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

Review: HBO’s Game Change is like Days of our Lives for Republicans

By Jason Apuzzo. It used to be that a politician had to be a Kennedy to get a juicy, tell-all movie made about them.

On the odd chance that you can’t get enough of this year’s colorful Republican primaries – if lurid accusations of Newt Gingrich’s ‘open marriage’ or saucy rumors of Herman Cain’s romantic conquests haven’t been enough for you – or if you think all the pizazz went out of the campaign once Michelle Bachman left the race (can anyone else say “Obama is a socialist” with such a winning smile?), then HBO’s frothy Game Change, which debuts this Saturday March 10th, may be the remedy for you.

Game Change is pure political soap opera, and in fleeting moments it even makes for compelling drama – though to be fair, Game Change is probably not an accurate view into the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the 2008 McCain campaign, or into the personality of its megawatt star, Sarah Palin.

Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin.

What the movie is, however, is a gossipy and occasionally colorful look at how much changed – at least in the world of Republican politics – when John McCain made the decision to select Sarah Palin as his running mate for the 2008 election.

And as the roiling 2012 campaign continues to make clear: a lot changed from that point forward.

There was an era, seemingly a lifetime ago, when the Republican Party appeared to be the quieter, more straight-laced of the two parties. Most people over 30 remember what that was like, back before Republican officeholders were expected to be celebrities.

Traditional Republican candidates were war veterans and businessmen, successful lawyers, sober Congressmen with dark suits and smiling families, genial chairmen of the local chamber of commerce. Think Mitch Daniels crossed with Phil Mickelson.

They were the type of person you’d want to buy real estate or aftershave from, or to lead your nephew into combat – but not necessarily build a Broadway show or rock opera around.

That, of course, was before the Palins came to town.

Game Change is HBO’s adaptation of the book of the same name about the 2008 Presidential election, penned by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Crucially, that book depicted both sides of the 2008 campaign – dwelling mostly on the epic Democratic Party primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, something left out completely from HBO’s movie. Continue reading »

From the new film "Putin's Kiss."

[Editor's Note: The article below appears in its entirety today at The Atlantic.]

Putin’s Kiss, Khodorkovsky, and Target question tyranny, capitalism, and their country’s future.

By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. As Russians head toward their presidential elections on March 4th, a trio of new films sheds light on a contemporary Russia veering between hope and cynicism, democracy and authoritarianism. The documentary Putin’s Kiss depicts a young Russian woman who becomes disillusioned with her role as a leader in Vladimir Putin’s nationalistic youth group Nashi in the wake of a brutal beating of a journalist. The chilling documentary Khodorkovsky examines the fate of the jailed Russian billionaire turned democracy activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky. And the science-fiction epic Target depicts the moral collapse of a wealthy elite in an authoritarian, near-future Russia.

On the brink of what may be another six years under Putin’s rule, these three films reveal a deep anxiety about Russia’s future—and a faint glimmer of hope for more genuine democratic freedom.

Masha Drokova is the young heroine of Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen’s documentary Putin’s Kiss (2012), a selection of the 2012 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals and currently playing in limited release. Born in 1989, Masha is part of the first generation to grow up in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the age of 16, Masha joins Putin’s nationalistic youth group Nashi; by age 19, she is already a spokesperson and leading commissar of the youth group, and Putin himself awards her a medal of honor. By age 21, the bright, ambitious Masha has everything thanks to Nashi: a prestigious spot in a top Moscow university, a new car, an apartment, her own TV talk show, and access to the highest echelons of Russia’s power elite.

As briefly mentioned in the film, Nashi itself was founded in 2005 by Putin supporters to counter the rise of pro-democracy youth groups in the wake of the Ukrainian Orange revolution. Although purportedly “democratic and anti-fascist,” Nashi bears a striking resemblance to the Soviet youth group Komsomol. Like Komsomol, the well-funded Nashi provides a route for many young people into official advancement.

