[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.

“I watched everything that was adventure – anything that Errol Flynn was in. He was my idol, I wanted to be Errol Flynn! In fact, I would leave the theater when I was about 12 years old – I’d have a crooked little smile on my face the way he [Flynn] smiled, I had an imaginary sword at my side, and I was looking for some little girl that a bully was picking on so I could protect her. I wanted to be Errol Flynn so badly. And of course I liked King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein – any of those big movies of those days. And I also liked the ‘real’ movies with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable.”

"The Fantastic Four" from November, 1961.

Lee’s career would take off in the 1960s, beginning with the launch of the Fantastic Four series. Lee described what was arguably his most important innovation at that time: bringing realistic psychology and more recognizably human frailties to his superhero characters. When I asked him what he’d learned over the years about creating compelling characters like Peter Parker (Spider-Man) or Dr. Bruce Banner (The Hulk), he talked about the need “to make make the character empathetic and likable as best you can.”

“When you create a character, no matter how fantastic the character is, you try to make him in some way believable – as if there could be somebody like this. And then you try to make him likable so that the reader really hopes that the character succeeds at whatever he’s trying to do. Beyond that, I don’t know how to explain it. You do whatever you can to make that character appealing to a reader or to an audience. And you do that by the way you have the character talk, by the personality you give the character. What you’re doing is creating – you’re like a sculptor, you’re creating a being. And you can either make the being dull, or you can make the being interesting.”

Since the ‘Silver Age’ of comic books in the 1960s, Lee’s most vivid characters – Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, Spider-Man and others – have become part of American pop-mythology, similar to creations from Walt Disney, Mark Twain, Jim Henson or George Lucas. Not surprisingly, the highly erudite Lee – who can still quote long passages from Shakespeare – associates some of this with having steeped himself in mythology as a young man. “I read Greek mythology, Norse mythology, Roman – whatever I could find. I love mythology, I love fairy tales. I love anything bigger than life and imaginative and dramatic.”

When my Libertas Film Magazine co-editor Govindini Murty asked Lee whether he believed his characters are mythological figures for today, he smiled and became philosophical. “It would be nice if some day in the future they were thought of as our mythology,” he explained. “That would be great.”

Spider-Man, one of Lee's greatest creations.

Lee’s full cultural impact is explored in the new documentary With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story, which was picked up for distribution by the EPIX channel just prior to its screening at Slamdance. With Great Power is a comprehensive and heartfelt account of Lee’s life and career from his early days growing up in the Depression to his rise as the prime mover behind Marvel Comics and today’s comic book revolution at the movies.

Over sixty interviews were conducted for With Great Power, and the film features appearances from Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and many of Lee’s colleagues. The film, a labor of love for its production team, also provides a rare, at-home glimpse into the man behind the Marvel phenomenon. With Great Power (which derives its title from a line in the original 1962 Spider-Man story: “With great power there must also come — great responsibility!”) is the result of over five years of work by a trio of directors – Terry Dougas, Will Hess, and Nikki Frakes – as well as a significant archival effort that unearthed Lee’s work on over 500 pop-culture characters.

Although Lee’s diehard fans will likely be familiar with Lee’s story from the 1960s forward, With Great Power also takes an in-depth look at many of his early challenges – including censorship battles waged against the comic book industry during the 1950s by psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham. Wertham and his followers believed that comic books promoted youth ‘delinquency,’ and their lobbying and regulatory efforts nearly derailed Lee’s career before Lee mounted a major comeback in the 1960s.

Iron Man, one of Marvel's most popular characters.

With Great Power also documents Lee’s extensive efforts to give credit to his colleagues (particularly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) for Marvel’s success. Importantly, the film also introduces fans to Lee’s quick-witted and vivacious wife of almost 65 years, Joan Lee, and explores their touching relationship and the vital role she plays in inspiring her husband. With Great Power debuts on the EPIX channel on April 27th.

Of course, with huge successes over the past decade and a seemingly endless array of projects now in the pipeline (at the end of the master class, it took him almost 20 minutes to describe all of his current projects in development), Lee has made the full transition from promoter of ‘delinquency’ to national institution. His fans, once mostly teenagers, now include a worldwide readership of every generation, along with filmmakers, scholars and even Presidents. Indeed, With Great Power begins with Lee receiving the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush, and during the master class Lee proudly recollected how President Reagan had been an avid reader of Spider-Man.

