Hollywood labor leaders: Roy Brewer and Ronald Reagan.

By Jason Apuzzo. Ronald Reagan’s 101st birthday was just two days ago on February 6th, and in honor of the occasion journalist and scholar John Meroney recently put together a fascinating new video detailing new discoveries concerning Reagan’s early days combating communism in Hollywood.

The thesis of the video, and of an accompanying piece by Meroney in the latest edition of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, is that Reagan’s early experiences combating communism in Hollywood served as a template for Reagan’s later struggles against the Soviet Union as President.

The video and the article are the result of copious research conducted by Meroney in the private archives of Roy Brewer, a Hollywood labor leader during the 1940s and ’50s and a close colleague of Reagan’s at that time. In the video you will hear audio recordings – unearthed for the first time in over 60 years – of Reagan and Brewer discussing their complex struggles against communist influence in Hollywood’s labor unions.

Meroney refers to these findings and others in Brewer’s archives as “Reagan’s Rosebud” (referring to ‘Rosebud’ from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane) – i.e., the key to unlocking Reagan’s early transformation from Roosevelt liberal to anti-communist Cold Warrior. Meroney’s compelling thesis, detailed in the full LA Times Magazine article, makes for fascinating reading if you are an admirer of President Reagan’s as I am, or interested in either Cold War or Hollywood history.

I encourage Libertas readers to watch the video and read the full article for context, and we wish John the best with his ongoing efforts to uncover the vital role of Reagan’s early Hollywood experiences in his ultimate defeat of the Soviet system.

Posted on February 8th, 2012 at 12:50pm.

This comes to us today courtesy of Vimeo via The Huffington Post.

LFM’s Govindini Murty recently conducted a 2-part interview with Herzog (see Part I, Part II). No chickens were harmed during the interview.

Posted on February 8th, 2012 at 12:44pm.

[Editor's Note: This post appears today at The Huffington Post and at AOL-Moviefone.]

By Jason Apuzzo. He’s 89 years old, and his career is hotter than ever.

With hits like Thor, Captain America and X-Men: First Class dominating the box office in 2011, and upcoming films like The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man looking to light up the summer in 2012, you’d think that a man whose career in comic books began just prior to World War II might want to slow down.

Think again – because this 89 year-old dynamo is named Stan Lee.

This year’s Sundance Film Festival offered a smorgasbord of art-house delights, but its competitor across the street – the scrappy Slamdance Film Festival – presented one of Park City’s best events last week when it hosted comic book legend Stan Lee for a 2-hour master class associated with Slamdance’s screening of the new documentary, With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story. Just two days after receiving the Vanguard Award from the Producers Guild of America, Lee breezed into Park City to spend a special two hours with filmmakers and journalists prior to the With Great Power screening, discussing his extraordinary career as the creator of iconic characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

And if anything was clear at the end of the master class and screening, it was this: the keys to Stan Lee’s ongoing success are his earthy humor, humanity, and incredible vitality. The man simply doesn’t know how to slow down. As Lee says in With Great Power about being the impresario of today’s comic book cinema: “I’m having fun! Don’t punish me by making me retire.”

Stan Lee at the Slamdance Film Festival.

A flinty and funny raconteur with a baritone New York accent, Lee spent much of his time at the Slamdance master class describing his colorful early days in which he was alternately a rebellious office boy for a trouser manufacturer (he made a mess of his store after being fired two days before Christmas), an obituary writer (he found the job morbid), and even a Broadway theater usher (he once tripped and fell flat on his face while escorting Eleanor Roosevelt to her seat at the Rivoli Theater in New York).

Lee finally got his big break in late 1941 when he became interim editor at Timely Comics, which would eventually evolve under his leadership into Marvel Comics. Then known as ‘Stanley Lieber’ (his name at birth, as the son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants), Lee was first given the chance to provide text filler for a May 1941 edition of Captain America Comics – and he hasn’t looked back since.

The language of "Thor" inspired by Shakespeare.

A passionate reader, Lee described in detail how literature fueled his imagination as a young person. “I read everybody when I was young – Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, [Edgar Rice] Burroughs’ Tarzan. I read everything I could get my hands on.” Lee also cited Shakespeare as an influence on the style of language for Thor, drily noting that Thor “was supposed to be a Norse god – I couldn’t have him talk like a guy who was born in Brooklyn. I loved Shakespeare, and I read Shakespeare when I was young. I probably didn’t understand most of it, but I loved the sound of it.” Lee’s fascination with Shakespeare continues to this day, with Lee and 1821 Comics collaborating on the new graphic novel Romeo and Juliet: The War, a sci-fi retelling of Shakespeare’s classic love story which debuted last week.