In Putin’s Kiss, Nashi founder Vasily Yakemenko is shown exercising a Svengali-like control over his young charges, exhorting them to discipline and promising them a new life if they will dedicate themselves to Putin and the Russian motherland. As Yakemenko says to the Nashi faithful: “I want everybody to understand: There is no authority for the movement except for the policy of Putin and Medvedev … Being part of the movement means going out into the streets. It means to tell a villain he’s a villain.” As depicted in the film, a major part of Nashi’s efforts are directed toward vilifying Putin’s opponents as “enemies of Russia.” By way of example, the film shows some particularly crude attacks directed at opposition figures Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, and Garry Kasparov.

Masha is initially drawn to Nashi out of patriotism and ambition. She sees Nashi as a way for young people to get involved in helping advance Russia, and she considers Putin a force for strength and stability. Masha is such a fan of Putin that she becomes known as “the girl who kissed Putin” for impetuously pecking him on the cheek when he presented her with a medal.

Yet Masha’s curiosity about the larger world leads her to make friends with a group of opposition journalists. Masha’s chief friend in the group is the gregarious Oleg Kashin, a liberal journalist who writes for the Kommersant newspaper.

Things take a dark turn one night in 2010 when assailants brutally beat Oleg Kashin …

[For the remainder of this article, please visit The Atlantic.]

Posted on February 29th, 2012 at 11:29am.

From "The Artist."

Libertas’ Jason Apuzzo, Govindini Murty & Joe Bendel participated in this year’s Indiewire critic survey for the Oscars & Indie Spirit Awards. The survey asks critics who will win the Oscars and the Indie Spirit Awards, and also who should win the Oscars and Indie Spirit Awards, based on the actual nominations.

To see the main Indiewire article covering the critics’ Oscar/Indie Spirit picks, see here.

Here is Jason’s list.

Here is Govindini’s list.

Joe’s list should be up by later today. And if you want to see a list of Joe’s many reviews of Oscar/Indie Spirit-nominated films, visits Indiewire’s Criticwire page and click on ‘Joe Bendel,’ then scroll down his page.

Our thanks to Indiewire for inviting us to participate. The Indie Spirit Awards took place last night, and you can see a list of the winners here.

Posted on February 26th, 2012 at 12:40pm.

LFM Co-Editor Govindini Murty was on Lars Larson’s national radio show Friday talking about Act of Valor, the Oscars, and the sci-fi novels of Robert Heinlein (!). 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 February 26th, 2012 at 12:37pm.

From the downtown LA battle of "Transformers" (2007).

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

By Jason Apuzzo. Celebrities will invade Los Angeles this weekend for the 84th Academy Awards ceremony. Searchlights will blaze and flashbulbs will pop as Hollywood stars will descend from the heavens — or maybe just the Malibu hills — to touch the ground that regular Angelenos walk on each day.

They’ll smile and snarl our traffic. They’ll toss their hair and forget to thank their husbands. They’ll praise each other for their bravery, while collecting $75,000 gift bags.

L.A. is accustomed to such strange invasions, of course. If you’re a movie fan, you already know that L.A. has been invaded over the years by everything from giant atomic ants (Them), to buff cyborgs (The Terminator), to rampaging 3D zombies (Resident Evil: Afterlife). So Angelenos take invasions from movie stars in stride.

But this weekend marks an anniversary of an invasion you might not know about: L.A.’s first alien invasion.

A surviving image from The Battle of Los Angeles.

This February 24th-25th is the 70th anniversary of The Battle of Los Angeles, also known as The Great Los Angeles Air Raid, one of the most mysterious incidents of World War II — and also one of the key, oddball events in U.F.O. lore that’s still inspiring movies and TV shows to this day.

Between the late evening of February 24th, 1942 and the early morning hours of February 25th, the City of Angels flew into a panic as what were initially believed to be Japanese enemy aircraft were spotted over the city. This suspected Japanese raid — coming soon after the Pearl Harbor bombing, and just one day after a confirmed Japanese submarine attack off the Santa Barbara coast — touched off a massive barrage of anti-aircraft fire, with some 1400 shells shot into the skies over Los Angeles during the frantic evening.

Oddly, however, the anti-aircraft shells hit nothing. Despite the intense barrage, no aircraft wreckage was ever recovered.

Indeed, once the smoke had cleared and Angelenos calmed down (the public hysteria over the raid was mercilessly satirized by Steven Spielberg in 1941), no one really knew what had been seen in the sky or on radar. Were they weather balloons? German Zeppelins? Trick kites designed by Orson Welles?