But Lee clearly takes his greatest pride in his many characters, the imaginative creations that form his legacy. Of his many characters, Lee singled out the Silver Surfer as possibly his favorite. “I had the Silver Surfer make what I thought were philosophical comments about man, and where we’re going, and why we’re the way we are. [...] I tried to put all the things I think of into the Silver Surfer’s dialogue, so that’s why I enjoyed him very much.” (Lee’s favorite of his villains? Dr. Doom.)

To say that Lee’s plate is full these days would be a Hulk-sized understatement. On the immediate horizon he’s launching a new line of ‘reality’ comic books, a series of children’s books, a new YouTube partnership with Michael Eisner, a live rock opera, a new website, a new slate of international superheroes (hailing from India, China and South America), and he has two TV series and four new movies in development.

And, of course, Lee is looking forward to The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man this summer, along with Marvel’s forthcoming Ghost Rider sequel. Speaking about The Avengers, the voluble Lee nearly jumped out of his chair: “Wait till you see my cameo in that one! It’s the funniest one I’ve done yet. I can’t wait to see it myself. And it’s the same with Spider-Man – it’s unusual.”

Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty with Stan Lee at the Slamdance Film Festival.

When it comes to advice for young writers, Lee urged his audience to first and foremost write what they themselves enjoy.

“I write stories that I think I would like to read, and I hope there are enough people who have the same taste I do. I’m not that unique – I’m adorable, but I’m not that unique,” he quips. “I just write to please myself. [...] I have to confess: I am my biggest fan. I love everything I write, because if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t write it.”

It’s fortunate that so many generations of Stan Lee’s readers love what he writes, as well.

Posted on February 1st, 2012 at 9:42am.

[Editor's Note: LFM's Joe Bendel will be covering the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and also select films from the 2012 Slamdance Film Festival.]

By Joe Bendel. They are no Scarlett O’Haras. As long as these Southern ladies have ammunition, they will never go hungry. Challenging Southern Belle stereotypes, Maria White follows five South Carolinian women as their pursue their game in the short documentary Debutante Hunters, which screens ahead of We’re Not Broke during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Lest there be any confusion, they do not hunt debutantes. They are debutantes who hunt, quite well in fact. The term “debutante” might be overstating the matter for some of the hunters, but regardless of whether they are in the social register, they shoot straight and can acquit themselves with grace in the wild. Indeed, most learned to track and shoot from their fathers, or in the case of Sara Frampton, from her mother Susan.

Unlike many current reality shows, Debutante never plays into cultural stereotypes. Although never asked directly, it seems a pretty safe assumption these hunters are firm advocates of gun owners’ rights to some extent. However, they are all very family-oriented and deeply attuned to the environment. In fact, Susan Frampton is rather eloquent comparing hunters and gardeners as fellow conservators. Never wasteful, the women also always cook what they kill, often feeding their families for weeks with delicious looking venison burgers.

At just a whisker over twelve minutes, the respectful Debutante delivers a fair amount of hunting action along with a measure of psychological insight into its subjects, but it seems to cry out for a longer treatment. Frankly, this would make a perfect series for the History Channel, perhaps following Top Shot. It boasts a telegenic, well-spoken cast shooting guns. There is a certain undeniable appeal to that. They could even do cooking segments. Highly recommended (though the same does not necessarily apply to the film it is paired with), Debutante screens this coming Sunday (1/22), Tuesday (1/24), Thursday (1/26), Friday (1/27), and Saturday (1/28) in Park City and Wednesday (1/25) in Salt Lake as part of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Posted on January 19th, 2012 at 9:07am.

LFM Co-Editor Govindini Murty was on Lars Larson’s national radio show Friday talking about The Iron Lady, the Beauty and the Beast re-release and also Jason Apuzzo’s Huffington Post/AOL-Moviefone article “Why The Cold War Is Back at the Movies.”

Special thanks, as always, to Lars and his staff for inviting Govindini on. She always has fun appearing on his show.

Lars’ show is broadcast on over 200 stations nationwide, and runs at different times across the country, so to find his show be sure to check out his website here.

Posted on January 17th, 2011 at 11:44am.

[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.

LFM Co-Editor Govindini Murty was on Lars Larson’s national radio show Friday talking about Hugo, War Horse and our list of The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2011.

Special thanks, as always, to Lars and his staff for inviting Govindini on. She always has fun appearing on his show.

Lars’ show is broadcast on over 200 stations nationwide, and runs at different times across the country, so to find his show be sure to check out his website here.

Posted on January 9th, 2011 at 7:34pm.

