By Jason Apuzzo. A very provocative new trailer is out for The Kennedys, the new eight-part miniseries from 24’s Joel Surnow that will be appearing on the ReelzChannel beginning April 3rd. I would normally wait to put this trailer in a Cold War Update!, but since I just did one of those on Friday I didn’t want you folks to have to wait.
From "The Kennedys."
The series looks like a lot of frothy fun, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m also understanding why the major networks were so aghast by this series; this is most certainly not the sort of depiction of the Kennedy family we’re accustomed to seeing on TV. Besides potentially out-sexing Mad Men, the series also seems to make Joe Kennedy look like Chancellor Palpatine.
Joel did an interview recently with the LA Times in which he talked about the pressures he thinks the series was under from higher-ups at The History Channel, the series’ original home. We all know what those pressure were, don’t we? Thou Shalt Not Offend the Kennedys, liberalism’s Holy Family. Frankly, you’d think the Kennedys would be glad anyone even remembers them, at this point. Decades of Teddy in the Senate took a lot of lustre off that family’s image, and memories of Camelot are growing old, indeed.
My sense is that the ReelzChannel got themselves a bargain with this series – which may end up putting that channel on the map. I would also expect this series to do excellent DVD business, and potentially revive pill box hats.
Posted on March 21st, 2011 at 11:15am.
The Cold War freezes over in "X-Men: First Class."
By Jason Apuzzo. • Libertas made news yesterday with our exclusive first look at the ‘uncensored’ version of MGM’s new Red Dawn remake. It’s conceivable that our review will be the only look at that film anybody’s going to get – which would be astonishing, but there it is. You can thank MGM’s new masters for that.
However, I wanted to follow up today by noting that MGM’s decision to alter the film – and digitally remake the villains into North Koreans – has been received poorly just about everywhere. The reason for this is obvious: there is absolutely no narrative reason to re-cut the film along such lines except to satisfy China’s market gatekeepers. There is certainly no real-world reason to depict such an invasion as being spearheaded by an impoverished prison-state like North Korea, particularly when the basic premise of the film is supposed to be our financial ‘indebtedness’ to the invaders. The last time I checked, we’re not indebted to North Korea.
The current spin we’re hearing behind the scenes is that the film is being re-cut to now depict the invading force as a ‘communist coalition,’ an undefined ‘red menace’ of nations, with the North Koreans featured prominently. What nobody seems to be asking is what such a coalition would be worth without the sponsorship of China. Or are they expecting Transnistria to do the heavy lifting here? Or maybe Vietnam?
Sensing how badly this is all going over, one of Red Dawn’s producers, Tripp Vinson, gave a somewhat peculiar interview to Aint It Cool News yesterday. Here’s part of what Vinson said: Continue reading »
By Jason Apuzzo. • The biggest news since our last Cold War Update! was the debut of the trailer (see above) for Apollo 18, produced by Timur Bekmambetov. I can’t say that I was all that impressed with it; the movie looks more or less like Paranormal Activity on the Moon, and otherwise far inferior even to what Michael Bay seems to be doing, re: Apollo missions in Transformers 3. The trailer looks cramped and claustrophobic, and plot-wise a bit too obvious in terms of where it’s going. None of the characters jumped out at me as being interesting – merely as victims in a standard-issue horror scenario.
Also: I don’t mind the ‘found-footage’ motif, but what bothers me here is that the filmmakers don’t seem to have actually nailed what Super 8 film looked like back in the day. Super 8 was generally grainier, but also (as I recall) had slightly deeper-than-usual color saturation. In any case, I’m a bit underwhelmed by what I’m seeing thus far with this film. Perhaps they need to find some piranhas on the Moon …
• Christopher Nolan has announced that after Batman 3, he essentially wants to do a hit-job biopic of Howard Hughes. That, at least, is the strong implication from this piece over at New York Magazine, which states that Nolan’s Hughes-pic “would focus on the freakier decades of Hughes remarkably secretive and OCD-addled life.”
This captures, in essence, what I dislike so much about Nolan. Howard Hughes was an extremely innovative, daring and ultimately tragic individual – and easily one of the most compelling American figures of the twentieth century. (He was also, incidentally, an ardent anti-communist and Cold Warrior.) Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Hughes, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, only lightly scratched the surface of Hughes’ accomplishments and refined allure – but I’m glad Scorsese at least got a crack at the material, because what Nolan is sure to give us is another of one his epics of adolescent derangement (The Dark Night, Inception, Memento, etc.) for which he’s becoming so famous.
Olga Kurylenko as a Russian Spy.
What disgusts me here is that Hughes’ mental and emotional troubles later in life – which were likely genetic in nature, and beyond his control – were also ones that he went to great lengths to conceal, precisely in order to avoid this kind of exploitation. Like a graverobber, though, Nolan apparently can’t resist the temptation to plunder them – his new film project, incidentally, will be based at least partially on handwritten memoranda actually burglarized from Hughes’ office – and so now Nolan will drag us through the garbage pile of Hughes’ later life in order to make whatever trite points he has in mind. It’s ghoulish – but typical for Nolan.
• Olga Kurylenko has a spread in the current issue of the Russian Glamour. It’s pretty good, but I like this picture to the right better.
• According to Kiefer Sutherland, the 24 movie is still very much on – and Tony Scott is still apparently interested in doing it. They’re still waiting on a script, though. Scott, incidentally, has also been attached to the Top Gun sequel.
And speaking of Top Gun, writer Mark Harris in GQ is currently blaming Top Gun for ruining contemporary Hollywood cinema. Harris recycles the oldest cliche in the book: that the nefarious forces of Lucas, Spielberg and Bruckheimer have ruined Hollywood forever, when the industry should rightfully have been left to the likes of Hal Ashby and Mike Nichols. Harris – who reads like a kind of poor man’s Peter Biskind – also doles out more trendy, fanboy love to Christopher Nolan.
Memo to Mr. Harris: had the industry been left to the likes of Hal Ashby and Mike Nichols – admittedly fine filmmakers – Hollywood would’ve gone bankrupt, and we would still be shooting movies in Super 8. Sorry, but that’s how it is. Incidentally, if a genuinely innovative filmmaker like Hal Ashby came up nowadays, people like Harris would probably be the first to attack him.
• The makers of John Milius’ anti-North Korean Homefront video game recently talked to The Wall Street Journal. Here are some choice quotes from the WSJ piece:
Homefront is less about vilifying North Korea than about placing the player within an occupied America. The 1984 film “Red Dawn,” which Milius directed and co-wrote, was a key influence. In “Red Dawn,” a group of high schoolers form a guerrilla resistance against an invading Soviet Union and its allies. The uncanny image in the film of paratroopers landing in a school field, says Votypka, sums up the feeling Kaos has attempted to capture in Homefront—that of a gross violation of boundaries. Invasions are not supposed to happen on American soil, and as such must inspire a certain gut reaction in the player.