Many people believed the aircraft they’d seen were extraterrestrial – one eyewitness even described an object he’d seen as looking like an enormous flying ‘lozenge’ – and some accused the government of a cover-up. Conflicting accounts of the incident from the Navy and War Departments didn’t help clarify matters.

As if to confirm public fears of extraterrestrial attack, one famous photograph emerged (see above) from the incident showing an ominous, saucer-like object hovering over the city. This much-debated photograph, which even appeared in some trailers for Battle: Los Angeles last year, inspired America’s first major U.F.O. controversy — a full five years before Roswell.

To this day, no one knows for sure what flew over Los Angeles that night and evaded the city’s air defenses. (The raid itself is recreated each year at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro.) But since it’s more fun to assume that it was aliens than weather balloons, we’ve decided to honor The Battle of Los Angeles by ranking the Top 10 movies in which aliens attack L.A. (See below.)

To make this list, a film must feature aliens on the warpath — no cuddly E.T.’s here — and their attacks must take place in L.A. proper, rather than out in the suburbs or desert (eliminating films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

As the list demonstrates, no city — other than perhaps Tokyo — has suffered more on-screen calamity at the hands of extraterrestrials than Los Angeles. At the same time, there’s no apparently no other city that’s easier for aliens to hide in.

From George Pal's "War of the Worlds."

1) The War of the Worlds (1953)

Producer George Pal’s adaptation of the H.G. Wells’ novel is the granddaddy of ‘em all, and still the best L.A.-based film about alien attack. Gene Barry plays Dr. Clayton Forrester, a natty scientist at ‘Pacific Tech,’ who along with his girlfriend Sylvia van Buren (a perky USC coed, played by Ann Robinson) struggles to prevent Martian invaders from destroying human civilization. Highlights of the film include a boffo attack on downtown L.A. (which Pal initially wanted to film in 3D) by the graceful, swan-like Martian ships, and an Air Force flying wing dropping a nuclear bomb on the Martians. Filmed in vivid Technicolor, The War of the Worlds was a huge hit, broke new ground in visual effects technology, and helped kick off the 1950s sci-fi craze.

Best exchange of the film: “What do we say to them [the aliens]?” “Welcome to California.”

2) Independence Day (1996)

Director Roland Emmerich’s funny, exhilarating and patriotic summer hit from 1996 borrows key elements from The War of the Worlds, but adds a few of its own: 15-mile-wide flying saucers, a president who flies fighter jets … and Will Smith. In the role that made him a megastar, Smith plays a trash-talking Marine fighter pilot paired with an MIT-trained computer wiz (played by Jeff Goldblum, channeling Gene Barry) who fights an alien saucer armada out to demolish humanity. ID4 is easily the best of Emmerich’s apocalyptic films, largely due to its tongue-in-cheek humor. Watch as ditzy Angelenos atop the Library Tower cheerfully greet an alien saucer, only to be zapped into oblivion a moment later. Only in L.A.

Best line of the film: “Welcome to Earth.”

3) Transformers (2007)

There’s mayhem, and then there’s Bayhem. Michael Bay’s Transformers redefined sci-fi action cinema in 2007, featuring a spectacular climax in downtown Los Angeles — a riot of colossal urban warfare and aerial strikes as the U.S. military and Autobot robots unite to fight Decepticon robots out to enslave Earth. A key sequence showcased Autobots and Decepticons ‘transforming’ at 80 mph on a busy L.A. freeway, swatting aside cars and buses while fighting each other — living out the fantasy of every aggressive L.A. driver. Unlike the stately saucers of ID4, or the graceful war machines of War of the Worlds, Bay’s Decepticon robots are fast-moving, anthropomorphic and nasty. Like certain Hollywood celebrities, they trash talk, strut and propagandize as they smash through buildings and otherwise inflict as much collateral damage as possible. The film that made stars out of Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, Transformers delivers heaping doses of humor, curvy women and robot carnage; it’s Bayhem at its best.

Best line: “You didn’t think that the United States military might need to know that you’re keeping a hostile alien robot frozen in the basement?!”

