming tame right now.] Buried, however, in an article today from The New York Post, is this tidbit from James Cameron about another scene that’s been put back in the film – a scene Cameron refers to as “the drums of war.”
• A scene Cameron calls “the drums of war,” which he hopes will clarify why the humans choose to wipe out the Na’vi. He compared it to America’s decision to invade Iraq. “We had to provoke Saddam to do something stupid, and it’s like that with the humans invading Pandora,” he said. “I felt when I was writing it that the Na’vi had to counter-react and do something that is called an atrocity that gave [humans] the moral right to go in and destroy and displace them. The additional footage is pretty short, but it fulfills that purpose.”
So let me untangle this for you. Cameron’s ‘thinking’ more or less proceeds as follows:
• America invaded Iraq by ‘provoking’ Saddam into doing “something stupid.” What was that, exactly? Refusing to allow in weapons inspectors? How did we ‘provoke’ him to refuse weapons inspection?
• In Avatar, the Na’vi are thus ‘provoked’ into committing something that is “called an atrocity.” So is it an “atrocity,” Mr. Cameron … or isn’t it? Does an atrocity become less of an atrocity if it’s provoked?
• The atrocity which isn’t actually an atrocity because it was provoked then becomes the pretext for the humans moving in and exploiting the Na’vi’s land. Or something.
Did you get that?
By the way, I’d like all the people out there who still aren’t sure whether Avatar is a political film to please raise your hands – so Mr. Cameron can hand you some free, prune-flavored suckers.
Incidentally, Cameron says today that an Avatar sequel may not arrive in theaters until 2014. What a relief.
Posted on August 23rd, 2010 at 12:51pm.
From "Mao's Last Dancer."
By Jason Apuzzo. • Mao’s Last Dancer is in the news a lot right now. The LA Times has a piece on the difficulties associated with shooting the film in China, and director Bruce Beresford does a new interview on the film over at IndieWIRE.
Predictably, the NY Times has attacked the film as “brainless,” but the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern had this to say about the film:
The movie’s strengths are considerable. The first section summons up a tormented period of Chinese history when art was bent to the breaking point in the service of a ruthless state … The film celebrates artistic freedom without preaching a sermon, and often flies when Mr. Chi is on screen. When he is on stage, spinning and leaping to the strains of magnificent music, the film soars.
I’ve put another clip of this extraordinary new film below. Make sure to see it this week. You can read the LFM review of it here.
• While on the subject of China, possibly the only film that America and China should be able to cooperate on, without Chinese censors getting involved in the mix, is a movie about Army Air Corp Lt. Gen. Claire Lee Chennault and his Flying Tigers, who protected China from Imperial Japanese invaders during World War II. And that’s exactly what director John Woo is apparently trying to do, as he attempts to put together a U.S.-China co-production for a huge film version of the Flying Tigers’ story, that would end up in the IMAX format and possibly starring Liam Neeson in the title role. This sounds intriguing, and we’ll hope for the best on that.
The girls of "Piranha 3D," at the LA premiere.
• Everybody’s talking about Piranha 3D right now! Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of this film’s debut is that – as of the writing of this post – the film is receiving an 80 rating among critics over at Rotten Tomatoes. The film had a splashy (so to speak) debut in LA the other night at the Chinese theater, featuring some of the jaw-dropping (as it were) ladies from that film – and there are some new interviews out with director Alex Aja (see here and here), and with newly minted star/Playboy covergirl Kelly Brook (who’s also adorning the cover of Love Magazine this month). Ms. Brook, by the way, is dueling it out with her ex-boyfriend – the Expendables’ Jason Statham – at the box office this weekend.
As regular Libertas readers know, we expressed our enthusiasm for Piranha 3D early on – eagerly devouring each marketing ploy for this exceedingly cheeky and sexy little thriller. It’s for this reason, sensing the possibility that this film might be a cult classic, that we dispatched noted film critic and theoretician Prof. Jacques de Molay to review Piranha 3D for Libertas. He delivered a decidedly impassioned and idiosyncratic review.
I just got off the phone with Jacques, and frankly he’s still raving about the film. I could barely hear him, because he’s currently kayaking down the Amazon river, but some of the phrases I made out were: “Cult masterpiece … easily the best film of the year, possibly of any year … ecstatic pleasure … dream-like … watching hyper-real, 30-foot high females floating underwater in free space in 3D … like something out of a Botticelli painting … or Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage … why couldn’t James Cameron think of this?!” At a certain point I had to cut Jacques’ call off, frankly, because he was just going on too much. I suppose I’ll have to see the film now.
Underwater sirens: Riley Steele, Kelly Brook.