This is certainly true of Homefront’s opening minutes. The game begins with a dizzying pastiche of real and simulated news footage about foreign conflicts and the failing economy, blurring the line between fact and fiction. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in a televised broadcast about last year’s North Korean torpedo that sank a South Korean ship, is the very first image. The rest of the video sequence concerns the game’s near-future setting and backstory but is hard to parse. What it does convey is a sense of urgency and imminent danger. When the player is subsequently given control as Robert Jacobs, standing in his home in occupied America, it isn’t long before Korean soldiers drag him out and onto a bus headed presumably for a prison camp.
Like a long establishing shot in a film, the bus ride sets the scene, but lets the player move the camera. Looking out the windows, one can see Korean guards battering young men in front of a playground, spot a large “Store Closing” sign, and watch Koreans gun down a young boy’s parents as he begins to sob. The reaction, of course, is anger on top of helplessness. “When you play most military shooters, you get the sense that there’s a war overseas somewhere, and the military commander has told you to go take these objectives,” says Votypka. “[This game is] less about trying to associate with some military character that you have very little in common with. Homefront is much more personal, because it’s about how you would react in this situation.”
Cool. Not to pick a bone with the WSJ writer, but actually the game rather obviously does seem to be about “vilifying” the North Korean regime – which is fine by me. The game certainly sounds intense, not to mention hard core in its depiction of our current antagonisms with Pyongyang. Homefront debuts March 15th.
Russian model Irina Shayk.
• In other Cold War News & Notes: some footage has leaked of Leonardo DiCaprio filming Clint Eastwood’s Hoover biopic; January Jones is talking more about X-Men: First Class (see here and here); more images have leaked of Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher; word comes that Kevin Spacey was almost set to play the villain in the new Bond film (nooo!); THR has a review up of the new documentary just premiered in Berlin about the Mikhail Khodorkovsky trial; THR also talks to the German director of the new Red Army Faction movie; the creators of Atlas Shrugged have released a clip from the film that looks like something out of Dallas; and Tyrese Gibson is saying that Transformers: Dark of the Moon is going to be the best movie of the series. I certainly hope so. Special Note: As I’ve previously reported in our Invasion Alerts!, producer James Cameron and director Shawn Levy are apparently going to be remaking Fantastic Voyage in 3D. I’ll be reporting on this periodically here in our Cold War Updates!, since the original Fantastic Voyage was, in fact, a Cold War thriller about America and the Soviet Union racing to create technologies that could miniaturize their militaries for transportation purposes (an odd idea, when you think about it). What Cameron will be doing with this premise, God only knows.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … In a week in which Vlad Putin urged sexy Russian (not so) super spy Anna Chapman to run for the Russian Parliament – a great idea, in my opinion – you would think she would be our Cold War Pin-up … but not when Russian supermodel Irina Shayk gets the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, my friends! Ms. Shayk talked to The Wall Street Journal this week, and revealed her ambitions to play “a Russian spy” in a movie; however, she also pouted that Vlad Putin hasn’t called her yet to congratulate her on the SI cover. Bummer!
Tempted as I was to use a picture from her SI photoshoot, I’ve decided to go with something a bit sultrier she did for South African GQ recently.
And that’s what’s happening today in The Cold War!
Posted on February 23rd, 2011 at 5:51pm.
Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Photos leaked this week of Leonardo DiCaprio playing Hoover (see here and here). In all the chatter I’m seeing about this film, I still haven’t heard a peep about how this film intends to depict Hoover’s confrontation with actual – i.e., non-imaginary – Soviet infiltration of the American government from the 1930s-1950s. This is an enormous issue that has rarely been covered adequately in film, beyond the usual treatment as being a phenomenon of ‘paranoia.’ I’m hoping that Clint breaks from that clichéd and misleading template – although, for a multitude of reasons, I’m doubting he will.
You know who would’ve made a great film out of this subject matter? Kazan. (I’m actually reading his autobiography right now.) There are no Kazans today, however, because they’ve been weeded out of the system by the same people so enamored with Eastwood right now.
• Die Hard 5 suddenly has a director, and the latest rumors on that film involve Bruce Willis/John McClane fighting a relative of his old nemesis, German ‘Red Army Faction’-style terrorist Hans Gruber, wonderfully played by Alan Rickman in the original film. (Jeremy Irons played a relative of Rickman’s in Die Hard 3; I actually thought Irons was even better than Rickman.) What do people still think of this franchise? Personally, I’m long past caring about Willis or what he does; I didn’t even bother to watch Die Hard 4 - a film which, I might add, dropped its American title of Live Free or Die Hard in certain foreign territories in order not to ‘offend’ certain sensibilities. Opinions on the film and on Willis are welcome.
• Sony will apparently be releasing James Bond 23. Also: no word yet on whether or how this may also affect MGM’s Red Dawn.
• According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Russians are building a huge new studio complex, ‘Lenfilm XXI,’ which apparently could become Europe’s largest film studio. Question: isn’t it ironic that the Russians are actually building studios, while we’re shipping our film production overseas?
• The big news this week was the release of the new X-Men: First Class trailer, in which the young X-Men and X-Babes appear to play a role in … resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not exactly what I was expecting, but I’m rolling with it. Check out the trailer above, and see how the Cold War continues to be fought and re-fought on our screens these days. (Also: Bryan Singer talks about the new film here.) By the way, where are all the juicy production stills we’re expecting of January Jones and Jennifer Lawrence? (January Jones talks more about her sexed-up costumes here.) The latest production photo they released was of the back of Magneto’s head. Weird marketing, guys.
• Speaking of publicity stills, the first such still of Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher has just been released. I’m not sure what the point of that was – to prove that Streep can transform herself? I think we all know that by now. The photo doesn’t make me feel any better about the ugly rumors over this film being a hit job – or about the Thatcher family’s ardent opposition to the film. Here’s what Streep herself is saying about playing the role:
“The prospect of exploring the swathe cut through history by this remarkable woman is a daunting and exciting challenge. I am trying to approach the role with as much zeal, fervour and attention to detail as the real Lady Thatcher possesses—I can only hope my stamina will begin to approach her own!”
Sounds wonderful. Why am I not believing a word of it?
• The Atlas Shrugged trailer arrived this week, and to some extent it raised more questions than it answered. Certainly the main question it raised was: who is John Galt? OK, bad joke, I haven’t my coffee yet. But seriously, reader Vince noticed that Dagny Taggart is driving a Toyota in the trailer – quite the irony given Toyota’s recent acquittal in court over their supposedly bad brakes. My question is: wouldn’t Dagny be driving something like a Jaguar? Or a Mercedes? She strikes me as being an expensive kind of gal.