From the NBC miniseries "V" (1983).

4) V (1983)

These alien ‘Visitors’ look just like us, and they come in peace … except that underneath their false skins they’re actually lizards and want to eat us. That’s the premise of Kenneth Johnson’s apocalyptic NBC miniseries from 1983, a show that leans heavily on references to Nazism, communism and other pernicious forms of group-behavior. V is also the show that first gave us gigantic motherships hovering over major cities, years before ID4. The best part of V, however, is the scene-chewing performance by Jane Badler as the alien leader Diana; somebody should put that woman in charge of GM. Otherwise, in V the human resistance movement against the aliens centers around Los Angeles — possibly because it’s hard to cop a tan while saucers are blocking the sun.

Best line [about the alien leader Diana]: “That damn dragon lady can bend people’s minds around. What the hell does she need a blowtorch for?!” Continue reading »

[Editor's Note: The article below and its accompanying slideshow appears in its entirety today at The Atlantic.]

Decoding the many references to film history in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated movie

By Govindini Murty. Martin Scorsese’s delightful children’s film Hugo is currently nominated for eleven Oscars, the most of any film of 2011. And in a year of movies like The Artist and Midnight in Paris that pay homage to early 20th century film and cultural history, Hugo might be the most complex cinematic homage of them all.

Based on the children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, Hugo tells the story of an orphaned boy who lives in the walls of a train station in 1931 Paris. Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield) maintains the station’s clocks and tries to repair a mysterious automaton left to him by his late father, a clock maker. While doing so, Hugo encounters an old man who sells toys in the station, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), and his precocious step-daughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz). Hugo and Isabelle team up to find the secret of the automaton, discovering along the way that Papa Georges is none other than Georges Méliès, the legendary turn of the century filmmaker known for such fantasy films as A Trip to the Moon (1902).

Scorsese uses the stunning 3D cinematography of Hugo much like a palimpsest, layering multiple levels of historical, cinematic, and intellectual history in each scene. Hugo references everyone from Jules Verne, Django Reinhardt, and the robot C-3PO to classic silent movies like Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last. Scorsese has even said that he considers the 3D in Hugo as a cinematic form of Cubism.

This cultural guide will help to decode the wealth of allusions in Hugo, making for a crash course in film, art, and literary history:

Maria from "Metropolis," C-3PO from "Star Wars."

Mysterious Automata

Hugo’s central mystery revolves around the automaton left to Hugo by his late father. The eerie metallic figure recalls such classic automata as the Machine-Man in Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis and C-3PO in Star Wars. According to Hugo author Brian Selznick, the inspiration for Hugo’s automaton came from an 1805 writing automaton created by Swiss clockmaker Henri Maillerdet, currently in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, as well from the 18th century Jaquet-Droz writing automata in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Animated figures go back to the Renaissance, when mechanical humans and animals would appear out of clock faces to mark the time. Automata were also popular in Hellenistic Alexandria, where automated figures were used in mechanical puppet theaters and in temples to provide oracles.

In Hugo, the automaton possesses a dual quality—both ominous and marvelous. This reflects the ambiguous feelings that people have toward humanoid automata—seeing them either as frightening doppelgangers (as in Metropolis) or as magical helpers (as in Star Wars). The scene where Hugo dreams that he turns into the automaton reinforces this ambiguity and dramatizes a common fear of dehumanization in the machine age.

[For the rest of the article and the accompanying slideshow, please visit The Atlantic.]

Posted on February 22nd, 2012 at 8:16am.

LFM's Joe Bendel, Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

By Govindini Murty. Sundance sets the tone for the entire film industry in North America. Its spirit of supporting creativity, talent, and scrappy innovation is one we heartily applaud here at Libertas. We also applaud the fact that in recent years Sundance has become a home to so many pro-freedom films. To name just a few, these have included Mads Brügger’s daring expose of North Korean Communism The Red Chapel (2010), Chris Morris’ brilliant satire of Islamic terrorism Four Lions (2010), and Lee Tamahori’s intense anti-Saddam Hussein thriller The Devil’s Double (2011).

