“Not only can fairy-tales be enjoyed because they are moral, but morality can be enjoyed because it puts us in fairyland, in a world at once of wonder and of war.”
G.K. Chesterton, Fairy Tales
“It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
“You stole a rose, so you must die.”
Jean Marais as The Beast in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête
ONCE UPON A TIME…
A frightened merchant is lost in the woods. He is trying to get back to his home and his children, but instead he stumbles into an enchanted part of the forest.
Branches part; a castle stands in the clearing. Tired and cold, the merchant enters the castle.
The castle itself is enchanted. It is a living castle, where arms come out of the walls to hold candlesticks and statues see with living eyes.
It is a castle where doors and mirrors talk and a rose holds the power of life and death.
It is the castle of a Beast. A beast with a curse.
And only by a look of true love will he find release from his curse. That look will come from a Beauty, a young woman who sacrifices her freedom to save her merchant father, who comes to be a prisoner in the Beast’s castle, and who will eventually come to love him. Continue reading Classic Cinema Obsession: Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête
By Jason Apuzzo. A film from the recent LA Film Festival that we loved was Disco & Atomic War. Disco is an extraordinary new Estonian documentary about the so-called ’soft power’ influence of American and Western culture on the minds of Soviet citizens living in Estonia during the Cold War, who were able through clever means to watch Finnish television broadcasts emanating from just over the border. As Disco informs us (in amusing detail), American popular culture – especially in the form of glamorous TV shows like “Dallas,” or movies like Star Wars and even Emmanuelle – was deeply feared by Soviet authorities due to the ideas and expectations such programming planted in the minds of Soviet citizens. This led to amusing co-optings, such as the Soviets creating their own officially sanctioned disco instruction course for TV(!).
This is documentary filmmaking at its finest, and easily one of the best – and most drily amusing – films I’ve seen this past year. We want to thank the folks at SnagFilms for making the full-length film available for everyone to see, for free. Also: special thanks to SnagFilms for following Libertas on Twitter!
By Joe Bendel. Euphemisms can be terrible instruments of evil. For instance, when former Khmer Rouge cadres speak of “solving problems” what they really refer to is the systematic torture and execution of roughly two million Cambodians, whose only crime was to be deemed insufficiently Communist. Thet Sambath understands this all too well. After losing his parents and brother to the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, he spent years interviewing former cadres to understand why they killed their countrymen. His self-funded investigation ultimately resulted in Enemies of the People (trailer above), a truly newsworthy documentary co-directed by Rob Lemkin, which opens in New York this Friday and in Los Angeles next week.
A newspaper journalist in Phnom Penh, Sambath’s quiet, unassuming demeanor is perfectly suited to winning the confidences of his interview subjects. However, he does not advertize his tragic family history, especially not with the big fish, Nuon Chea, a.k.a. Brother Number Two, the Khmer Rouge’s chief theoretician – second only to Pol Pot (Brother Number One). For years, the largely silent Chea has maintained his ignorance of the Killing Fields, but Sambath wore down his reticence. With Chea facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, what he says on Sambath’s tapes is extraordinarily timely.
Depicts the ideologically-driven crimes of the Khmer Rouge.
Beyond its potential relevance in the Cambodian Tribunal, Enemies is highly significant as a pioneering Cambodian documentary inquiry into the Khmer Rouge’s crimes. Providing historical context that will likely be instructive for western audiences as well, Sambath explains that the Khmer Rouge directly looked to China as their revolutionary inspiration. Indeed, one can argue the Killing Fields were an indirect product of the Cultural Revolution.
The former low level cadres interviewed on camera also confirm their victims were brutalized and murdered out of ideological zeal. They were capitalist or counter-revolutionary “problems” to “fix.” The matter-of-factness of their videotaped statements is quite chilling, lending credence to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. While some express remorse, decades after the fact, for the most part, it seems like Sambath is not tapping into feelings of guilt so much as a Dostoevskian compulsion to confess. Obviously suffering from his own survivor’s guilt, Sambath also has his own stories to tell. However, he appears to attain a measure of closure through his ambitious undercover research project.
