By Jason Apuzzo. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, HBO and the BBC are apparently in the early stages of developing a sci-fi dystopian series based on Reznor’s album/alternate reality game, Year Zero. Here is the LA Times article on all this, and here is an extensive interview with Reznor about the Year Zero project.
According to the LA Times, the Year Zero project has its origins in Reznor’s rage over “the geopolitical situation during the Bush years.” I personally haven’t heard Reznor’s album – because I find him loathsome, and always have – nor played the game.
Wikipedia describes the basic premise of the Year Zero video game in this way:
The story takes place in the United States in the year 2022, which has been termed “Year 0”, by the American government, being the year that America was reborn. The U.S. had suffered several major terrorist attacks, apparently by Islamic fundamentalists, including attacks on Los Angeles and Seattle. In response, the government granted itself emergency powers and seized absolute control on the country. The U.S. government is now a Christian fundamentalist theocracy, maintaining control of the populace through institutions like the Bureau of Morality and the First Evangelical Church of Plano. Americans must get licenses to marry, bear children, etc. Subversive activities can result in these licenses being revoked. Dissenters regularly disappear from their homes in the night, and are detained in federal detainment centers and sanitariums, if not executed.
The government corporation Cedocore distributes the drug Parepin through the water supply, making Americans who drink the water apathetic and carefree. There are several underground rebel groups, mainly operating online, most notably Art is Resistance and Solutions Backwards Initiative. The First Evangelical Church of Plano is a fundamentalist Protestant Christian church which is favored by the neo-conservative government.
Sounds charming – alternate reality, indeed. The Wachowskis must really be bummed that Reznor got a network to back this stuff, while they still have to slog it out in the indie scene .
By the way, I’m still waiting for my old friend Patrick Goldstein to get back to me about the whole ‘liberal filmmakers checking their politics at the door’ thing.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Actress Gloria Stuart of Titanic fame has died, several months after her 100th birthday. Govindini and I had the pleasure of meeting this elegant star from Hollywood’s Golden Age twice. On each occasion she was the picture of elegance and grace, and she will certainly be missed.
• Wall Street 2 took top prize at the weekend box office, with a haul of about $19 million. That’s not surprising; I think Oliver Stone crafted an entertaining and emotionally compelling film, the politics of which were relatively muted compared with what one might otherwise expect from him these days. [See my review of the film here.] One can only imagine how much better business the film might’ve done if Stone had only kept off the talk show circuit over the past week; the man truly does himself no favors.
For directors, you will never be a great director if you don’t read. I run my own film school — I call it a traveling circus, a rogue film school — and I have a mandatory reading list for those who apply. It starts with Virgil’s “Georgics.” Read it in Latin if possible. I have a short story by Hemingway; old Icelandic poetry; and, among others, the Warren Commission Report. It’s a fantastic piece of reading.
• On the Sci-Fi/Alien Invasion front, the 1962 Brit sci-fi thriller Day of the Triffids (based on the 1951 novel) is getting a remake, and in 3D. Day of the Triffids?! Of all the sci-fi classics from that era, they’re remaking Day of the Triffids?! So we’re going to get marauding, carnivorous plants coming at us in 3D. And you thought Piranha 3D was campy? Imagine Riley Steele getting devoured by a fern. In other news, Guillermo del Toro talks here and here about his forthcoming adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness that he’s doing with James Cameron. An early, highly unflattering script review of that project has already frightened me off, and nothing del Toro is saying now is making me feel like he won’t botch this – which is a shame.
By Jason Apuzzo. Let me begin by saying that this review is written for people who have not already been irretrievably burned by Oliver Stone. To those of you out there who have been irretrievably burned by Stone, you have my sympathies and my understanding – and if you feel sufficiently put off by Stone’s behavior over the years never to watch another one of his films, I will not argue the point. Stone is to blame for that, not you. So if you wish to proceed to another post here at Libertas, you have my blessings.
You would, however, be missing out on what is actually quite an enjoyable film in Wall Street 2 – a film that, much like the original Wall Street, is weirdly at odds with its creator in creating such a compelling and seductive portrait of a system the filmmaker supposedly despises. In this, Wall Street 2 becomes the latest example of a film that actually appears savvier and more insightful – not to mention warmer and more sentimental – than the man who made it.
I must confess that I was not expecting Stone’s film to be enjoyable, for at least three reasons. One, Stone’s skills as a filmmaker have atrophied significantly over the years. What originally put Oliver Stone on the map, culturally speaking, were well-constructed (if obnoxious) entertainments like Platoon and JFK. Stone’s Alexander, however, was easily one of the worst films I’ve seen over the past decade – a mess on so many levels that I can’t even imagine how the film ever got made, let alone released. And Stone’s World Trade Center seemed to miss its moment; if you think no one remembers 9/11 any more, absolutely nobody remembers Oliver Stone’s film about it. World Trade Center was an anodyne, strangely uninteresting exercise for such a voluble director as Stone – a lugubrious, by-the-numbers drama that could easily have been a made-for-TV movie, and that disgracefully avoided the subject of terrorism altogether. That Stone would avoid the subject of terrorism was not only dishonest and ideologically loaded on his part, but at odds with the drama of the moment – like making a movie about Pearl Harbor without mentioning Imperial Japan.