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.

6. Transformers: Dark of the Moon – Michael Bay, U.S.

Big summer popcorn movies are still some of the most effective (and entertaining) ways to convey the importance of fighting for freedom, as Michael Bay’s epic Transformers films have proven time and again. With a plot spanning the Cold War and America’s space race with Russia, this third film in the Transformers series features Decepticon robots scheming to enslave Earth – before Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), his loyal Autobot friends, and the U.S. military come to the rescue. Much like Bay’s previous films, Dark of the Moon mixes spectacular action (here in breathtaking 3D) and cheeky humor with a celebration of America’s independent streak, fighting spirit, and passion for freedom. As Autobot leader Optimus Prime puts it, while defending his human allies from alien invasion: “The day will never come that we forsake freedom.”

From Michael Bay's "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."

7. The Devil’s Double – Lee Tamahori, Belgium/Netherlands

Starring Dominic Cooper in a career-making dual performance, The Devil’s Double tells the true story of Saddam Hussein’s villainous son Uday and his reluctant body double, Latif Yahia. Stylishly filmed by former James Bond director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day), The Devil’s Double depicts the full tyranny of the Hussein family’s mafia-like reign in the ’80s and ’90s, dramatizing the plight of average Iraqis under their cruel and arbitrary rule. While taking not taking an overt position on the Iraq War, the film nonetheless depicts a brutal and ultimately doomed dictatorship that was a menace to the region – and to the human rights of the Iraqi people.

8. The Lady – Luc Besson, United Kingdom/France

Burmese democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has lived an extraordinary life, seemingly tailor-made for the big screen. The Lady tells the story of Aung San Suu Kyi’s (Michelle Yeoh) multi-decade struggle for democracy in Burma, now renamed Myanmar by its ruling military junta. The film depicts the poignancy of Suu Kyi’s struggle: leaving her happy marriage and family in England, she returns to her homeland of Burma to lead the struggle for democracy, with the party she founded (the National League for Democracy) ultimately winning the 1990 elections. The election results are invalidated, however, and Suu Kyi is placed under house arrest for much of the next twenty years. Besson depicts the tremendous sacrifices made by Aung San Suu Kyi as a wife and mother for the cause of Burmese freedom.

Emmanuelle Chriqui and Rupert Friend in "5 Days of War."

9. 5 Days of War – Renny Harlin, U.S.

Director Renny Harlin’s 5 Days of War is two things simultaneously: a crisp, high-octane action-war drama, and a heart-rending depiction of the brutal Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. While largely side-stepping the initial cause of the invasion, 5 Days lingers on the human toll of the Russian assault, and on the courageous war reporters who struggled to get the story of war crimes out to the world. Featuring American stars like Val Kilmer, Andy Garcia, Dean Cain and Heather Graham, the film is as much an indictment of international indifference to human suffering as it is of the actual invasion. A stirring, emotional film that celebrates Georgia’s desire for freedom, 5 Days concludes with a moving postscript featuring real-life victims of the invasion describing atrocities committed against their families.

10. Battle: Los Angeles – Jonathan Liebesman, U.S.

American science fiction has always taken a keen interest in the struggle for freedom. An intense, stirring and patriotic ode to America’s fighting men and women, Battle: Los Angeles depicts a team of Marines – led by Aaron Eckhart as a rugged Marine staff sergeant – tasked with defending Los Angeles from a massive alien assault. Like an old-school World War II film, Battle: Los Angeles revels in the honor of military service, the basic code of fidelity to the mission and one’s fellow soldier – especially in the face of overwhelming odds. Against a backdrop of intense urban warfare, often resembling street fighting in Iraq, director Jonathan Liebesman captures the steadiness and quiet resolve of America’s soldiers as they defend civilians in an apocalyptic battle for human liberty.

Aaron Eckhart in "Battle: Los Angeles."

We’d like to thank our colleague Joe Bendel for helping us compile this list and for his work reviewing many of these films for Libertas Film Magazine. Other timely films from 2011 on the subject of freedom include: Khodorkovsky, the chilling account of the Russian mogul’s imprisonment by Putin; Cairo 6, 7, 8 and Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story, both portraying the struggle for women’s rights in modern Egypt; along with The Black Tulip and The Miscreants of Taliwood, about the efforts of average Afghans to resist Taliban rule.

Posted on December 31st, 2011 at 8:32am.