• A word of note: Mao’s Last Dancer will be arriving on DVD/Blu-ray on March 29th (we loved the film, see our review here), and Farewell – a great Cold War thriller, featuring Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan (see our review here) – will be arriving on DVD/Blu-ray April 12th.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT COLD WAR NEWS … Russian former Bond babe Olga Kurylenko’s The Assassin Next Door hits DVD this week, and her new film There Will Dragons just got picked up for distribution for Samuel Goldwyn Films. Olga’s proving that old homespun adage about what Russian immigrants should do to make it in America: play Bond girls and assassins.
And that’s what’s happening today in The Cold War!
Olga Kurylenko, with gun.
Posted on February 12th, 2011 at 12:37pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Today is Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, and those of us here at LFM want to pay our respects today to our 40th President, a man who remains an icon to so many of us – a vibrant symbol of American optimism, and of our better selves.
Since many others today will be talking about Reagan’s legacy as a political figure – a legacy that only seems to grow with time – I wanted to talk a little about Reagan’s career as a movie star. In this context one of the more positive developments in recent years has been the belated recognition by critics and historians that Ronald Reagan was, indeed, a very fine movie star – a versatile and charismatic actor whose only ‘crime,’ so to speak, was that his career never quite reached the levels of other great Warner Brothers contract stars like Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn or James Cagney. Reagan was nonetheless a sparkling and compelling presence on-screen, who radiated a boyish charm as a young man in films like Santa Fe Trail (1940; co-starring Errol Flynn), Desperate Journey (1942; again co-starring Flynn) and the ‘Brass’ Bancroft serials; he was also an actor of brooding intensity and lightning wit in films like King’s Row (1942) and Knute Rockne, All American (1940) – who later made a convincing transition to playing craggy, weather-beaten heroes in films like Law & Order (1953) and Hellcats of the Navy (1957). I also happen to think Reagan’s credentials as a noir actor have been overlooked over the years; more on that subject below.
Reagan in Hollywood.
Two factors recently were vital in my own re-evaluation of Reagan as a star. First of all, Turner Classic Movies several years ago devoted an entire month to Reagan’s films – several of which only recently became available on DVD – and so I finally got the chance to record and watch a lot of them in an organized, sustained fashion. Also: in 2008 author Marc Eliot released a superb account of Reagan’s life and career in Hollywood, called Reagan: The Hollywood Years. Put together, the picture that Eliot’s book and Reagan’s own films create is one of an engaging, sympathetic star whose career – ironically enough – might have reached much greater heights had he not been ‘distracted’ by politics, particularly in the form of Reagan’s involvement in Hollywood’s complex labor disputes in the 1940s. Indeed, one of the many ironies of Reagan’s career in Hollywood is that as an eight-term SAG president Reagan spent an inordinate amount fighting other people’s battles, when he perhaps should’ve instead been fighting Jack Warner in order to get better roles for himself – roles which Reagan manifestly deserved, in my opinion.
Nonetheless, Reagan was a major Hollywood player during his heyday of the early 1940s. How big was he? In 1942, right after the release of King’s Row, Reagan’s agent – the powerful Lew Wasserman – signed him to Hollywood’s first $1 million contract of the 1940s, and Reagan was soon under consideration for the lead in Casablanca. What happened afterward, however, was that America’s ongoing war effort created a cascading series of changes in Reagan’s career that led him, ultimately, to lose professional momentum – right as people like Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Gary Cooper were gaining it. Reagan nevertheless forged ahead, and still banged out some fine pictures all throughout the 1940s and early 1950s – even as political battles of the era increasingly consumed his time.
One of Reagan's best.
I’d like to point out a personal favorite of mine from this period: a brooding little noir romance called Night Unto Night (1949), directed by Don Siegel. The film stars Reagan as a terminally ill doctor suffering from epileptic seizures. He travels to the Florida coast to try to find some solace as his condition deteriorates, and there he falls in love with Viveca Lindfors (who was actually married to Siegel at the time) – who’s dealing with her own problems, having just lost her husband during the War, and yet still occasionally hearing her husband’s ghostly voice at night. Complicating matters further his Lindfors’ saucy, vixen sister, played by the strikingly attractive Osa Massen (sci-fi buffs will remember her from Rocketship X-M) who spends most of the film coming-on to Reagan like a cat in heat.
The film takes place mostly in a dark mansion along a storm-swept stretch of Florida’s coast, and has a kind of hypnotic quality to it – a dark romanticism of chiaroscuro lighting, subjective camera angles and sound design – with Reagan bringing a psychological intensity to his role that reminds one of his friend and contemporary William Holden, when Holden was at his peak in the 1950s. Reagan as the doctor is alternately stoic and terrified at his own fate, and deeply ambivalent about dragging Lindfors into his own personal tragedy so soon after she’d suffered one of her own. At the same time, he recognizes his own role in reviving her otherwise moribund spirits, and this makes his predicament all the more poignant.
Reagan’s performance in Night Unto Night is one of the better film noir performances of that period, fully of a piece with work by other noir stars like Glenn Ford or Dennis O’Keefe, and he should get more credit for it. Reagan and Lindfors (and, for that matter, Reagan and Osa Massen) make a genuinely smoldering couple – and I highly recommend this film to anyone still in doubt as to Reagan’s merits as a star.
Reagan in Don Siegel's "The Killers."
And, while we’re at it, I should mention the other film Reagan made with Don Siegel, which would actually be Reagan’s final acting performance – as gangster Jack Browning in 1964’s The Killers, based on the Hemingway short story. The Killers is the film that makes one speculate as to what an incredible career Reagan might’ve had if he’d turned to playing villains, because even in a film featuring stand-out performances by Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and Clu Gulager, Reagan absolutely steals the show as a ruthless and sardonic mobster out to pull off a major truck heist. In The Killers Reagan shows the side of himself that I liked most as a teenager when he was President: his toughness, his merciless wit, and a certain old-fashioned professionalism. Plus, Reagan somehow became more handsome as he grew older – craggier, his age-lines giving his face a sharper, more pleasing definition. (Someone should’ve thought to cast Reagan as Dick Tracy during this period.) Reagan in The Killers is what a lot of villains in Tarantino movies are trying to be, but never fully are: cool, in command, and macho as hell. It’s another stand-out noir performance from Reagan which, in my opinion, deserves more credit than it’s gotten over the years.
I could go on, but you get the point: Reagan was a fine star, by no means a ‘failed actor’ as some would have it, and the best testimony to his abilities are his films. And, on this point, LFM readers should be aware that Warner Brothers recently released some rare Reagan classics on DVD, and you can read the estimable Lou Lumenick’s reviews of that new set and other Reagan rarities now available from the Warner Archive Collection (such as Night Unto Night) here.