The third reason, of course, has to do with Stone’s compulsive politicizing of everything he does – and the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 seemed altogether too ripe an opportunity for someone with his blunderbuss sensibility – a kind of smorgasbord of possibilities to take potshots at the capitalistic system that has, of course, made his own career possible.
Gekko.
What I will confess to have forgotten, however, was what a seductive portrait of Wall Street Stone’s original Wall Street film was. Stories of the guys who were lured into lives as stock traders by Stone’s film – and by the magnetism of Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko character – are legendary, and form part of the strange and contradictory afterlife of that film as a high-end cult phenomenon. Wall Street did for The Street in the 80s what Top Gun did for the military. What Stone’s original film captured was the drama, the adrenaline rush, the heat and speed of the Wall Street lifestyle as it’s lived on a daily basis. Personal note here: I was close to two guys at Yale who were obsessed with Gekko (and American Psycho), and who got swept right into that world in the early 90s – and I mean all of that world, with its giddy, steroidal highs and humiliating lows. A world of glitzy New York penthouses, weekends in the Caribbean, coke, endless women, media scandal … and ego. Greed? Yes, there was that as well – but I never really bought the idea that what drives the guys on The Street is greed, per se. It always seemed more like ego, the desire to win – or at least, survive. More on that subject below.
And so the perverse truth of the matter is that Stone himself is as much to blame for today’s Wall Street as anybody else – which may be why he pops up occasionally in Wall Street 2, playing a cameo role an investor. [Which, incidentally, his own father was – his father having been a stock broker and a Republican who was broken by The Street and eventually went bankrupt.]
Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps brings this adrenaline-fueled world of Gordon Gekko back – with all its stratospheric highs and punishing lows – and updates it to the world of today, the world of the financial markets post-crash. And it attempts to incorporate what Stone has learned (if not necessarily what the rest of us have learned) from that calamity. Not surprisingly, what Stone has learned from the Meltdown is that greed was its driving force – not just the greed of the Wall Street guys (and they are depicted almost uniformly as guys in this film – there’s hardly a female in sight), but all of our greed. Greed here is defined as our current tendency to overreach, to live off little more than borrowed money and a prayer. For example: greed in the way we re-finance homes, based on … what? A desire to free up some cash without really doing anything. Or the way we leverage our other assets based on … what? Too often just a hope.
In the heat of the game.
There’s truth in Stone’s critique, of course – not nearly the whole truth about what brought down the market, but certainly enough truth to serve as a kind of moralistic backdrop to Stone’s real business, which is actually not political at all. Wall Street 2 is really about about something else altogether, which is: how to maintain one’s integrity not only in the high-pressure environment of finance, but in the ultimate high-pressure environment of one’s own family. In essence, how do you preserve your own ego – when even people you love may be putting your well being in jeopardy?
Wall Street 2 is essentially a kind of 2-hour, five-Act Shakespearean family drama that begins with Gordon Gekko leaving jail in 2001, being given back his few remaining momentos from the 80s. [This is the great scene from the trailer, when he poignantly gets his empty gold money clip back – and his gigantic, 80s-era mobile phone.] Gekko leaves the jail, walks outside into the sunlight to find … no one waiting for him. He’s become the quintessential forgotten man. Flash forward to 2008, and the central character of the film: Shia LaBeouf’s ‘Jake Moore’ character. LaBeouf is a young guy on The Street, making his way up, who has two things that define him: he’s got smarts and is street-savvy (more so than Charlie Sheen from the original film), yet he also has an ‘idealistic’ side to him that’s kept fully charged by his web-activist girlfriend (Carey Mulligan), who just happens to be Gordon Gekko’s estranged daughter, Winnie. Winnie is extremely wary of her father, blaming him for the (off-screen) drug-related death of her brother. Gekko himself by this point in 2008 has now become a ‘reformed’ man, a best-selling book author whose media jeremiads are designed to warn others off of his earlier ‘bad’ example.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
Jake and the rest of Wall Street then undergo the 2008 meltdown, in which Jake’s financial house goes down – and Jake’s soft, humanistic mentor (Frank Langella) commits suicide. There’s something extremely dramatic about these early sequences of the film, because we get the sense of real history playing out – and Stone’s handling of these moments when the Feds are trying to decide who to bail out (or not) are handled nicely. One gets the sense of the arbitrariness, the messiness and – crucially – the egos involved in deciding who was to be saved, and who would walk the plank. We all like to feel that these were clean, impartial decisions – yet we know by now that they weren’t. [Why was Lehman allowed to go down, for example, but not AIG?] These decisions were as much a result of the personalities involved as the economics, or the politics for that matter.