Lee also developed an early love of the movies. When I asked Lee what movies had influenced him, he was quick to cite Errol Flynn’s adventure films of the 1930s and ’40s. Continue reading »

[Editor's Note: The post below appears today at The Huffington Post and the newly relaunched AOL-Moviefone site, where LFM's Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty will also now be blogging.]

By Jason Apuzzo. The Cold War is back – at least at the movies.

This weekend moviegoers can watch Meryl Streep portray ardent Cold Warrior Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Gary Oldman root out a dangerous Soviet mole from the British intelligence service in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Tom Cruise race to prevent a Cold War-style nuclear exchange between America and Russia in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

These films form part of a major Hollywood trend toward reawakening memories of the Cold War – an era that is suddenly returning with a vengeance on the big screen, with long-term implications for our popular culture.

Currently in the midst of an awards-season run, for example, Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar tells the story of legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s decades’-long confrontation with Soviet infiltration of America. Also in the midst of an awards-season run is the ominous new documentary Khodorkovsky, which depicts how little Russia’s authoritarian governing style has changed since the dark days of the old Soviet Union.

Michael Fassbender in "X-Men: First Class."

And the trend doesn’t stop there. If Santa slipped new Blu-rays of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, X-Men: First Class, Apollo 18 or The Kennedys into your Christmas stocking, you just got another healthy dose of Cold War nostalgia from those films – because 2011 was a watershed year in Hollywood for reviving America’s long-standing rivalry with all things Russian and/or communist.

So, what’s going on here? Why is Hollywood suddenly reviving Russian communists, spies and autocrats as the go-to villains of choice?

The simplest answer may be that the old Soviet Union is gradually replacing Nazi Germany, Imperial Rome and space aliens as Hollywood’s favorite antagonists. In an industry still hesitant to make films about today’s War on Terror, and with memories of World War II fading, Russian authoritarians – including those of the present day variety – are on their way to becoming Hollywood’s safe, consensus villains of the moment.

This trend began in 2008, with of all things an Indiana Jones film. Set in 1957 at the height of the Cold War, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull featured Soviet communists as the villains, and despite grumbling from critics and internet fanboys the film played well in middle America – taking in over $317 million domestically (a figure even Ghost Protocol seems unlikely to match) and $786 worldwide. Perhaps just as significantly, the fact that the film had been made by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas seemingly gave the green light to other left-of-center filmmakers that depicting Reds as the villains was OK again.

Angelina Jolie in "Salt."

Soon Angelina Jolie was hunting sleeper Soviet agents in Salt (2010), Ed Harris and Colin Farrell were escaping a brutal Soviet gulag in Peter Weir’s extraordinary The Way Back (2010), and even Richard Gere and Martin Sheen were getting in on the act – smoking out a Russian mole in The Double (2011). Released here in the U.S. in 2010, Fred Ward played Ronald Reagan in the French Cold War spy thriller Farewell, and Renny Harlin’s action-drama 5 Days of War (2011) depicted the brutality of Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia.

To be fair, Russians haven’t been the only villains in this trend. MGM’s forthcoming remake of Red Dawn (read a review of an early cut of the film here) depicts a communist invasion of America by the North Koreans and Chinese, similar to the invasion of Australia depicted in Stuart Beattie’s recent thriller Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010). Bruce Beresford’s touching Mao’s Last Dancer (2009) recreated in heartbreaking detail the restrictions in Chinese communist society on artists. And perhaps no recent film captured communist tyranny more vividly than Mads Brügger’s gonzo documentary from 2009 on North Korea, The Red Chapel.

Sterling Hayden as Col. Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove."

This movie revival of the Cold War – in its many Russian, Chinese and North Korean variations – has intriguing implications. For the past generation, many left-of-center filmmakers have been deeply invested in the notion that the Cold War was a kind of paranoid mirage, a tragicomic figment of Ronald Reagan and Whittaker Chambers’ imaginations. With few exceptions, the basic image created by these filmmakers of the Cold War – codified in films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), or more recently in Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) – has been one of an artificial conflict fueled by American militarism and bourgeois small-mindedness. The sardonic The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) serves as perhaps the sine qua non of this genre.