[Editor's Note: The post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. When The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hits movie theaters on December 21st, it will be the second major female-led franchise movie released in just over a month. The first, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part I, has already earned over $640 million dollars worldwide since its November 18th release and has become the third-highest grossing movie of 2011 (after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and Transformers: Dark of the Moon – and on a lower budget than those films). The remarkable success of the Twilight film series, with over $2 billion in worldwide ticket sales to date, proves that audiences will show up to see tentpole movies built around women. Now with the upcoming release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the spring/summer 2012 openings of Mirror Mirror, The Hunger Games, and Snow White and the Huntsman, audiences are being offered a run of female-oriented big-budget films unlike anything they’ve seen in recent years. After decades of lavishing resources on male-led action and comic book movies, Hollywood is finally making an effort to give women and their stories the blockbuster treatment.

Greta Garbo in "Queen Christina."

In doing so, the film industry is hearkening back to what was once a strength of classic Hollywood: the blockbuster women’s film. Such films were high-quality productions that elevated the unique psychology, heroism and romance of women’s lives to the level of epic entertainment. The great era of this kind of women’s film was in the ’30s and ’40s when movies like Greta Garbo’s Queen Christina, Vivien Leigh’s Gone with the Wind, Marlene Dietrich’s The Scarlet Empress, Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce, Greer Garson’s Mrs. Miniver, and Bette Davis’ Jezebel enthralled audiences. Whether they told historical or contemporary stories, such films offered a ‘blockbuster’ vision of women’s lives – both in terms of the resources the studios devoted to them (A-list directors and casts, big budgets) as well as in the importance they placed in their heroine’s emotional journeys. Such films were a mainstay of classic Hollywood, filling box office coffers and building the careers of talented actresses. Further, these films inspired both women and men, for they successfully transformed the unique emotions and experiences of women into works of art with universal significance.

The success of classic women-led films is reflected in their status as some of the highest grossing films of all time. According to Box Office Mojo’s list of the all time highest grossing films (all figures are domestic, adjusted for inflation), Gone with the Wind (1939) is still number one with an astonishing U.S. theatrical total of $1.6 billion dollars. The Sound of Music ($1.13 billion), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ($867 million), and Titanic ($1.02 billion) also figure in the top ten list – and one could argue that Dr. Zhivago ($988 million) and The Exorcist ($880 million) owe much of their success to their strong female characters, as well. The success of these films shows that women and their stories have been a compelling draw in many of the biggest movies ever made.

Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the action movie rose in prominence – and a genre that naturally favors men over women took over Hollywood. The success of the male-oriented action film was used to justify spending less money on women’s films, and women were increasingly relegated to lower budget romantic comedies and dramas. This led to a vicious cycle in which the modest budgets given to women’s films led to modest box office returns that were then used as an excuse to spend even less on women’s films – completely contradicting the evidence of the successful women’s films of the classic Hollywood era. While some fine movies were made in this period – Norma Rae, Julia, An Unmarried Woman – much of the heroism, glamor, and romance that had characterized the great women’s films of the ’30s and ’40s was lost.

Kate Winslet in "Titanic."

There was a brief resurgence of the blockbuster women’s film in the ’80s with Out of Africa, Terms of Endearment, and comedies like Romancing the Stone, but this promising trend petered out in the early ’90s. By the late ’90s, the film industry’s downgrading of women’s importance in the movies was such that when Titanic became a massive hit in 1997 – a film very much built around Kate Winslet and her emotional journey – the film’s success was instead credited to Leonardo DiCaprio and to the film’s special effects.

This mindset has led to another trend in contemporary Hollywood: the rise of the comic book movie. With the comic book movie, the film industry has became preoccupied with producing a never-ending stream of films based around male adolescence and coming of age. That’s fine for men, but there’s little there to relate to for women. On the rare occasion when a woman plays the lead in a big-budget comic book or video game movie – say Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider films, or Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil films – her role is little different from that of a man. This is a shame because women are capable of a lot more on the big screen than simply wielding violence.

Women’s life experiences are different from those of men. We wish to be leaders and to achieve success in the world, but in our entertainment we also want romance, adventure, and emotional catharsis. When the Twilight movies came along, they answered this need beautifully. Twilight’s highly traditional storyline of a young woman falling in love with and taming a dangerous man has appealed to women for generations and dates back to the 19th century Gothic novel and beyond (as I describe in my analysis of the literary and mythological themes in the Twilight series). One sees this storyline in everything from the fable of Beauty and the Beast to novels like Jane Eyre and Gone with the Wind. Ultimately, this storyline serves as a metaphor for a woman’s heroic quest to overcome the forces of evil and find love and fulfillment in the world. Continue reading »

LFM Co-Editor Govindini Murty was on Lars Larson’s national radio show Friday talking about Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Special thanks, as always, to Lars and his staff for inviting Govindini on. She always has fun appearing on his show.