Josh Brolin as an engaging villain, Bretton James.
Although Wall Street 2 is chock-full of politics – it’s an Oliver Stone film, so how could it not be? – Stone is to be commended for indulging in no Bush-bashing here, or elsewhere in this film. These tense early sequences play as I suspect they played out in real life – which is to say, on a knife-edge of suspense, as everybody – Republicans and Democrats – stared right into the abyss. Stone avoids political finger-pointing here, recognizing the gravity of the moment. In fact, the ‘reformed’ Gordon Gekko actually speaks up early in the film for the Bush Administration – admonishing people for rushing to blame Bush’s Administration for problems that were largely beyond their control. So if you’re expecting Wall Street 2 to roast Bush and Cheney over the coals – which Stone’s increasingly bizarre and erratic interviews seem to suggest – there’s none of it in the film. The bailout is presented as having essentially been the lesser of two evils: the ‘socialization’ of the market, in order to protect from 1929 Crash Redux (only worse). Continue reading LFM Review: Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps
By Jason Apuzzo. There was an interesting article recently in The New York Times about a brand new film called The Black Tulip, from first-time feature director Sonia Nassery Cole – an Afghan expatriate whose day job involves running the Afghanistan World Foundation, a charity focused on refugees and women’s rights. Ms. Cole apparently fled Afghanistan as a teenager in 1979 (after the Soviet invasion), and gained notoriety at that time by writing a letter to then-President Ronald Reagan – who subsequently invited her to the White House. President Reagan would subsequently put her in contact with the Afghanistan Relief Committee, providing her with a network of philanthropic contacts that would eventually help Cole direct The Black Tulip on location in Afghanistan, in the midst of the current war.
Sonia Nassery Cole.
The Times article details the extraordinary hardships and complexities associated with getting this film made in contemporary Afghanistan – the most shocking of which reportedly involved militants locating the film’s original lead actress, Zarifa Jahon, and cutting off her feet. Jahon was subsequently replaced by Ms. Cole herself – although, it’s fair to mention, this incident has been disputed by Latif Ahmadi, head of the Afghan Film Organization – and Jahon herself currently resides in a remote part of the country, apparently unavailable for comment. In any case, Ms. Cole certainly had to deal with threats of violence, crew defections and shortness of funds, yet her film unspooled in Kabul yesterday – with a possible appearance at Sundance ahead. Afghanistan has apparently already submitted the picture as its entry for best foreign film at the next Academy Awards.
Check out the trailer for the film above. WARNING: THE TRAILER ABOVE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.
We look forward to getting a look at the film when it inevitably arrives in the States in the months to come, and we otherwise wish the irrepressible Ms. Cole the best with her film.
By Jason Apuzzo. The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein apparently wasn’t very pleased with Govindini’s DVD review of Prince of Persia from this past weekend. Patrick attacked the premise of Govindini’s piece yesterday, dismissing suggestions that the film has an anti-Iraq War subtext as “far fetched,” and rather ungraciously calling the review a “screed” in a piece over at the LA Times’ site.
Govindini herself will be responding to Patrick later, but I wanted to throw in my own thoughts on the matter.
• First of all, let me begin by saying that we don’t write “screeds” here at Libertas. Patrick really should know better than that – he must be confusing us with another site. Govindini’s piece is actually rather drily written – in fact, our readers were surprised that she invested so much care and analysis into an otherwise trite film – and her argument is well-referenced with respect to details within the film. I’m at a loss to understand how anyone who isn’t ideologically-driven could possibly read the piece, or what’s on this site regularly, and refer to it as a “screed.” The only “screed” here actually is the film – not our pointing out what’s in it.
• What’s extraordinary is that Patrick’s own piece neither refutes nor even addresses any of the specific details the review made about the film. He simply passes Govindini’s entire thesis off as “far fetched,” without actually engaging any of its details. Suffice it to say that if what she’s saying is so “far fetched,” why did he feel compelled to write the article then?
• Patrick’s entire ‘refutation’ of Govindini’s thesis amounts to this: that the film’s producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, is a Republican – and therefore the film simply couldn’t have an anti-Iraq War subtext. In other words, Bruckheimer’s party affiliation alone is supposed to make the actual content of the film irrelevant.
If that’s the case – i.e., if a filmmaker’s political affiliations are entirely determinative of the content of their films – then here are a few cases I’d like Patrick to address:
How it is that ‘Republican’ Rupert Murdoch’s Fox funded and released Avatar, which more or less everyone on planet Earth (save Patrick?) agrees was as ideologically left-wing as any film Michael Moore or Oliver Stone has ever made?