Also, news arrived this week that Robert Forster will soon be playing Reagan in a new one-man stage show and film (see here), and new Reagan documentaries are also popping up everywhere. Make sure, however, not to watch Eugene Jarecki’s documentary on HBO; Jarecki should not be trusted with this material, after the hack job he did on America’s Cold War effort in Why We Fight (a shameless pilfering of the title from Capra’s far better, more honest film). Instead, take some time today if you can to simply watch Reagan in one of his own films – my personal favorites are the ones he made with Errol Flynn. The films are great fun, and are a wonderful testimony to Reagan’s talent – and to what might have been, had his career not turned in a very different direction …
• And now to Clint Eastwood. Clint gave an interesting interview last week to the Wall Street Journal on his forthcoming J. Edgar Hoover biopic, which will star Leonardo DiCaprio – and also, as of recently, Naomi Watts and Ken Howard. In this interview, Clint gives what is arguably the most complete statement of his political worldview in years. I found him to be sober and restrained – but also a bit all-over-the-map, difficult to pin down.
Clint is someone who has traditionally been pegged as a ‘Hollywood conservative,’ a Cold Warrior and lone Republican holdout in a liberal-dominated industry. Actually, though, there’s always been a good deal of what I could call Steinbeck-style, Depression-era liberalism to Clint that seems to have become more pronounced as the years go on.
Eastwood talks politics.
In this recent interview he comes across as relatively cool toward conflicts like the Iraq War and the Korean War, for example, particularly with respect to the burdens these wars put on the average fighting man. I understand that perspective, and it’s one that he brought to Flags of Our Fathers (although very different from what he did in Heartbreak Ridge), but it creates problems when it comes to America’s ongoing need to project force in dangerous parts of the world. Even Obama has come to recognize the necessity of fighting in Afghanistan, for example – an environment that puts extraordinary burdens on our fighting men. Clint seems to have forgotten that our current military is a volunteer force, not the conscripted force he was in while stationed up at Ford Ord in the Army back in the early 50s. And based on re-enlistment rates in the armed forces over the past decade, it seems that our fighting men believe in their current mission.
In any case, you might ask why any of this matters – Clint’s a filmmaker, after all, not (any longer, at least) a politician. Well, it very much does matter because he’s about to make a big-budget biopic of J. Edgar Hoover, a film spanning Hoover’s entire 40+ year career – a career that helped define the domestic profile of the entire Cold War era. And he’s making this film with arguably the biggest male star in the world, and a lot of people who are never going to read about Hoover or the Soviet-era threats he confronted are instead going to watch this movie and assume that what’s being depicted is at least semi-accurate.
So people need to keep a careful eye on this film, and on what its director is saying – even when it’s Eastwood saying it. I unfortunately don’t always have the sense lately that Clint’s minding the store in terms of what his films are saying – or perhaps maybe I’m worrying that he is the minding the store, and is in the process of shifting his worldview quite dramatically from what it was back during the 70s and 80s, before he was the darling of the Hollywood establishment – and people like Sean Penn and Paul Haggis and Tim Robbins became eager to work with him. In any case, I recommend that you read the interview and judge for yourself.
John Barry's album for "Thunderball."
• A lot is suddenly happening on the James Bond front. Rumors are now swirling that Javier Bardem may be signed as the new film’s villain, and Ralph Fiennes may get involved with the film, as well. Everyone is speculating that director Sam Mendes may be pushing the series in a more dramatic direction – which is fine, but I’m also hoping that Mendes understands that Bond movies should also be light on their feet and amusing, something Mendes’ films have never been (being, instead, ponderous and dull-witted). We’ll see. Oh, and Judi Dench has signed back on.
In classic 007 news, the wonderful Bond composer John Barry has passed away, and we wish his family our condolences. Barry was an essential ingredient in the Bond formula for decades, and leaves behind him a rich musical legacy; he will certainly be missed. Also: if you’re in the mood for classic Bond, watch this interesting recent interview with production designer Ken Adam, who did so many of the great sets from the Connery films, as well as the War Room set from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
• This is so incredibly pathetic: Captain America: The First Avenger will apparently only be called The First Avenger in Russia and the Ukraine, as Marvel and Paramount have apparently caved. Way to go, Hollywood! Champions of free speech, as always. If the title Captain America: The First Avenger isn’t mellow enough for the Russians, maybe Paramount could re-title it Captain Redondo Beach: First in the Water. Just sayin’.
Vlad Putin: big movie fan.
Meanwhile, Putin apparently had copies of a new documentary critical of his regime (re: the Khordorkovsky case) actually stolen in Berlin – while he’s simultaneously demanding that the number of movie theaters in Russia be doubled. I guess you can never have enough empty theaters for Burnt by the Sun 2.
• … and speaking of Russia, scribe Steve Zallian (Mission: Impossible, Clear and Present Danger, Schindler’s List, The Falcon and the Snowman) has apparently been tapped to re-draft the Jack Ryan reboot (starring Star Trek’s Chris Pine), titled Moscow. Good choice. Maybe the young Jack Ryan can steal back the Khordorkovsky documentary.
• Not to miss a publicity opportunity, the ReelzChannel is now marketing the new Kennedys miniseries as featuring the Kennedy family’s “mob associations, the drugs and the women.” Hey! And here I thought this series was just going to show 8 hours of shaky home movies of beach football on Cape Cod! You mean the Kennedys actually had mob ties, and lots of sexy dames with beehive hairdos hanging around? I’m scandalized! How dare they show this on our public airwaves?!
January Jones of "X-Men: First Class."
• I wasn’t aware of exactly how 60s-Cold War inflected the new X-Men: First Class film was going to be. Here’s how the film’s director, Matthew Vaughn, describes it:
Calling it “X-Men meets Bond, with a little bit of Thirteen Days thrown in for good measure”, the film will follow the burgeoning relationship between a young Charles (Professor X) and Erik (Magneto) from 1942-1962, and it will all be done without flashbacks.
“In the beginning of the film, no one knows that mutants exist, and all the mutants don’t know that each other exist. They’re all in hiding. Kevin Bacon plays a very megalomaniac mutant [Sebastian Shaw] who decides that he can take over the world and that mutants are the future. Erik and Charles then meet each other and hook up with the CIA to try and prevent World War III. You find out everything about what went on between Erik and Charles” says Vaughn. So it appears the CIA are the ones who develop the X-Men’s technology.
Vaughn calls Michael Fassbender’s turn as Magneto very reminiscent of old school James Bond – “I basically molded a young Magneto on a young Sean Connery. He’s the ultimate spy — imagine Bond, but with superpowers. For me, Magneto is the good guy in the film, but he’s a sort of a good bad guy. He literally kicks off the movie, and Xavier goes along on the ride trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and trying to persuade Erik that you don’t have to kill everyone.”