Lars’ show is broadcast on over 200 stations nationwide, and runs at different times across the country, so to find his show be sure to check out his website here.

Posted on December 20th, 2011 at 9:58am.

LFM Co-Editor Govindini Murty was on Lars Larson’s national radio show Friday talking about Twilight, the new John Carter trailer, and her Huffington Post interview with Werner Herzog as his Cave of Forgotten Dreams arrives on Blu-ray/DVD.

Special thanks, as always, to Lars and his staff for inviting Govindini on. She always has fun appearing on his show.

Lars’ show is broadcast on over 200 stations nationwide, and runs at different times across the country, so to find his show be sure to check out his website here.

Posted on December 6th, 2011 at 12:02pm.

Charlize Theron prepares a new persona for herself in "Young Adult."

[Editor's Note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. Charlize Theron’s new movie Young Adult offers one of the most striking depictions of narcissism to hit movie screens in some time. Directed by Jason Reitman, Young Adult tells the story of Mavis Gary (Theron), a self-absorbed writer of young adult novels who returns to her hometown to steal back her happily-married former boyfriend (played by Patrick Wilson). I had the chance to see Young Adult recently at a screening hosted by The Huffington Post and AOL. HuffPost Founding Editor Roy Sekoff moderated the colorful Q & A that followed at Arianna Huffington’s home with screenwriter Diablo Cody and actor Patton Oswalt. In the most memorable exchange of the evening, actress Sean Young (Blade Runner) asked Diablo Cody why she had decided to explore the subject of narcissism in the film. Cody wryly responded that perhaps it was because Young Adult was the first screenplay she wrote upon moving to LA. This drew a big laugh from the crowd, but the implication seemed more serious: what is the ever-increasing narcissism in Hollywood entertainment doing to our broader culture?

Charlize Theron’s Mavis embodies all the narcissism of modern popular culture. She’s obsessed with reality TV (the Kardashians drone on in the background of several scenes), a medium that has elevated the navel gazing of minor celebrities to the level of major entertainment. Mavis writes young adult novels that are only thinly-disguised relivings of her own high-school glory days, and she’s otherwise obsessed with appearances and shallow celebrity status. The film repeatedly shows Mavis studying herself in the mirror – either in depressed self-loathing after an alcoholic bender, or with vain self-satisfaction as she puts on makeup to impress her former boyfriend.

Charlize Theron tries to steal away married man Patrick Wilson in "Young Adult."

In keeping with the instability of identity that goes with modern narcissism, Mavis also adopts different personae as it suits her: at home she plays the dumpy writer in baggy jeans and t-shirts, but when she wants to seduce her old boyfriend she dresses in a low-cut black dress and adopts the manner of a big-city sophisticate. Later when Mavis is invited to a baby’s naming ceremony, she takes on another guise: that of a sober career woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a high-necked dress and conservative spectator pumps. Her various outer guises fail to impress the people of her hometown, though, for Mavis has neglected to develop any sustaining character traits. Mavis is the classic narcissist: cut off from objective reality, lacking any concern for other people, insecure in private but willing in public to ride roughshod over anyone and everything in order to gratify her whims.

Interestingly enough, Young Adult is one of several upcoming films that explore the dangers of vanity and narcissism. For example, two new adaptations of the Snow White fairy tale, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, depict vain queens willing to kill to maintain their beauty – with Charlize Theron even playing the villainess in the latter film. In keeping with the original fairy tale, the wicked queen’s obsession with her own appearance in both films is so extreme that she literally has a spirit residing in her mirror that she calls on to affirm her own beauty – this spirit acting as the exterior personification of her own vanity.

In Young Adult, Theron’s Mavis may not literally kill young women in order to remain beautiful, but her narcissism leads her to disregard all moral standards as she attempts to destroy the marriage of her former boyfriend and undermine the happiness of his wife and baby.

Vain Queens: Charlize Theron in "Snow White and The Huntsman" and Julia Roberts in "Mirror Mirror."