How is it that ‘Republican’ Sylvester Stallone could make The Expendables, featuring a waterboarding former CIA operative as a villain?
How is it that ‘Hollywood liberals’ Steven Spielberg and George Lucas could make Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, featuring murderous Soviet spies bent on mind-control as villains?
How is it that ‘Hollywood liberal’ Angelina Jolie could make Salt, featuring rogue ex-communist agents as villains?
How is it that the first major Hollywood film made about Nelson Mandela (Invictus) was made by ‘right wing Republican’ Clint Eastwood? I would’ve thought good ‘Hollywood liberals’ would’ve beaten Clint to the mark on that one.
I could go on but you get the point. [I could spend an hour writing about all the left-wing content that eventually appeared in the ‘right wing’ show 24, for example.] None of these cases really make sense, if what Patrick says is true. Because actually, I dare say that it’s Patrick who is viewing things here in a somewhat simplistic manner, if he thinks that something as complicated as a film can have its meaning neatly and easily grasped by looking at the party affiliation of the producer writing the checks. I’m surprised I even have to say that to someone as otherwise savvy as Patrick is.
What we try to focus on here at Libertas – and the Stallone/Expendables controversy really demonstrated this – is the content of entertainment, rather than what ‘team’ entertainers are supposedly on.
For example, just recently we reported here at Libertas how Mad Men’s Jon Hamm made disparaging remarks about the Tea Party. It was disappointing to report that, because we like Hamm’s show here – and we suspect that a lot of people who attend Tea Parties do, as well. Interestingly, however, we haven’t stopped reviewing Hamm’s show – i.e., we haven’t junked it – just because one actor made a few injudicious remarks. Hamm’s private opinions are ultimately his own, and aren’t dispositive of the meaning of the show. It would actually be silly to think they were.
Let me conclude, though, with the real whopper line in Patrick’s article from yesterday.
There are tons of liberals in showbiz, but when it comes to big-budget studio films, all those liberals check their politics at the door. They’re trying to sell movie tickets, not make converts.
I don’t even know where to begin here. Patrick, are you kidding me? Please convey all this to James Cameron, or Oliver Stone, or Roland Emmerich – because I suspect those particular Hollywood liberals and makers of ‘big-budget studio films’ would passionately disagree with you. Your argument is as much with them as it is with us here. I don’t know how you missed the memo on this, but Hollywood has cheerfully branded itself asliberal – even if not 100% of the time – and nobody feels any compunctions any more about jamming politics into big-budget fare if they feel like it. That Rubicon was crossed long ago.
Suffice it to say that the film is getting a very favorable response thus far. Aside from Fincher’s skill as a director, I think that what intrigues people here the most is not so much Mark Zuckerberg himself, as much as the phenomenon which he’s assumed to represent – i.e., a socially alienated America, and the new, anonymous social networking technologies that give people a simulacrum of community/intimacy in their lives. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never felt especially alienated, nor lacking in intimacy, that these technologies have meant very little to me over the years. Nonetheless, I think people do find uses for the internet that are valid and legitimate in terms of creating communities based on shared interest – Libertas is obviously one example among many of that – and also in terms of sharing aspects of their lives with others.
A friend of mine here in LA recently sent me a link to an interesting blog called the Talk to Strangers Blog. The basic purpose of the blog is spelled out in this post; essentially, it’s written by an amusing, ironic guy here in LA in his late 20s who decided at some point to stop feeling alienated and angry all the time and start interacting with strangers – to actually get to know people, start placing names with faces, learn about people’s lives around him in a programmatic way. The idea driving the blog appears to be social networking based on actual social contact, rather than the ersatz form of the internet – and the guy doing it takes his whole enterprise as an experiment, one that does not yet have any clear outcome. I only mention this site because I think that the impulse behind it is more or less similar to what drives millions of people to Facebook and Twitter each day – a desire, in effect, to connect … when our lives might not otherwise feel very ‘connected.’ I’ll have more to say about all this down the line. Right now I have to get back to my usual subjects of alien invaders and supermodels.
• Wall Street 2 just had its big, swanky premiere party in New York. You can see pictures of this event here and here, and I wonder if it occurred to anyone present that the party looks just like the sort of ritzy gala thrown by filthy capitalist pigs. Ironies abound.
Odette Yustman of "You Again."
• Hawaii Five-O beat out The Event in the ratings, albeit only by a nose. Hooray hot Hawaiian chicks fighting terrorists on The Big Island! Boo pro-Obama/anti-CIA propaganda! I was too busy to watch either show in progress, actually, because I was trying to find out what happened to Reggie Bush’s leg.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … in the spirit of Godzilla, alien invaders and the like, we thought we’d take a look today at actress Odette Yustman, who starred in Cloverfield and will be appearing this Friday in the comedy-drama You Again.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