So in the spirit of such retro-Cold War/60s nostalgia, X-Men: First Class‘ January Jones will be today’s pin-up. Isn’t this a great picture? Here’s the key to this picture, aside from the nicely plunging neckline: she’s not smiling, and she looks like a hard-case, sort of like what I imagine Dagny Taggart would look like. Women smile too much nowadays, and it makes them less sexy. Toughen up, ladies.
And that’s how we close out this Extended Cold War Update! in honor of America’s Greatest Cold Warrior, and a very fine movie star: Ronald Reagan.
By Jason Apuzzo. • The Kennedys miniseries controversy goes on and on, with no end in sight. The Hollywood Reporter recently watched the first hour of the series and – surprise, surprise – found it “brisk, entertaining” and “compelling.” Why anyone would’ve expected less from series producer Joel Surnow (24) is beyond me, but there it is. The series still has no distribution deal, however, although the latest scuttlebutt has The Kennedys potentially landing on DirecTV – which, frankly, would be sad if that winds up being its only distribution venue. Meanwhile, new behind-the-scenes accounts of the controversy are emerging (see The New York Times), with fingers being pointed in many new directions.
Although I probably shouldn’t be surprised by all this, I still am. I’d always thought my colleague Joel had the magic touch, the ability to rise above Hollywood’s ongoing ideological blockade of projects veering even slightly from the Maoist line; alas, not even Joel seems able to pull off such a levitating act at the moment, due to the industry’s apparently fanatical devotion to the Kennedy clan.
And so I’d like to officially welcome Joel to the world of independent filmmaking and distribution – a world he has now joined like the rest of us, albeit unwillingly.
• Speaking of Joel, the big news today is that Kiefer Sutherland told Extra that the 24 movie will be “shooting hopefully by next December or January.” That’s big news, because there had been some concern over the length of time it was taking to complete the script on that one (and it’s apparently still being re-written). So for you 24 fans, Jack Bauer will indeed be back.
• There’s been a lot of casting news for the Clint Eastwood-J. Edgar Hoover pic. It looks like Charlize Theron is out, but Judi Dench, Josh Lucas, Arnie Hammer (late of The Social Network) and some other folks are likely in. ‘Arnie’ is such an old-school name, isn’t it? [CORRECTION: a reader points out that his name is actually 'Armie,' which is even more old-school.]
"Red Dawn" cast photo.
• A Red Dawn cast photo has leaked, which you can check out to the right. I want to urge Libertas readers NOT to forward this photo to Hu Jintao, however, because we’re all trying to ‘tone down our rhetoric’ these days. Right?
• Speaking of MGM releases, James Bond 23 finally has a release date – November 9th, 2012 – and Daniel Craig will be returning as Bond, with Sam Mendes directing. Directing a Bond film is no doubt great for Mendes, but is it good for the Bond series? Only time will tell. The current word is that Fox may distribute the film.
• Star Trek’s Chris Pine talked recently about Moscow, the forthcoming Jack Ryan reboot he’s doing. I like Pine; he seems like a decent, regular guy – and his dad (Robert Pine), incidentally, is a fine character actor. I assume it’s no small challenge for the younger Pine to step into Shatner’s shoes and now Harrison Ford’s, but so far so good.
• It occurs to me that I never posted the Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon trailer. It’s actually quite good, and deserves to be part of a Cold War update. (Aside from the stuff you see in the trailer covering the ‘69 moon landing, there’s also apparently a retro-U.S. vs. Russia space race element to the film’s storyline.) Check the trailer out below if you haven’t already – it’s fun.
• Eugene Jarecki’s Reagan documentary will soon be unspooling at Sundance, which is depressing. This other, totally separate new Reagan documentary called Ronald Reagan: An American Journey is looking more promising to me if for no other reason than that Jarecki’s name isn’t on it. Ronald Reagan: An American Journey premiered Thursday night in Orange County – and was directed by Robert Kline, a former executive vice president at Fox Studios and producer of “Firing Line” with William F. Buckley Jr. Best wishes to him on that project.
• Peter Weir’s anti-Soviet epic The Way Back opens today, and you can read the LFM review of it here. Also, the film’s post-theatrical distribution rights just got bought up (a good sign) and both Weir and star Ed Harris have been doing a lot of media lately. (See Weir here, here, here and here and Ed Harris here).
January Jones in "X-Men: First Class."
• The forthcoming X-Men: First Class is set in the swinging, Cold War 60s, and a bunch of new cast photos just got leaked of that film – including of Mad Men’s January Jones as Emma Frost. Yowza! Ms. Jones has been out doing interviews about her insanely sexed-up costumes for that film (see here and here) … but at least she had costumes in the film, as opposed to Jennifer Lawrence. Ms. Lawrence, formerly of the indie hit Winter’s Bone, recently described to Hollywood Reporter the process of having her nude body painted blue each day by seven female make-up artists, all in preparation for playing Mystique. Welcome to Hollywood, Jennifer! We’re all looking forward to seeing how that worked out. (Memo to James Cameron: have you looked into trademarking blue women?) Also: check out some new First Class interviews here and here.
Russian spy Anna Chapman.
• In other Cold War News & Notes: buzz is building for John Milius’ Homefront video game; new photos are out of Atlas Shrugged; Timur Bekmambetov’s Apollo 18 will now be released on April 22nd; and one of my favorite classic movie sites, Greenbriar Pictures Shows, did this great post recently on John Wayne’s Cold War anti-communist classic, Big Jim McLain (one of the inspirations for Hawaii Five-O, incidentally). The Duke wears some strikingly snazzy suits in that film while he’s fighting the Reds on The Big Island.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … our old friend Anna Chapman is back! Fox News is reporting today that the comely ex-Russian spy has landed a new Russian TV gig for herself, a series in which she unlocks the ‘hidden mysteries of the world’ – such as stigmata, and other bizarre skin phenomena! Maybe The History Channel can slip this show into the slot previously reserved for The Kennedys, as I’m sure Ms. Chapman’s series must certainly meet History’s ‘rigorous’ broadcast standards!
And that’s what’s happening today in The Cold War!
Posted on January 21st, 2011 at 12:05pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. According to The Hollywood Reporter, 24 creator Joel Surnow’s 8-part miniseries The Kennedys has apparently been cancelled by The History Channel after the show “was not considered historically accurate enough for the network’s rigorous standards.” The series stars Greg Kinnear, Katie Holmes and Tom Wilkinson.