Young Adult vividly depicts what happens when self-love crosses the line into monstrous solipsism. This type of narcissism is becoming a defining trait of our modern cinema, and is taking on ever more baroque forms. It extends into the trend of psychological thrillers like Inception, The Ward, Dream House or Sucker Punch that take place almost entirely within the mind of a character, often one who is mentally unstable. Although these thrillers depict elaborate action, they recast this action as being the involuted imagining of a diseased mind – or of someone who has lost the will to live. Indeed, in Inception the hero’s wife becomes so confused between reality and delusion that she commits suicide. Such films are symbols of a culture in decay – like the passive Narcissus of Greek mythology, so intent on gazing inwardly at himself that he loses the will to engage productively with the outside world.

The last time such narcissistic themes appeared en masse in Western culture was during the late 19th century Decadent movement, just before Europe collapsed into the conflagration of World War I. Decadent novels like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray portrayed self-absorbed aesthetes who cared only for their external appearances, using them as cover to commit the ugliest of crimes. Dorian Gray’s portrait is the functional equivalent of the “double” seen by Mavis as she stares into her mirror – or of the reflected doubles that feature in Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, or even The Devil’s Double or Black Swan. Like Narcissus gazing at himself in the forest pool, all these reflected doubles signify the modern split psyche – alienated from humanity, from moral values, and from objective reality.

Icon of modern vanity: Kim Kardashian at the mirror.

In the old days this destructive narcissism was known by another word – vanity – and it was considered one of the seven deadly sins. However, in the twentieth century with the rise of photography and the cinema, Western culture has become ever more dominated by the visual image – and vanity has ceased to be stigmatized, instead being outright celebrated. Of course, there is a glorious life-affirmation inherent in appreciating the beauty of the physical. It would be just as perverse to denigrate beauty as to overvalue it. Nonetheless, Western culture has become so over-preoccupied with outward appearances that it is neglecting the important moral and intellectual qualities that give those appearances any larger meaning.

Perhaps dramas like Young Adult represent a healthy effort to deal with the problem of narcissism. After all, the movie shows how Mavis Gary’s self-absorption only leads to heartbreak, as relationships with family and old friends prove more difficult for her to manage than she expected. Reality eventually comes crashing into the hermetically-sealed world of Mavis’ narcissism and she is forced to deal with it.

This is as it should be. We can only evade objective reality for so long before being faced with one of two choices: either retreat into the reflection in the mirror and go mad, or look outside of ourselves and reestablish a healing connection with humanity and the larger world.

Posted on November 29th, 2011 at 10:17am.

By Joe Bendel. Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche was a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who embraced the 1960’s counterculture, but could not abide rock & roll. He drank significantly more than he should have, openly and often, but he had no use for drugs. A former monk, Trungpa renounced his robes, developing ways to teach Tibetan Buddhism in the western vernacular. A study in paradoxes, Trungpa’s all too brief life avoided cliché, making him a rich documentary subject in Johanna Demetrakas’ Crazy Wisdom: the Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, which opens this Friday in New York at the Rubin Museum of Art.

A recognized reincarnation, Trungpa was the last of his generation to be entirely educated in Tibet. After the Chinese Communists invaded in 1959, he took a leading role securing the teachings and documents of his faith, personally guiding a group of his fellow monks to safety in India. Living in exile, Trungpa chose to embrace the west, trading his robes for a business suit. It was the start of a transformation that was decidedly controversial with his elders.

Living in Scotland, Trungpa married a young British woman and began teaching Tibetan Buddhism to hippies. For obvious reasons, they were attracted to his “crazy wisdom,” a recognized approach to enlightenment celebrating the eccentric and unconventional, sort of the rough Tibetan Buddhist analog to drunken master martial arts. However, Trungpa liked to keep people guessing.

As one of his students recalls, at the height of the anti-war movement, Trungpa was once asked to comment about aggression in America, to which he replied: “I want to talk about the aggression in this room.” Ouch. He was also evidently a stickler for the Queen’s English, perhaps giving scores of hippies their first elocution lessons. However, the greatest irony must have been the Dorje Kasung, the military drill team he established at Naropa University, the American Buddhist school Trungpa founded in Boulder, Colorado. Continue reading »

LFM Co-Editor Govindini Murty was on Lars Larson’s national radio show Friday talking about Twilight, J. Edgar, Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, and Werner Herzog’s nature documentaries.

Special thanks, as always, to Lars and his staff for inviting Govindini on. She always has fun appearing on his show.

Lars’ show is broadcast on over 200 stations nationwide, and runs at different times across the country, so to find his show be sure to check out his website here.

Posted on November 23rd, 2011 at 11:29am.