This vision of the Cold War appears to be changing, however, among younger, less ideologically driven filmmakers. These filmmakers view the Cold War simply as a fertile field of storytelling possibilities about the struggle for freedom, in much the same way an older generation viewed World War II. Filmmakers today seem more eager to tell such stories about the Cold War, unearthing the past and depicting the sharp political divisions between East and West, perhaps because these filmmakers detect a continuity between communist tyrannies of the 20th century and similarly repressive regimes today.

After all, Brezhnev and Mao may be gone – but an ex-KGB man still runs Russia, and communists still run repressive regimes in China and North Korea. And America’s relationship with these nations sometimes seems no better than it was before.

After a 3D re-release, "Top Gun" is slated for a sequel.

Today’s Hollywood seems alive to these realities as never before, as reflected in a slate of new projects in the development pipeline that channel Cold War themes. Along with sequels to Salt, X-Men: First Class, Die Hard (with Die Hard 5 set to take place in Russia), and even Top Gun, work is also underway to re-boot the Jack Ryan franchise with Chris Pine in a new thriller called Moscow. Remakes of famous Cold War properties like Ice Station Zebra, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and even Colossus: The Forbin Project are also in development – along with adaptations of the books Londongrad, The Reluctant Communist, and the Red Star comic book.

On TV, HBO and FX are working on competing series about ’80s-era Soviet spies in the U.S., and HBO reportedly has another series in development about Cold War spies in Berlin.

As if that were not enough, Gerard Butler and Ed Harris will soon be trying to stop rogue Russian generals and KGB agents from starting World War III in Hunter Killer and Phantom, respectively. Or if your sensibilities run toward the art house, Andrzej Wajda is currently directing a biopic of Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

Granted, it shouldn’t be assumed that these films will express a uniformity of opinion about the Cold War, or about current international tensions. Indeed, several recent films like The Iron Lady, J. Edgar, and X-Men: First Class express a pronounced ambivalence about the Cold Warriors they depict.

Watching The Iron Lady, for example, you would hardly know why the Soviet Red Army newspaper labelled Margaret Thatcher “the Iron Lady” in the first place. The film is weirdly evasive of Thatcher’s vital role in ending the Cold War – barely alluding to it except in brief moments of Thatcher with Reagan and Gorbachev, or attending an event commemorating the end of the Cold War. The Iron Lady seems more concerned with Thatcher’s current state of physical fragility than in her momentous alliances with Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa in hastening the collapse of the Soviet state.

Still, the fascination that films like The Iron Lady or J. Edgar have with Cold Warriors of the past is obvious. And certainly none of these recent films bothers to romanticize the communist cause. Indeed, the days in Hollywood of dueling Che Guevara biopics (Che, The Motorcycle Diaries) – or of Katherine Hepburn wearing a frayed Mao jacket to the Oscars – seem long gone.

The Cold War is back in Hollywood, but this time the idea seems to be to support the winning side.

Posted on January 13th, 2012 at 5:24pm.

Dominic Cooper in "The Devil's Double," Michelle Yeoh in "The Lady," and Colin Farrell in "The Way Back."

[Editor's Note: this post appears today at The Huffington Post. Jason is very pleased to now be blogging at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. Freedom is one of the most important prerequisites of artistic excellence. 2011 was distinctive for producing a number of critically acclaimed films that celebrated the history of the arts and of the cinema itself – from Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, to Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Yet filmmaking never takes place in a vacuum, and these superb, literate films – which value knowledge, humanity, and civilization – are nonetheless the outgrowth of a free society, and would have had difficulty being made under circumstances of political tyranny.

It’s therefore worthwhile to celebrate the notable movies of 2011 that took the risk of advocating for democratic freedom, the political principle that makes so much film artistry possible. Some of these are foreign films created under the most difficult circumstances, while others are mainstream Hollywood productions made within the freedom of democratic society. Whether spectacular or intimate, tragic or comic, these films dramatized to audiences around the world the importance of liberty. With the revolutions of the Arab Spring, citizen protests in China, and the recent democracy demonstrations in Russia, 2011 was a remarkable year for democratic action and this year’s pro-freedom films often reflected this.

Given that many of these are foreign or independent films with multi-year releases, we thought it fair to include films that had their first theatrical or DVD release in the U.S. in 2011, or that screened in a U.S. film festival in 2011. Also, this is merely a list – not a ranking – so please consider each film on this list to have its own unique value.

Jafar Panahi in "This is Not a Film."