I’m laughing at this, because just the other day while channel surfing I happened to notice that The History Channel is still running its rigorously accurate series Ancient Aliens, featuring theories on extraterrestrial visitations to our planet – theories explained by such noted, credible scholars as Erich von Däniken.
Greg Kinnear & Katie Holmes in "The Kennedys."
What a farce this decision is.
For the record, Govindini and I know Joel and are certain that he and his team have put together a show that more than merits a showing on a network that currently includes on its schedule such scrupulously accurate series as MonsterQuest, The Bible Code: Predicting Armageddon, Nostradamus Effect, The Real Face of Jesus?, Stan Lee’s Superhumans and UFO Hunters.
We’ve embedded the trailer for Joel’s series above, and frankly it looks great. It also appears to be pointed and opinionated on the subject of the Kennedys – but nothing out of bounds, from what I’ve thus far seen.
After all, don’t we already know that image and reality were often quite different with respect to the Kennedys? God forbid that discrepancy would actually be dramatized in a television series.
As a side note, The History Channel has just guaranteed a few more ratings points for this series when it eventually airs on another network (possibly Showtime, according to reports) – which it inevitably will.
[UPDATE: Thanks to Michelle Malkin's Hot Air for linking to this post. Welcome to our Hot Air readers.]
[UPDATE #2: It now appears that The History Channel pulled the show due to lobbying on behalf of Caroline Kennedy, and also Maria Shriver according to The Hollywood Reporter. As the story goes, the History Channel is co-owned by Disney - and Kennedy herself has a book deal with Disney - and she was planning to appear on (Disney's) ABC network to do some exclusive promotion of the book. So it seems that Disney received an 'either/or' choice from the Kennedys, and ultimately decided to drop the show - and concoct this ludicrous story about the show 'not being up to network standards.' And so the farce goes on.]
Posted on January 8th, 2011 at 5:15pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. For you Libertas readers who are currently digging ABC’s V, I wanted to mention to you folks that something quite similar (at least in terms of being a futuristic invasion scenario) – namely, John Milius’ video game Homefront – is debuting March 18th and has a new trailer out which you can see above.
Homefront is set in 2027. The idea is that North Korea has by then 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.
It’s at this point that the North Koreans launch some kind of advanced electronic pulse weapon that cripples our defense systems – and subsequently invade the American homeland. A patriotic American ‘insurgency’ ensues.
The video below develops in great detail the thinking behind the game, and I recommend that you give it a look – even if you don’t like video games, or have no plans to buy this one – because it will encourage you to know that what a refuge the video game world has become for Cold Warriors.
Enjoy, and best wishes to John and the Homefront team. If Call of Duty’s success is any indication, this game may become a major hit.
Posted on January 7th, 2011 at 3:02pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. • One of the most intriguing things I’ve seen recently is the promotional trailer (see above) for director Renny Harlin’s new, $20 million Russian-invasion-of-Georgia thriller 5 Days of August, which is set for release in March.
Andy Garcia as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
The film stars Val Kilmer, Andy Garcia (as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili) and Heather Graham among others – and deals with a group of war correspondents caught behind enemy (i.e., Russian) lines when the Russians invaded Georgia back in 2008.
When the journalists videotape a series of horrific Russian war crimes, they have to fight to get the footage out of the country. The film was apparently shot on-location in Tbilisi, with the approval of the Georgian government.
From the look of the promotional trailer (which does not appear to be the final, theatrical trailer), it looks like Harlin is going hard-core in his criticism of the Russians – so this is going to get very interesting come March. Bravo to everyone involved for their courage in doing this, and please do try to avoid assassination.
Harlin (Die Hard 2) also seems to have squeezed a lot out of his $20 million budget, as the scale of the project seems impressive. We’ll be keeping an eye on this project here at Libertas. Val Kilmer really needs to drop some weight, by the way.
• In related news, Putin’s ballerina-mistress just appeared on the cover of Russian Vogue. (Did the old Politburo guys have mistresses? It’s hard to imagine Brezhnev sneaking off with his secretary.)
• Angelina Jolie’s The Tourist opened poorly (see the LFM review here), but fortunately there’s always Salt – which just hit Blu-ray and DVD. The new Salt disks apparently contain several different cuts of the film, including an ‘extended’ cut and also a ‘director’s’ cut – the differences between these cuts are explained here – and the cuts actually seem to represent legitimately different visions of the film, particularly with respect to the film’s ending. Without giving anything away about the new scenes, suffice it to say that sequels were definitely on everyone’s mind at the time of the production.
So will there be sequels? It’s too early to say, but director Phillip Noyce – who’s out doing media for the new DVDs – probably won’t be doing them himself (see here) as he seems to have moved on to other ventures.
We liked the retro, commie-hunting vibe of Salt here at Libertas (see our review here), and we’re hoping this film gets its franchise. If it does, it will be noteworthy for having done so without the aid and assistance of the talking heads on either Fox News or talk radio, ironically enough.
• Charlize Theron and Armie Hammer (The Social Network) have apparently been offered roles in the new Clint Eastwood/Leonardo DiCaprio biopic of J. Edgar Hoover. Hammer would reportedly be playing Hoover’s ‘lover’ Clyde Tolson, although there is still some controversy about the exact nature of Tolson’s relationship with Hoover. Theron would be playing Hoover’s personal secretary of 54 years, Helen Gandy.
Speaking of Hoover and the FBI, by the way, the LA Times recently ran a piece clarifying Ronald Reagan’s rumored cooperation with the FBI in their hunt for communists in Hollywood.
• The Jack Bauer/24 movie has apparently been put on temporary hold, after the last version of the screenplay didn’t satisfy Fox executives. However the latest rumor apparently has Tony Scott – who still intends to direct the Top Gun sequel – pitching a new 24 idea to Kiefer Sutherland himself, so there’s still some momentum left on that project.
• The new Bond film is currently scheduled for a November 2012 release, incidentally.
• Take a few minutes to enjoy this animated short below, called Pigeon: Impossible from Lucas Martell. It’s about a rookie CIA agent who gets into hot water after a pigeon gets trapped inside his nuclear briefcase and sets off an ICBM toward Moscow. It’s a cute little story, and the quality of the animation is quite high.
• In other Cold War News & Notes: another Die Hard sequel is apparently a ways off; the CW’s Nikita just got a full season ordered; there are a bunch of new set photos from Atlas Shrugged; and, odd to say, but the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz spy thriller Knight and Day actually ended up being Fox’s #1 hit of the year, grossing $262 million worldwide. Granted, $186 million of that came from overseas … [Read the LFM review of Knight and Day here.]
January Jones for Versace.