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival continued this tradition. Pro-freedom films screened at the festival included: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s efforts to expose the brutality of the Communist Chinese government; The Other Dream Team, about the Lithuanian basketball team and their struggle to overcome Soviet influence; Putin’s Kiss, about the turn toward authoritarianism amongst the Nashi youth movement in Putin’s Russia; and Mads Brügger’s The Ambassador, a witty and politically-incorrect expose of corruption in central Africa. There were also a host of entertaining and well-made narrative dramas and comedies this year. A few we at Libertas enjoyed included The Raid, Grabbers, and Shadow Dancer.

LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty with Joseph Gordon-Levitt at Sundance 2012.

Jason and I arrived at Sundance on Monday, January 23rd. Libertas super-contributor Joe Bendel had already been at the festival since opening night on January 19th, and had managed to fit in an astounding number of films that first weekend. Because we admire the Zen warrior-monk focus Joe brings to writing movie reviews, the first thing we did when we arrived in Park City was meet up with Joe on Main Street – the central artery through which all things Sundance flow. Snow flakes were falling and the lights were twinkling on the picturesque street as we all met up in front of the famed Egyptian Theatre.

Slipping and sliding through the snow and invigorated by the air of good cheer around us, we headed with Joe down the street through the crush of festival goers and filmmakers to plan our film-going strategy. With approximately 180 films showing at Sundance, many playing simultaneously in multiple venues, careful coordination is integral to having a successful Sundance experience. As we hurried down Main Street, we ran into Paul Giamatti (looking avuncular with a fuzzy beard), and Jason spotted Kate Bosworth (there promoting her thriller Black Rock). Jason wanted to ask her whether she did her own surfing in Blue Crush, then thought better of it.

The first Sundance film we had scheduled for that night was an 11:45pm screening of Grabbers – a campy, sci-fi Irish alien-invasion movie. Sundance’s Park City at Midnight screenings are where the festival shows its genre films, and the raucous crowds that attend these screenings often provide a lively show of their own. The screening of Grabbers was great fun, with the mostly drunken crowd hooting and hollering throughout the screening, and we agreed the film had a good chance at getting distribution. In fact, Jason spotted some distribution execs he recognized walking into the theater. We would have stayed for the Q & A with the filmmakers, but it was 2:00am and we were scheduled to attend the coffee chat with Stan Lee at 9:00 the next morning. This was something we would have to get used to at Sundance: sleep deprivation.

LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty with Stan Lee at the 2012 Slamdance Film Festival.

Tuesday, January 24th’s highlights were most definitely Slamdance’s two-hour coffee chat with Stan Lee in the morning, followed by the screening of his film With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story that afternoon. Slamdance is the fun, ‘alternative’ festival to Sundance, and is really worth a visit.  Jason has already described this wonderful event with Stan Lee in detail, but let me just add how charming, witty, and delightful Stan is in person. He was truly gracious when we met him, with a big smile on his face and a roguish twinkle in his eye. We bonded with him over our mutual love of classic film and all things Errol Flynn, and had fun asking him questions about his work and inspiration during the course of the two-hour master class/coffee chat. We would have loved for Joe to have attended this event with us, but Joe was scheduled to leave Sundance Tuesday morning for New York, so we bid him adieu the night before. Continue reading »

Filmmaker Mads Brügger, director of "The Ambassador" at the Sundance Film Festival.

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

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. His documentaries have been among the most provocative films featured in the Sundance Film Festival over the past several years. Bolder even than Sacha Baron Cohen, he’s punk’d both the North Korean communist government and now, in his new film The Ambassador, the Central African Republic and the corrupt diplomatic culture that supports it.

He’s one of Europe’s funniest and most controversial filmmakers, although most Americans haven’t heard of him — yet.

The name of this lanky, cerebral enfant terrible is Mads Brügger.

In Brügger’s previous film The Red Chapel (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), winner of Sundance’s 2010 World Cinema jury prize for documentaries, the filmmaker pulled off one of the most dangerous and politically provocative stunts in cinema history by infiltrating North Korea as part of a fake socialist comedy group. Operating under the watchful (and vaguely confused) gaze of the North Korean government, Brügger’s cameras proceeded to document the bizarre, Orwellian nether-world of today’s Pyongyang and its frightening cult of the ‘Dear Leader.’

