Day: June 24, 2010

Hollywood Round-up, 6/24

Kristen Stewart of "Twilight."

By Jason Apuzzo. • Google/YouTube has won the first round of its legal battle with Viacom over copyright protection. Based on what I’m reading, it’s looking very much like this won’t get decided until the case hits the Supreme Court.  Rooting for Viacom here, because Google’s getting far too powerful – for all the wrong reasons.

• Are fanboys already rallying around Christopher Nolan’s Inception, in the wake of a so-so review from Rolling Stone? Fanboy reality check: Nolan’s never done much at the box office outside of the Batman series.  I also just read about an iPhone/GPS app designed to help promote Inception, and somewhat like the film it’s almost impossible to tell what the damn thing’s supposed to do.  Someone needs to implant in my brain a reason I should care about this film.

• Twilight fans are gearing up for the film’s opening. While insider-chic has Inception the summer’s hottest film (or maybe Toy Story 3?), this film is probably going to blow them all away.  And it will still be reported as a ‘surprise’ as Hollywood slowly figures out that females go to the movies, too.

• Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog runs through the Lessons to be Learned from the Jonah Hex Debacle. Here’s just one lesson I can think of: avoid lead characters with melted faces.

• New Hollywood genre: movies billed as ‘the next Avatar.’  The latest is called Ion, a sci-fi spectacle being produced by Tony & Ridley Scott. ‘Next Avatars‘ tend to be big sci-fi spectacles with a romantic subplot.  Blue skin and Spock ears optional.

• With Tom Cruise’s Knight and Day tracking poorly, Paramount is apparently re-thinking Mission Impossible 4. MI3 had a nasty anti-American subtext that didn’t help matters, either.  Maybe they should have Cruise do something useful in the next film like get Simon Cowell back on American Idol.

• Breck Eisner talks about his remake of Escape From New York today, and also about removing himself from the remake of Creature From the Black Lagoon, which is now being directed by the guy doing the Logan’s Run remake.  These guys should save themselves the embarrassment and just retrofit the old films into the new 3D.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … old Libertas favorite Jessica Simpson has given herself ‘the gift of thin’ for her 30th birthday.  In Hollywood that’s truly the gift that keeps on giving.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on June 24th, 2010 at 12:28pm.

New Bollywood Film Mocks Osama bin Laden

By Jason Apuzzo. A new Bollywood film called Tere bin Laden (Without You, Laden) that satirizes Osama bin Laden, is apparently set for release next month (on July 16th) according to the AFP.

According to the film’s Wikipedia entry …

Tere Bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek comedy about an ambitious young news reporter from Pakistan who is desperate to migrate to the US in pursuit of the American dream. His repeated attempts to immigrate are shot down as his visa is always rejected. But when things couldn’t look worse he comes across an Osama bin laden look alike. Ali then hatches a scheme to produce a fake Osama video and sell it to news channels as a breakthrough scoop! Unfortunately there are serious ramifications as the White House gets involved and dispatches an overzealous secret agent on Ali Zafar’s trail.

Satire is an extremely potent weapon, and it isn’t really surprising that current Bollywood filmmakers would feel comfortable going into this comedic territory due to the dire, ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism to Indian society (as grimly evidenced by the 2008 Mumbai attacks).  As Arun Venugopal wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Bollywood has been cranking out movies of various sorts on the subject of terrorism for the past several years – Kurbaan (2009), Black and White (2008) A Wednesday! (2008), My Name is Khan (2010) and Aamir (2008), just to name a few – while filmmakers in the West have been cowering under dark clouds of political correctness.  And as we’ve been covering here at LFM, extremely funny hit indie films like The Infidel (see the LFM review), Four Lions and the award-winning web series Living With the Infidels have recently been ripping away the veil that’s been hovering over this subject … while Hollywood dithers, still trying to figure out what is politically ‘safe’ to say about terrorism.

We wish the filmmakers well with this new project. The film’s trailer is below.

Posted on June 24th, 2010 at 9:38am.