In Enemies, Sambath puts to shame most western journalists who simply preen in front of cameras and regurgitate talking points. At no small risk to himself, he set out to get the truth, succeeding rather spectacularly given his modest resources. Frankly, the ignorance and misunderstanding of the Khmer Rouge borders on the criminal in the west, but Sambath and Lemkin bring their genocidal crimes into sharp focus. Yes, the American bombings are mentioned in Enemies, but only briefly – never suggesting they excuse or rationalize the crimes of the Khmer Rouge in any way. Truly, Sambath understands who the killers really are, and he got them on tape. Thoughtful and legitimately bold, it opens this Friday (7/30) in New York at the Quad and next Friday (8/6) in Los Angeles at Laemmle’s Music Hall, Beverly Hills.
By Jason Apuzzo. • The big story right now is that Leonardo DiCaprio is apparently dropping out of Mel Gibson’s forthcoming Viking epic due to Mel’s recent … do I need to tell you? As I said when this story first broke about Gibson’s ranting and physical abuse, he wasn’t going to survive this scandal. And now we’re seeing it. For what it’s worth, I think DiCaprio has made the right decision.
• In the wake of the recent debate here at LFM over alien-themed projects, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel has a new screenwriter, who also happens to be the guy working on both the new Star Trek films and also Cowboys & Aliens. Should the same guy be doing all this? Incidentally, Ridley Scott is also apparently circling around Gucci, which may star Angelina Jolie as Patrizia Reggiani – who was sentenced to 29 years in prison after being convicted of plotting the murder of her ex-husband Maurizio Gucci, after he’d taken control of the family’s fashion empire. It would be an alluring femme fatale role for Jolie – and I’m sure the opportunity to be around Gucci products has absolutely nothing to do with her interest in this project.
• Another very big alien project just got announced: Guillermo del Toro is set to direct and James Cameron produce a 3D adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous novel, At the Mountains of Madness. I would love to see this, even given my current intense displeasure with Cameron. At the Mountains of Madness is one of my favorite novels, and is one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time. You could say, in a sense, that it already has been adapted by way of such films as The Thing and Alien … but it would be wonderful to see a new take on the original material, provided everybody is respectful toward Lovecraft’s novel (which I assume they would be). Del Toro seems to have the right florid sensibility for this.
• Did you know that Paul Giamatti will be playing Nikita Krushchev, in a new HBO movie? The title of the movie is K Blows His Top, about Krushchev’s famous visit to the United States – during which he blew his top in public after his Disneyland trip was cancelled. Tom Hanks is producing on this one. Hanks recently blew his top when The Pacific was released.
• Carla Bruni just started shooting Woody Allen’s next film … and she blew her first scene! Apparently she looked into the camera. Maybe that’ll end up on the DVD.
• In the annals of overhyped bloggers, nobody quite takes the cake like Olivia Munn. Today she had this elegant, insightful remark to make about Wonder Woman’s new costume: “She doesn’t need to wear a f**king star to be a f**king patriot.” Thank you, Olivia. You and your fanboy compatriots certainly elevate everything we do on the internet.
Author/celebrity Katie Price.
• In the wake of Oliver Stone’s recent impolitic musings on the Jewish people (ahem), Haim Saban wants Stone’s 10-part series “A Secret History of America” to be pulled from Showtime. Ari Emanuel is apparently joining him in this effort. I actually think Les Moonves might cave here. Saban is one the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, and heads will roll if Stone’s show airs … as they should.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … in America we have Snooki, Kim Kardashian, Heidi Montag, etc. In Britain all these women are more or less rolled into one as Katie Price, who has a new novel out right now called Paradise. Price’s last novel Sapphire hit #1 in the UK, and she’s already written about 6 children’s books and 3 autobiographies – while still only in her 30s. One thing’s for certain: the woman is building up a substantial body of work. So to speak.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Aaron Eckart combats aliens in "Battle: Los Angeles."