• … and speaking of Tom Cruise, by the way, some incredible set footage from Mission: Impossible 4 emerged recently of Cruise swinging around outside the upper floors of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, where he’s roughly 2,000+ feet up. He even waves and smiles at the tourists watching him. I’ll say this for the guy, he always gives people their money’s worth. One other bit of related news: Ving Rhames may not be back for Mi4 – although, weirdly, he may be returning for the next Piranha film (didn’t he get chewed to pieces?).
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … January Jones – who will be playing Emma Frost in the swingin’ 60s/Cold War-themed X-Men: First Class – just did a series of provocative handbag ads for Versace, which is odd because she herself really doesn’t look like a bag at all.
And that’s what’s happening today in the Cold War!
Posted on December 20th, 2010 at 2:05pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. When you’re the biggest female movie star in the world, and your personal man-servant is Brad Pitt, you can order up a film like The Tourist – more or less as you would order up room service at The Ritz.
That’s the ‘truth,’ such as it is, behind the new Angelina Jolie star vehicle that opens today, co-starring – technically, at least – Johnny Depp, and directed (so the advertising claims) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
Because if the phrase ‘vanity project’ has any meaning, then it applies with full force in describing The Tourist.
That’s not necessarily such a bad thing, in so far as Ms. Jolie is a genuine star – albeit, occasionally a star in the same way that Medusa was a ’star’ of Greek mythology, earning her points by way of force rather than charm. But in the strange world we live in, in which people like Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon are routinely and incorrectly referred to as ’stars’ (rather than as what they are, which is ‘actresses’) Angelina Jolie is the genuine article, and The Tourist only confirms that. If there ever was a woman the camera loves as she walks into a crowded ballroom, or as she skeptically raises an eyebrow at a would-be suitor, or as she fixes an appraising gaze on a man she intends to possess – and destroy? – then it’s Angelina Jolie.
The problem is, star vehicles don’t always make for good films – and at a certain point, they also corrode the star’s image. (Ask John Travolta about that.) The Tourist is almost – if not quite – a disaster, a woeful and expensive attempt to mimic charming romantic espionage capers of the past like North by Northwest, Charade or Arabesque; and in the generally misogynistic calculus of today’s Hollywood, Jolie likely can’t afford many more films like it.
Angelina Jolie, with some guy.
There’s more to The Tourist than that, though. There’s also a kind of snarky, dismissive tone taken by the film toward America and Americans that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. More on that below. The bottom line is that whereas I was ready to pass this film off as a harmless failure, an expensive lark – now I’m actively rooting for it to fail.
Frankly, I hope The Tourist tanks.
I’ll go through the motions and describe the film’s ‘plot,’ although ‘plot’ in this film is strictly an afterthought. We start with Jolie, who’s in Paris being surveilled by Scotland Yard for reasons as yet unknown. The Scotland Yard team is led by Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton (highly underrated as James Bond, I might add) – just two members of this film’s expensive supporting cast, which also includes Steven Berkoff and Rufus Sewell. Jolie gives Scotland Yard the slip, and finds herself on a train bound for Venice where she picks up Depp as a decoy to keep her pursuers guessing. Complicating matters is that a crime lord (Berkoff) who’s also pursuing Jolie mistakes Depp for a criminal who recently made off with about a billion dollars’ worth of his dirty money. Double-crosses, pseudo-adventure, predictable revelations and passing glances at romance ensue.
What non-chemistry looks like.
A few other things ensue, as well. One of the film’s motifs is that of Depp acting out as a bumbling, graceless and naive American in one of Europe’s most exotic and resplendent cities: Venice. (It’s simultaneously one of Europe’s grimiest and crassly commercialized cities; even Goethe was complaining about it back in the 1790s, long before there were Americans around to ruffle anybody’s feathers.) Depp plays the 2010 version of the ‘ugly American’ overseas, although in this case he’s more like the bumbling, gauche American – and The Tourist tries to play his ‘fish-out-of-water’ status for as many cheap laughs as possible.
It’s pathetic, and none of it works. It also happens to be obnoxious – a ‘look at the dancing American monkey’ routine – and immediately reawakened my dormant contempt for all-things-Depp.
By why restrict my venom to Depp? How about the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck? You can stick a fork in him. His 2007 film The Lives of Others was a breath of fresh air on a challenging, politically incorrect subject (i.e., the legacy of communism in Europe). Whatever good-will he established with that film has now been swiftly squandered – and for what? To play personal valet to big-dollar American movie stars on a European holiday? To indulge in cheap anti-Americanism, so he can fit in better with the Malibu gentry?
A fairy-tale Venice, with no tale to tell.
Donnersmarck does not appear to have ‘directed’ his stars here at all, actually. Perhaps he was over-awed by the talent suddenly put at his disposal. Jolie swans through the film doing her usual routine – which is fine, it’s a good routine, except that she lacks the vulnerability here that she shows in her better roles. As for Depp, he really needed to be directed because – conventional wisdom to the contrary – he is neither Cary Grant nor Laurence Olivier, and needed to bring more discipline to his performance (beginning with cutting his hair, and getting a shave) in order to be convincing as a math teacher from Wisconsin.
The deeper problem here, though, is that Hollywood is long out of practice making films like this – and it shows. The Tourist feels like a tourist ride through other, better films – films with higher stakes (as during the ideological struggle of the Cold War; one thinks here of Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews), or with more style (say, Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik). Donnersmarck doesn’t want to take too many chances here, though, and potentially risk his shiny new Hollywood career; ironically, his career may now get scuttled by this film.
The temptation to ‘go Hollywood’ is a strong one, one that only the most willful and stubborn can withstand. It’s probably very tempting even for an Oscar-winner like Donnersmarck, with serious things on his mind, to become – in effect – little more than another member of Angelina Jolie’s livery.
There are no doubt worse fates, but some of us were hoping for more from him.
Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 6:14pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. To complement our new Invasion Alert! series, today we are introducing a new series here at Libertas called Cold War Updates!
Have you noticed that the Cold War is back? At the movies at least, the Cold War seems to be returning in a big way. As LFM’s own Govindini Murty reported in her recent Human Events article on “The Cinema’s Surprising New Anti-Communist Films,” both Hollywood and the indie film scene have been producing films large and small about the communist threat in the past year – whether of the Chinese, North Korean, ex-Soviet or even homegrown-American variety. And these trends are not only continuing – they’re actually accelerating.
Angelina Jolie in "The Tourist."
It seems that each week new films, TV shows, documentaries and even video games are being green-lit featuring sexy spies, villainous Russians, jaded CIA operatives, the space race, unguarded uranium stockpiles, communist oppression … all that good stuff we remember from that nobler and altogether sexier period – the Cold War era – with its Bond girls, martinis, microfilm, Whittaker Chambers, Dean Martin, JFK … and Ronald Reagan.
I personally, for example, am currently working on a 7-hour, 3D IMAX film adaptation of the epic Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky World Chess Championship match of 1972!