1. This is Not a Film – Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran

This is Not a Film depicts in heartbreaking detail the house arrest of acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was accused in 2010 of making a film critical of the Iranian government. Panahi vehemently denies the charges, yet he currently faces six years in jail and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking. Nonetheless, in This is Not a Film Panahi not only documents his own house arrest, revealing how the banal details of daily confinement can crush the human spirit; he also reveals how the creative impulse can survive even the most repressive circumstances, and inspire hope.

2. The Way Back – Peter Weir, U.S.

Starring Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess, and Saoirse Ronan and directed by Peter Weir, this epic and moving film based on real events tells the story of a group of Polish, American, and Russian political prisoners who escaped from a brutal Soviet gulag in 1941 and walked 4000 miles from Siberia to India and freedom. An extraordinary paean to liberty, The Way Back’s courageous protagonists repeatedly affirm their willingness to die in freedom rather than live out their lives in the slavery of Soviet communism. The film’s concluding montage depicting the events of the Cold War is a long overdue acknowledgment from Hollywood of how the fall of European communism freed millions of Poles, Czechs, Russians, and Eastern Europeans.

Jessica Chastain, Octavia Spencer in "The Help."

3. The Help – Tate Taylor, U.S.

The civil rights drama The Help reveals how the struggle for freedom is equally urgent when it comes to racial equality in America. With gripping performances from Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and a powerful ensemble cast, The Help portrays the plight of African-American women who labored as house maids in the American South of the 1960s. The Help depicts the daily humiliations and injustices that grind down the human spirit and that form an ‘internal prison’ of despair that can be as destructive as any war, or act of violence. Taking place within recognizable domestic circumstances, The Help shows that our respect for civil rights in America is as important as our fight for human rights around the world.

4. Petition – Zhao Liang, China

A member of the ‘Digital Generation’ of independent Chinese documentarians, Zhao Liang depicts in Petition the Kafkaesque struggle of the Chinese people for justice from their own government. Petition follows real citizens, often poor and powerless, who travel from all across China to Beijing to petition the government for redress against local injustices. Zhao Liang goes into the petitioners’ shanty towns to hear their tragic tales of official malfeasance: unlawful imprisonment, confiscations of property, torture and death at the hands of local authorities. The petitioners wait months and sometimes years for their cases to be heard, and in the meantime eke out miserable existences in cardboard hovels on the sidewalks of Beijing. Following on Zhao Liang’s powerful Crime and Punishment, Petition is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to understand the abysmal state of human rights in communist China.

From "The Red Chapel."

5. The Red Chapel – Mads Brügger, Denmark

In one of the bravest films in recent memory, director Mads Brügger and Danish-Korean comedians Simon Jul Jørgensen and Jacob Nossell risk their lives traveling to North Korea to tweak/punk that nation’s tyrannical communist regime. Ostensibly visiting North Korea for the purpose of putting on a Danish socialist comedy show as an ‘inter-cultural exchange,’ the filmmakers’ true purpose is to document the censorship and inhumanity of the North Korean government. Referring to the communist dictatorship as “the most heartless and brutal totalitarian state ever created,” Brügger and his comedians repeatedly make fools of the authorities in this blackly satirical, poignant and insightful documentary. All the more relevant after the demise of Kim Jong Il, The Red Chapel follows on the heels of North Korea-themed films like Kimjongilia, Yodok Stories, and The Juche Idea in illustrating how the cinema can advocate for freedom by exposing tyranny. Continue reading »

By Jason Apuzzo. The first trailer is now out for Sacha Baron Cohen’s forthcoming comedy, The Dictator, and for the most part I like it. Cohen has obviously thrown political correctness out the window, and at first glance it looks like this film could be hilarious. Take a look, and judge for yourself …

Posted on December 14th, 2011 at 12:38pm.

By Jason Apuzzo. We like to periodically put a spotlight on short films here at Libertas, and this recent short film above called “The Arab Spring” caught my eye over at Vimeo. The film is essentially an abstract representation of the historic events of the Arab Spring, and is quite polished in terms of its graphic design and sound. Take a look. We wish filmmaker Raoul Marks the best with it.

[UPDATE: The filmmaker has made the decision to remove the film from Vimeo. See the comments from filmmaker Raoul Marks in the comments section below.]

[UPDATE #2: The film is now back up, with a minor alteration.]

Posted on November 30th, 2011 at 11:40am.

Sam Worthington in a new ad for "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3." The game has grossed $775 million in its first 5 days.