The sheer number of major films following this trend is striking. On the alien invasion front, we’ve got Jon Favreau’s forthcoming Cowboys & Aliens with Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig; Battle: Los Angeles with Aaron Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez; J.J. Abrams’/Steven Spielberg’s Super 8 (coming soon on the heels of Abrams’ Cloverfield); Oren Peli’s Area 51; the feature film remakes of The Thing and The Outer Limits; Robert Evans’ feature film remake of Gerry Anderson’s influential British TV series UFO; Spielberg’s forthcoming TV series Falling Skies; the ongoing alien invasion series V; Ridley Scott’s forthcoming reboot of the Alien franchise; the untitled Bobby Glicker-Michael Bay alien invasion flick that just got picked up by Paramount … and in the indie scene, there’s Skyline (to be released this fall by Universal), Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, Iron Sky (still in production) and The Mercury Men (the hotly anticipated web series that was just at Comic-Con) and a few others I know about in the pipeline. And really we shouldn’t forget the obvious recent examples of Avatar, the Transformers series and Predators, all of which involve intense warfare between humans and aliens.
Angelina Jolie fighting communist infiltrators in "Salt."
What’s interesting is how this trend toward alien invasion is being matched by a new trend toward communist invasion and/or infiltration scenarios. We just had the Angelina Jolie thriller about retro-communist sleeper agents in our midst, Salt (we loved it here at LFM); at some point in the fall or early next year we’re presumably going to get MGM’s Chinese communist invasion thriller Red Dawn; there’s the ambitious indie web series Red Storm; not to mention the recent Soviet espionage thriller Farewell (read our glowing review); and I even detect certain Cold War themes evident in things like the recent Karate Kid remake (set in communist China) and the forthcoming Mao’s Last Dancer. [In this context I should also mention Chris Gorak’s forthcoming alien invasion thriller The Darkest Hour, which is actually set in Moscow.]
I locate the beginning of this recent trend with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (a movie I loved, by the way) – which managed to feature both aliens and Soviet communist infiltrators, who are intent on using alien technology for mind-control purposes against the West.
So what’s going on here? Here’s what the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein thinks:
This sudden obsession with alien invaders has me wondering: Why now? Trends usually happen for a reason, even if it isn’t always clear at the time what that reason might be. There were a host of similar alien invader films in the early-mid 1950s (my personal favorite being “The Thing”), which film historians theorize were inspired by fears of the U.S. being invaded, either physically or ideologically, by communism. If you get two film professors together and let ’em watch the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” they’ll argue over the hidden meanings of the film for weeks on end.
But what’s up with all these new films? What new hidden fear do we have that is being sublimated into our movies? Glenn Beck, for one, seems almost grotesquely overwhelmed by fears of all sorts of hidden conspiracies, but I doubt that whatever is bugging him is the same thing that’s bugging this generation of filmmakers. Could the collapse of the economy have spooked so many Americans that it’s created an intense level of fear and unrest that is being channeled into film projects? And, of course, there’s always the possibility (WOO-HOO) that there really are a few aliens poking around, looking to abduct a few of us. I guess anything’s possible.
My own opinion, more or less along the lines Patrick describes, is that we are seeing a revival of the 1950’s anti-communist sensibility (Crystal Skull was even set in the 1950s) that’s getting sublimated into fantastical fears of domestic alien invasion. And I think all of this was more or less predictable, as our society gets increasingly re-engineered along progressive-liberal/pseudo-futuristic lines, and as we face an increasingly hostile and dangerous threat from nuclear-armed terrorists and/or their client states. What’s more, this trend is being super-charged by James Cameron’s recent revival of that old, stand-by technology that emerged directly from 1950s science fiction: 3D. One thinks here in this context of such 1950s 3D classics as It Came From Outer Space and Creature from the Black Lagoon.
In "Crystal Skull," Soviet agent Cate Blanchett hunts alien technology.
[I should mention, incidentally, that the best analysis of this 1950s anti-communist/alien invasion mentality certainly comes in Peter Biskind’s marvelous book, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. Biskind goes into this stuff in great detail in close-readings of Them!, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, etc. I can’t recommend Biskind’s book highly enough if you want to understand the mentality depicted in these films.]
And so ultimately this is a trend that I lustily endorse … with one proviso: pace this return to the 1950s sensibility, does this mean we can now go back to those optimistic bosoms and/or brassieres of that era? Because the problem with most of these films – Salt very much excluded – is that they just don’t have the 3D feminine firepower, so to speak, that they should. And even in Salt we never see Angelina in a dress! Which is really a crime.