In his new film The Ambassador (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), which recently screened at Sundance, Brügger now attempts an even more complex and daring stunt by purchasing a Liberian diplomatic title and infiltrating one of the most dangerous places on Earth — the Central African Republic (CAR) — as an ersatz Ambassador. His purpose? To expose the illegal blood diamond trade — and the corrupt world of CAR officials, bogus businessmen and shady European and Asian diplomats that it benefits.

Like a tragicomic version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, The Ambassador takes viewers into a rarely-seen world of European influence-peddlers who exploit the African continent — and the amoral retinue of African officials, petty businessmen and hangers-on who are complicit in the exploitation.

Along the way Brügger and his hidden cameras have close encounters with everything from an obese ex-French Legionnaire heading the CAR’s state security (who is assassinated shortly after talking to Brügger), to armed militias in the middle of Africa’s ‘Triangle of Death,’ to a diamond smuggler with a secret child bride and potential terrorist ties, to a tribe of inebriated pygmies organized by Brügger to staff a match factory.

Mads Brügger talks with Jason Apuzzo at Sundance.

It all makes for a potent, carnivalesque and politically incorrect experience — and one that exposes the mutual racism (of Europeans toward Africans, and Africans toward Europeans) that makes central Africa such a hotbed of corruption and violence.

In the midst of all this is Brügger himself — a tall, soft-spoken Danish journalist (and son of two Danish newspaper editors) with an ironic sense of humor and an uncanny ability to transform himself into the kind of diffident European grandee that African officials are accustomed to exploiting — and being exploited by — well into the 21st century.

Along with my Libertas Film Magazine co-editor Govindini Murty, I sat down with Brügger at the Sundance Film Festival to talk about his funny, horrifying and highly controversial new film. With a shaved head, and wearing a skull ring from DC Comics’ The Phantom, Brügger arrived looking very much the part of an experimental European director.

Apuzzo: What got you interested in [corruption in the Central African Republic] as subject matter for a film?

Brügger: I like doing films that divert from their own genre. I wanted to do an Africa documentary without all the usual semiotics and codes of the generic Africa documentary. You know — NGO people, child soldiers, HIV patients, and so on. But also I wanted a film where you would meet all the people you usually don’t get to see – you know, the kingpins, the players, the ministers who live a very secure and comfortable life away from the scrutiny of the media. So I thought that if I could purchase a diplomatic title, I could gain access to this very closed realm of African state affairs and politics. It’s pretty much a ‘let’s-see-what-happens’ project. Once we set off to do this, who will we meet? What kind of people will I run into?

Mads Brügger talks with Govindini Murty at Sundance.

Apuzzo: How did you prepare to become a corrupt European diplomat?

Brügger: [Laughs.] I prepared for almost three years, because I wanted to really go into detail with my persona. I would go to receptions, embassies in Copenhagen, especially the Belgian embassy because they have a lot of African diplomats coming there. I noticed all the telltale signs, the do’s and don’ts of how diplomats behave and carry themselves. For instance, when they’re having cocktails they like to fold their napkin into a triangle and then wrap it around the glass. I think it’s because they don’t want to leave fingerprints, but I don’t know for sure. [Laughs.]

The most popular cigarette amongst African diplomats are red Dunhills. The most popular liquor is Johnny Walker Black Label. You know, things of that order. At the same time, I also wanted my ‘character’ to be packed with various archetypes, and characters from comic books: Dr. Müller in Tintin, Bernard Prince (a Belgian comic book hero), even the Man with The Yellow Hat from Curious George. Continue reading »

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

By Govindini Murty. As the Egyptian military government prepares to put nineteen American employees of pro-democracy NGOs on trial, and thousands of Egyptians continue to demonstrate over the stalling of democratic reforms, the new documentary 1/2 Revolution offers a striking look back at the Egyptian revolution of one year ago.

Premiering recently at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, 1/2 Revolution depicts the revolution through the eyes of a group of Egyptian activists directly involved in it. Using cell phone cameras and hand-held camcorders, the filmmaker-activists capture dramatic footage of clashes between average Egyptians calling for freedom and the repressive government forces attempting to stop them.