By Jason Apuzzo. Since we first debuted Terror Watch as a series here at Libertas back on the weekend of September 11th, there have been a torrent of announcements regarding War on Terror-themed projects in Hollywood and in the indie film world – confirming that we have a major, bona fide trend in play here. The floodgates are obviously now open, and the War on Terror – interpreted as a traditional American fight for freedom – has suddenly become one of the hottest subjects in Hollywood.

What’s causing this trend? I have my theories, which are in order: 1) the weakening grip of the Baby Boomers on Hollywood; 2) the successful bin Laden raid; 3) Obama in the White House; 4) the astonishing success of video games like Call of Duty and Battlefield.

But actually I don’t particularly care what’s causing it any longer. All I know is that it’s about damn time.

• Among the big new projects announced recently, two really caught my eye: the Navy SEAL drama Rubicon, and the CGI Iraq War thriller Thunder Run. Rubicon will be written, directed and produced by Christopher McQuarrie – and the Rubicon story will serve as a platform for a movie, graphic novel and a videogame. Rubicon is set in Afghanistan and features the Navy SEALs as the heroes and the Taliban the villains. Fabulous! We’ve only been waiting for this sort of thing for what – 10 years? McQuarrie’s brother actually commanded a SEAL team, and the film will otherwise be co-produced with founding SEAL Team Six member Dan Capel.

As an added bonus: Rubicon will be a retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, with the Navy SEALs taking the place of the samurai.

So am I looking forward to this project? Hell yes. The Seven Samurai connection in particular gives the storyline a kind of mythic overtone, elevating it above conventional action-thriller fare. Cineastes may recall, incidentally, that director John Sturges’ classic Western The Magnificent Seven had similar origins in Kurosawa’s film. Bravo to McQuarrie and team for having the ambition to try this, and we’ll root for this project getting fully off the ground in days ahead.

As for Thunder Run, that appears to be an even more unusual project – essentially a 3D CGI depiction of the heroic capture of Baghdad by American forces in April 2003. The film is based on the novel Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad, and Black Hawk Down screenwriters Robert Port and Ken Nolan are writing the adaptation. Amazingly, the film already has Gerard Butler, Sam Worthington and Matthew McConaughey attached, along with director Simon West (Con Air, Tomb Raider). In other words, this is a very hot property – and given the gigantic debut of Call of Duty this past week, expectations for this film could be absolutely off the charts. Also: Thunder Run already has a promo poster out. [Btw, I'm wondering if Sam Worthington is clearing all this stuff with James Cameron?]

"Seven Samurai"-inspired artwork (left) for "Rubicon."

As if that’s not enough, Brad Thor’s novel Takedown is now in development at Warner Brothers. Takedown deals with a butt-kicking former Navy SEAL Team 6 member who takes on an Al Qaeda plot to strike New York; think Jack Bauer on steroids

In other new projects: Michelle Monaghan (Machine Gun Preacher) will be playing an Afghanistan War vet in the indie drama Fort Bliss; Tom Hanks has been offered the lead in Patriot Down, about a U.S. President on the run after Air Force One gets shot down over Pakistan; Producer Frank Marshall (the Indiana Jones & Bourne films) will now be adapting some of Jeffrey Archer’s novels; Oliver Hirschbiegel will soon be directing Eye in the Sky about drone strikes; and Universal may be picking up a new comic book project called War Heroes – although that one looks vaguely annoying.

"The Devil's Double" hits Blu-ray.

• The Devil’s Double, which features an electrifying performance by Dominic Cooper in the dual role of Uday Hussein and his body double Latif Yahia, hits Blu-ray/DVD on November 22nd. If this film didn’t hit your area or you haven’t had the chance yet to check it out yet, this week will be your big chance. (Read Joe Bendel’s glowing review of the film from LFM’s coverage of Sundance.) Govindini and I were very impressed with the film and can’t recommend it enough.

• The big news, which came out just yesterday, is that the untitled Sony-Kathryn Bigelow ‘hunt for bin Laden’ movie has a new official release date of December 19th, 2012. Also: the movie apparently has its star, Jason Clarke (I’m not familiar with him), with prominent people like Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises), Guy Pearce, Idris Elba (Thor) and Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) circling other roles.

The initial rap against this film – in part – was that Sony had selected an October 2012 release date to capitalize on next year’s election and bolster Obama’s flagging re-election hopes. As I expressed in my initial Terror Watch, though, it didn’t seem very likely to me that Bigelow would even be able to make that date – and sure enough the movie has now been pushed off to mid-December, probably as late as Sony could go without dropping the film into January, a no-no for any film with award-season ambitions.