In related Piranha news, Lake Havasu is apparently worried that Piranha 3D is going to take a bite out of tourism due to unfounded fears of piranhas. (It’s the exact opposite; hordes of teenage guys are likely to now descend on the place looking for Riley Steele … probably quite willing to risk their lives in the process.) “Girls Gone Wild” mogul Joe Francis has also fired off an unintentionally funny legal letter to the producers of Piranha 3D over concerns regarding ‘defamation’ (the film’s primary villain is obviously based on him). I suppose it is a bit humiliating to watch one’s member getting chewed by piranhas on a 30 ft. screen in 3D, but maybe he should’ve thought about this sort of thing years ago when he started exploiting teenage girls.
Finally, Alex Aja has announced his next project … which will be a big-budget adaptation of the French space-pirate comic book series, Cobra. That looks absolutely fantastic, and we wish him the best with that.
• The trailer for the new Valerie Plame movie Fair Game is out, starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, and apparently Richard Armitage – the man who leaked Plame’s identity to Robert Novak – isn’t even mentioned in the film (or at least, no character by that name is listed in the credits). This is kind of like making All the President’s Men and not mentioning Deep Throat.
Jolie in Berlin.
• From real-life spies to fictional ones, Angelina Jolie premiered Salt in Berlin this week. This worldwide tour of hers is really colorful, and I enjoy covering it … but I’m wondering if one visit to, say, Greta van Susteren’s show might actually do more good for this film’s box office right now. Has Salt really been promoted as aggressively here in the States as it should be?
• The first review of David Fincher’s new Facebook movie The Social Network is out, and it sounds like a whopper. The Facebook camp isn’t happy about the film, not surprisingly. And now Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page may get the biopic treatment. [Why do I think Steve Jobs is next? He's the biggest character of them all.] Memo to the Silicon Valley crowd: you’d better start financing your own movies, if you want to start writing your own history … because otherwise, Hollywood will write your histories for you. Hollywood has a financial interest in keeping Silicon Valley egos in check, because the Valley is constantly threatening to take Hollywood over. Expect this inter-California rivalry to get a lot hotter.
• In sci-fi news, an interesting casting notice has leaked for the forthcoming J.J. Abrams’/Steven Spielberg Super 8. I’m very much looking forward to that film – actually much more so than any of the forthcoming sci-fi projects on the books that we’ve been covering here, simply because I have greater confidence in the filmmakers involved. We’re also learning that X-Men: First Class will apparently be taking place in the 1960s. According to Aint It Cool News:
[T]he film takes place in the 1960’s. John F Kennedy is the President of the United States. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are on TV doing marches. There is a spirit of a hopeful future that was prevalent in that time.
Now receiving transmissions.
Interesting. In other sci-fi news, the new poster for Skyline is out, and Shia LaBeouf is apparently very excited about the storyline that’s been revealed to him for Indy 5.
Word on the street is that Indy 5 will be headed to the Bermuda Triangle, potentially with a final stop in Atlantis. Indy 4, along with the suprise-hit Cloverfield, kicked off the most recent wave of alien invasion projects … and I expect Indy 5 to add a new dimension to this whole craze before it’s all over, due to Lucas and Spielberg’s deep immersion in sci-fi lore …
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … would you buy iPod accessories designed by Brit celebrity Katie Price? [They adorn her headgear to the right.] These things look like they’re designed to receive transmissions from outer space – of which she may already be receiving her fair share. She may be trying to snag a role in Area 51, although Battleship or Piranha would probably be more appropriate given that she already comes equipped with artificial flotation devices.
And that’s what’s happening this weekend in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on August 22nd, 2010 at 9:06am.
By Jason Apuzzo. As many of you are aware, we’ve been highly critical of late of Sylvester Stallone’s new film The Expendables, which features an extremely nasty caricature of a CIA agent, as played by Eric Roberts. [See our thoughts on the film here and here.] Our criticism of the film in fact recently made The LA Times.
All of this is of note because in a recent interview Stallone did on Fox News with Bill O’Reilly on Thursday, August 19th, Stallone responds to unnamed critics who have taken him to task on his depiction of the CIA and of ostensible ‘imperialist’ American overreach overseas.
Since I’m not aware of any other film site that’s taken Stallone to task on these issues as we have, I will proceed under the assumption that he’s responding to Libertas – or has otherwise been made aware of our criticisms.
Watch the segment of the interview between 3:05 – 3:30 for Stallone’s remarks on this subject. His denials of our criticism are, unfortunately, difficult to square with what is actually depicted in his film – in which a druglord/ex-CIA operative collaborates with the brutal regime of a South American country in order to exploit that country’s cheap labor and resources.
One final note here: we like and respect Bill O’Reilly here at LFM. In fact, LFM’s own Govindini Murty has appeared as a guest on Mr. O’Reilly’s show twice. Unfortunately, however, Bill did not bother to actually see The Expendables before conducting this interview – something he admits at the outset. Had he actually seen the film, it’s unlikely he would have agreed with the characterization of the film by Stallone and others as being benignly ‘patriotic.’ It isn’t. The only flag Stallone waves in this film is his own.
Posted on August 21, 2010 at 11:56am.