As co-director Karim El Hakim said after the film’s recent Sundance screening, “You can’t get any more cinema verité than this.”

Danish-Palestinian director Omar Shargawi and Egyptian-American director Karim El Hakim live with their families just a few blocks from Tahrir Square in Cairo. When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians take to the streets on January 25th, 2011 to demand the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak, Omar and Karim head down from their apartments to record the events. Viewers are immediately thrown into the visceral experience of the revolution. Crowds of protesters run through the streets shouting “Egypt! Egypt! “Join us! Join us!” “Freedom! Freedom!” When gangs of government-paid thugs and police start beating and shooting the protesters, the protesters shout “No violence! No violence!” This call to non-violence is one of the early strong points of the documentary. To emphasize the theme, Shargawi points out a crowd of demonstrators who surround a group of police yet refrain from assaulting them.

Over time, though, these commendable calls to non-violence are drowned out by the tide of chaos and bloodshed that overtakes the demonstrations when the government attacks. Police fire into the roiling crowds of protesters with live ammunition, loud booms announce the launching of tear gas canisters through the air, and demonstrators and counter-demonstrators fight back and forth with truncheons, rocks, and knives. Demanding to see their passports, secret police harass Karim and Omar as they attempt to film the events, and Omar pulls a scarf around his face to disguise his identity.

Later, Karim is gassed in the face and stumbles home partially blinded, while Omar is severally beaten in a dark alley, barely emerging alive. Government snipers start shooting people through the windows of their apartments in the blocks around Tahrir Square – making viewers fear for the safety of the filmmakers in their own homes, particularly as one of them has a baby who keeps wandering close to the windows. Late in the film, government thugs even take over the street below the apartment building and start harassing the residents, which is what finally forces the filmmakers to question staying in the country.

Omar Shargawi filming "1/2 Revolution."

In capturing the tumult of the Cairo protests, 1/2 Revolution depicts more violence than most Hollywood action movies – but tragically, the mayhem here is all too real.

The seemingly intractable rage captured in the film – both from democratic protesters righteously angry over the suppression of their human rights, and from entrenched government elites determined to hold on to power at any cost – highlights the central challenge facing the Egyptian people today. How will they overcome this bitterness and anger – these scars from decades of violence, repression, and authoritarian rule – in order to build a peaceful democracy?

In his seminal 1947 study of German film, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer pointed out that the details of life captured in a film often reveal a country’s unconscious predilections. The details captured in 1/2 Revolution are ominous: activists repeatedly declare their willingness to die and become martyrs, the camera dwells on shattered heads and limbs, bodies on stretchers being rushed away, a man lifting up his shirt to show a bullet wound in his back, a pool of blood on the pavement with the word ‘Egypt’ traced in Arabic. Even more ominous are the anti-American and anti-Jewish symbols scrawled onto anti-Mubarak protest signs. One particularly ugly sign depicts Mubarak as the devil with pointy ears and a Star of David stamped on his forehead.

The filmmakers at the Sundance screening.

Sadly, the filmmakers and their friends engage in implicitly anti-Israeli rhetoric themselves. Co-director Omar Shargawi, whose father is Palestinian, says with pride of the demonstrations, “It was like being part of the intifada or something.” One of his friends, a woman also of Palestinian origin, expresses fears that “the Israeli army is massing at the border” and worries that the U.S. might invade. Given that Israel’s population of only 7.8 million is vastly outnumbered by Egypt’s population of 81 million, and given that the American government was generally supportive of the Egyptian revolution, these kind of fears come across as over the top. But this is the dark side of the revolution: the urge to look for blame in outside bogey-men – in this case, America and Israel – rather than look internally to ask why so many Arab states have failed to achieve lasting democracy. Continue reading »

LFM Co-Editor Govindini Murty was on Lars Larson’s national radio show Friday talking about the recent Sundance Film Festival, the new film Big Miracle, and also Jason Apuzzo’s Huffington Post/AOL-Moviefone Conversation with Stan Lee at Slamdance 2012. 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 February 7th, 2011 at 11:33am.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stan Lee at the Slamdance Film Festival.

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

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

The language of "Thor" inspired by Shakespeare.

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

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

[Editor's Note: 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.