So what will the film be like? We simply don’t know yet. An interesting footnote, however: a competing Navy SEAL-bin Laden movie is already in the works called Code Name Geronimo, and yet another SEAL Team 6 project is currently being shopped around based on the new book SEAL Target Geronimo. Expect more of this sort of thing in the future. Someone might want to consider making a film, for example, called SEAL Team 6 Kills Code Name Geronimo bin Laden. Just a thought. Continue reading »

By Jason Apuzzo. It appears that we may have a new film movement afoot, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests: “Occupy Cinema.” For the moment this movement seems to be situated around just a few sites: Cine Foundation International, Occupy Cinema and Cinemas In Solidarity. However, I sense a trend growing – a filmic uprising that may change the cinema as we know it.

Or not.

A movement in the making?

I recently watched two of the film offerings at Cine Foundation International, and decided to embed their latest – a short film titled “#Occupy Cinema Untitled 1” – above, for LFM readers’ consideration. Frankly, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the film, so I decided to email my old colleague, Professor Jacques de Molay, Professor of Cinema & Neurosemiotics at the University of Northern California. I was very eager to seek out Jacques’ opinion about the film – as he’s always had a better feel for radical, transgressive cinema than I do.

As regular Libertas readers know, Jacques is a widely recognized Marxist intellectual, and last appeared on our site here to provide a guest review of Piranha 3D, which he liked very much – interpreting the film as a subversive parable on ‘consumerism.’ As Jacques put it at the time, reviewing Piranha: “after the Wall Street collapse, commerce in today’s capitalist society can only end in bloody apocalypse – a farrago of bikini tops, chewed limbs … and shattered ideals.”

With this in mind, I asked Jacques what he thought of the film above. He emailed me this reply, from his vacation home in St. Bart’s: Continue reading »

By Jason Apuzzo. A new trailer for Act of Valor is now out. Check it out above. Featuring active-duty Navy SEALs in action, Act of Valor opens nationwide on February 17th.

Posted on November 15th, 2011 at 12:26pm.

By Jason Apuzzo. While we’re on the subject of major figures of the Cold War era (see the J. Edgar review below), a new trailer has just arrived for The Iron Lady, about Margaret Thatcher.

So will this be the hit job many people are fearing, or something more complex and true-to-life? Judge for yourself.

Posted on November 14th, 2011 at 11:26am.

Leonardo DiCaprio & Armie Hammer in the lead roles.

By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: Director Clint Eastwood and star Leonardo DiCaprio bring the colorful and controversial life of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to the big screen, in a sprawling and complex biopic covering some 50+ years of American domestic history.

THE SKINNY: Eastwood’s relaxed, naturalistic directing style combines with a charismatic performance from DiCaprio to create a mostly sympathetic portrait of Hoover, albeit one that traffics in shopworn clichés of ‘50s anti-communist ‘paranoia’ and Kinsey-style sexual repression. J. Edgar bites off far more history than it can chew in 2 1/2 hours, however, and suffers mightily from its slow pace.

WHAT WORKS: • Leonardo DiCaprio has finally begun to hit his stride as an actor, delivering a voluble, eccentric take on Hoover – treating him as a dapper, genial workaholic with an occasional tendency to overstep his bounds. DiCaprio’s enthusiasm for the character is palpable, however, and mitigates the film’s sporadic tendency to belittle Hoover’s accomplishments.

• Eastwood’s direction softens some of the sharp edges in Dustin Lance Black’s script, keeping the focus on the characters rather than on Oliver Stone-style political showboating. Ideologues of both the left and right will not get out of J. Edgar what they want; the film is much more a Citizen Kane-style character study (complete with flashback structure) than a referendum on the anti-communist cause or the legacy of the FBI and its methods. The film is far too fond of Hoover to be considered left wing, yet too ambivalent toward Hoover’s politics to be considered right wing.

• The question of Hoover’s sexuality is broached tastefully, basically depicting him as too tightly wound for relationships of any kind. In fact, throughout the entire film he receives a grand total of one kiss – forced on him awkwardly by his friend, Clyde Tolson. As presented in the film, Hoover’s greatest passion is quite obviously his work.

• J. Edgar otherwise features strong supporting performances by Armie Hammer as Hoover’s colleague and companion Clyde Tolson, Naomi Watts as Hoover’s long-suffering secretary Helen Gandy, and Judi Dench as Hoover’s mother – the steel in J. Edgar’s spine.

Arriving at the Lindbergh estate.

Continue reading »