Kathleen Hughes, from 1953's "It Came From Outer Space" in 3D.
But there’s more to be said about this revival of the 1950s/Cold War mentality, actually. I think the filmmaking world is gradually coming around to the side of freedom. It’s happening in fits and starts, and sometimes awkwardly – but it is happening. There’s no way that movies like Salt or Red Dawn or Four Lions or Mao’s Last Dancer or The Infidel would be getting made, otherwise. It’s something that we’re talking about all the time here at Libertas, and I think this is a trend very much to be celebrated. [We even just posted today about Frank Miller’s new project Holy Terror, which pits a superhero called ‘The Fixer’ against Al Qaeda baddies; this follows directly on the heels of Frank’s quasi-metaphorical look at the current War on Terror in the forthcoming Xerxes.]
So for every occasion nowadays when a Captain America or Wonder Woman get their patriotism downgraded by Hollywood censors (and, yes, censorship is what’s happening there), there are now counter-examples where freedom – and America’s role in promoting it – is being championed. And that’s a very positive sign.
Some of you, for example, may be wondering why we haven’t been harping on the latest scandals involving Oliver Stone or Roman Polanski here. The reason, in part, is because these guys are old and irrelevant and very much out-of-step with what’s going on in the filmmaking world right now. These trends that we’re talking about here toward invasion and/or infiltration scenarios are major trends that are affecting what projects get funding at the moment – particularly among the younger, more active crowd of filmmakers.
And so on with the invasion! Just don’t forget the brassieres.
Frank Miller takes on the terrorist threat in "Holy Terror."
By Jason Apuzzo. According to today’s Los Angeles Times Hero Complex blog, Frank Miller – best known as the writer and artist of The Dark Knight Returns, 300 and Sin City – is in the final stages of completing a long-developing project of his that will pit a brand-new superhero character called ‘The Fixer’ against Al Qaeda.
This long-awaited project, which began initially as a storyline for Batman – and was supposedly rejected for political reasons by D.C. Comics (Miller disputes the long-standing rumors to that effect) – will apparently be published next year (Miller is speaking to publishers right now) with the title, Holy Terror.
This is wonderful news, as I’d thought this project had been abandoned by Miller some time ago. Here’s Miller:
“It’s almost done; I should be finished within a month,” Miller said. “It’s no longer a DC book. I decided partway through it that it was not a Batman story. The hero is much closer to ‘Dirty Harry’ than Batman. It’s a new hero that I’ve made up that fights Al Qaeda …
“The character is called The Fixer and he’s very much an adventurer who’s been essentially searching for a mission,” Miller said. “He’s been trained as special ops and when his city is attacked all of a sudden all the pieces fall into place and all this training comes into play. He’s been out there fighting crime without really having his heart in it — he does it to keep in shape. He’s very different than Batman in that he’s not a tortured soul. He’s a much more well-adjusted creature even though he happens to shoot 100 people in the course of the story …
“I pushed Batman as far as he can go and after a while he stops being Batman. My guy carries a couple of guns and is up against an existential threat. He’s not just up against a goofy villain. Ignoring an enemy that’s committed to our annihilation is kind of silly, It just seems that chasing the Riddler around seems silly compared to what’s going on out there …
“It began as my reaction to 9/11 and it was an extremely angry piece of work and as the years have passed by I’ve done movies and I’ve done other things and time has provided some good distance, so it becomes more of a cohesive story as it progresses,” Miller said.
Needless to say, we’re very excited to learn this and wish Miller the best.
"The hero is much closer to 'Dirty Harry' than Batman."
What Miller touches on here is one of the things that’s been bothering me the most about the post-9/11 boom in comic book movies: which is their tendency to feature narcissistic heroes who almost never (Iron Man excepted) are asked to face the current terrorist threat. This is something that is a complete betrayal of what happened in the 1940s, when so many of the original comic book heroes were asked to face down the Nazi/fascist threat. So good on Frank for pushing through and completing this, and bad on D.C. for ripping this storyline away from the Batman series if indeed that’s what happened.
By Jennifer Baldwin.