(Just kidding.)
Anyway, what do all these new films portend? I’ll leave that for readers to decide (although in days to come I will be advancing certain theories), but I’ve decided to put together this regular Cold War feature to cover these new developments – or as many of them as we can. So grab a martini, plug in your Fender Telecaster and enjoy!
Two brief notes: there will likely be some occasional crossover of this series with Invasion Alerts!, as some of the new sci-fi films coming down the pike appear to have Cold War themes in them.
And of course, it goes without saying that Cold War Updates! will always feature the sexiest women around. Would you expect anything less from Libertas?
Ready to go?
• The next James Bond film – called James Bond 23, for the moment – is apparently ready to go, with Sam Mendes still attached to direct. How do we know this? Because his ex-wife, Kate Winslet, says so! I love this as a way to break major film news – let the ex-wife handle it! MGM may be breaking new ground here. In any case, the film supposedly already has its composer, and there’s even some interesting speculation today about who may be playing the new villain – namely, British stage veteran (and Mendes crony) Simon Russell Beale.
• Salt Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura recently provided an update about Moscow, the forthcoming reboot of the Jack Ryan series, starring Star Trek’s Chris Pine. Here is Bonaventura, talking to IGN:
“It’s a really interesting challenge and Chris is an amazing actor” explained di Bonaventura. “So I’m confident we found the right guy.”
However, the producer claims the bigger challenge will be attracting a young audience to the film… “Tapping into Ryan’s was always a sophisticated world – it’s slightly adult. How do you bring those adults who expect that kind of sophistication and yet how do you also bring a young audience to it? That’s an interesting business challenge and a creative challenge – how do you weigh what’s in front of you and put it all together”
My take on this, for what it’s worth, is that the younger audience will come – provided you don’t gratuitously pander to them. (The folks doing Tron, incidentally, may be discovering that too late – if we’re to believe how poorly that film is tracking.) In any case, I’m looking forward to what Bonaventura’s cooking up for this reboot – this being one of the few series that actually deserves being brought back. Incidentally, Chris Pine will soon be starring (with Angela Bassett and Reese Witherspoon) as yet another CIA spy in Fox’s McG-directed This Means War.
Poster for the Joel Surnow minseries.
• A poster is already out for producer Joel Surnow’s quasi-controversial new miniseries, The Kennedys. What do you think? It seems to play it straight. The series stars Greg Kinnear is JFK, Katie Holmes as Jackie, Barry Pepper as Bobby Kennedy, and Tom Wilkinson as Joe Kennedy. Chris Diamantopoulos apparently plays Frank Sinatra. I don’t know if anybody plays Dean Martin, but somebody should. In any event, our best wishes to Joel on this 8-part series that airs on the History Channel next year.
• There are new interviews out today with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Tourist. (There are also new photos from the film here and here.) I’m liking everything I’m seeing about this film right now, although I’m alarmed that the film is apparently tracking poorly (much like Tron). I do think there’s an audience for an old-school, Hitchcockian thriller like this, but they’ll need to market the film to people who are above the age of 16. Do the studios know how to do that anymore?
• Speaking of JFK, Leonardo DiCaprio is apparently going to be doing a JFK-assassination conspiracy thriller, to go along with the J. Edgar Hoover movie he’s already doing with Eastwood (which starts shooting early next year). DiCaprio seems to be living the Cold War lifestyle these days, having already done things like The Aviator and Shutter Island with Scorsese – with whom he also may now be doing a Sinatra biopic. What’s going on here? The weirdest thing recently was DiCaprio palling around in Moscow with Vladimir Putin, where DiCaprio had travelled for some sort of tiger preservation conference. It’s hard to get a fix on DiCaprio sometimes; he has an old-school style and taste about him, while simultaneously acting-out the usual liberal fantasies (eco-activism, etc.) in his public activism. It will be interesting to see where all this leads under Eastwood’s tutelage.
Publicity still for "The Man From U.N.C.L.E."
• I’ve seen no new news about the Top Gun sequel, but elsewhere in the world of Tom Cruise it appears that Jeremy Renner is being groomed to take over the Mission: Impossible franchise as Cruise is eased out. What that means is that the series will soon be dead.
• I loved the idea that the classic Cold War spy TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., starring Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo, was going to get remade as a movie (set in the 60s)… until I learned that the leading candidates to do it are apparently Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney. I’m now “opening channel D” and calling for help. And speaking of projects set in the 60s, the new X-Men: First Class is also set in the 60s at the height of the Cold War, and more plot details are emerging about that film now (spoiler warning after jump).
• HBO just greenlit a new Cold War spy drama, set in Berlin, about “a missionary who becomes involved in the CIA.” We’ll keep an eye on that one.
• Distribution has been set up for the ‘Aussie Red Dawn‘ movie Tomorrow, When the War Began in the UK, Scandinavia, Russia, Portugal and South Africa … but predictably not here in the U.S. yet. Expect that to change.
• On the video game front, you’ve probably already heard by now that the Cold War-based Call of Duty: Black Ops had a huge debut (the biggest in the history of gaming), and is projected to earn something like $1.4 billion, but don’t forget that John Milius’ anti-North Korean commie Homefront video game will also be debuting soon, on March 8th. The timing on that couldn’t be better, alas.
Former spy Anna Chapman, in Russian Maxim.
• I’m annoyed to report that the obnoxious Eugene Jarecki, director of Why We Fight (definitely not the Capra version), has a documentary about Ronald Reagan in this upcoming Sundance Film Festival. Personal note here: I have three acquaintances who are working on no less than three different Reagan movies right now, and I implore all of you dudes to hurry up! before people like Jarecki are allowed to define The Gipper in perpetuity. They’d love to do it if they could.
• On the DVD front, the famous (and infamous) Red Scare thriller My Son John is finally getting a release, courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection. (It will also be available via Netflix streaming.) I have mixed feelings about that film, largely because its gifted star, Robert Walker, died before he could complete his performance – which seemed to be an interesting expansion on what he’d just done in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (and footage from Strangers was ultimately used to complete My Son John). Had Walker been able to finish the film, I think it might’ve been a lot better than it currently is, even if the film nonetheless has its moments (particularly those between Walker and his mother, played by Helen Hayes).
• AND FINALLY … it somehow seemed fitting that our first Cold War Update! pinup would be an actual Russian spy – the increasingly cheeky (so to speak) Anna Chapman – who’s currently paying her bills by posing for Russian Maxim … which should, incidentally, tell you everything you need to know about how very different the new Cold War is going to be from the old. (There’s a lot of money to be made this time!)
And that’s what’s happening today in the Cold War!
Posted on December 3rd, 2010 at 2:59pm.
