By Jason Apuzzo. A special hat-tip goes today to my LFM colleague Joe Bendel for covering an interesting new web series called Pioneer One that just appeared on Vimeo and YouTube, and is also showing right now at the New York Television Festival. Pioneer One is essentially a crowd-funded webseries that went from concept to finished pilot in three months, on a budget of about $6000.
The premise of Pioneer One is this: a mysterious object falls from the sky, spreading radiation over North America. Fearing terrorism, Homeland Security Agents are dispatched to investigate and contain the damage. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that what they find there involves elements of sci-fi, contemporary anxieties associated with terrorism, and the political history of the Cold War. And while the politics of the series seem a bit murky, based on what I’ve seen thus far it’s safe to say that the series’ creators take a dim view of Soviet communism.
All summer long here at Libertas we were covering a variety of subjects – sci-fi alien invasions (see here), a return of Cold War/anti-communist themes (Salt, Mao’s Last Dancer, Farewell, etc.), and crowd-funded indie sci-fi projects (Iron Sky, The 3rd Letter, Mercury Men) – all of which categories, interestingly, Pioneer One fits into.
Having watched the full pilot episode, my feeling is that the team behind Pioneer One has a great premise they’re working from – one that only becomes clear by the end of the episode. Writer Josh Bernhard and director Bracey Smith are doing a very nice job, cleverly providing a sense of scale and suspense to the story, even if the pacing of this first episode is perhaps a bit relaxed. I hope this series takes off (it already has, to a great extent – the pilot has been downloaded and streamed over 2 million times) because if it goes where I think it’s going … it should be a great deal of fun. Bravo to the whole team behind Pioneer One.
By Jason Apuzzo. • The Affleck movie won the weekend at the box office. I’ve generally been pro-Affleck, but The Town didn’t grab my attention at all. Also, I didn’t like the advertising for it; even though my Catholic days are long in the past, the ugly nun masks really turned me off, in so far as they were being used as an advertising ploy. In any case, Affleck’s career now appears to be resuscitated, so now we can look forward to that Daredevil sequel we’ve all been waiting for.
Aly Michalka of "The Roommate."
• There’s always James Cameron news, isn’t there? And so today we’re learning more details about the new Avatar DVD, with its 5,000 hours of extra bonus features, 900 deleted scenes, new sequences set in the Amazon rainforest, etc. Who has time for this? There might even be a plan to halt global warming in the box set, for all I know. In any case, I only wish there was this type of set available for Aliens, which is still Cameron’s best film in my book (the Blu-ray for Aliens is coming out soon, btw, and apparently looks fabulous). And guess what? This Avatar content-dump will all get re-released again at some point down the line in 3D for Blu-ray, so get used to the fact that this film is never going away.
• As usual, there’s a lot of news on the ‘alien invasion’ front: if you can believe it, it looks like we may be getting a Voltron movie – a Voltron movie, for goodness sake! … so check out some of the production art for this project at the top of this post; there’s also some new Iron Sky casting news; plus there are some intriguing new set photos out from the J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg alien-on-the-loose thriller Super 8, which is slated for next year. I’m expecting that film to be the best of this new alien invasion wave, chiefly because the guys doing it have a lot of practice at this sort of thing. Based on the set photos, the setting for this film is obviously supposed to be ‘middle America,’ whichused to be where Spielberg set all his stories. It’s nice to see him return there, as I think that’s where he’s at his best.
Monica Cruz.
• Perhaps the most unusual news on the ‘alien invasion’ front, however, is that there’s apparently a new version of the old Space Invaders video game coming out – and even that’s now been redesigned for 3D. See the Wall Street Journal’s report on this subject, plus we’ve put the trailer for the game above. The ‘alien invasion’ trend is obviously cross-platform at this point. [Footnote: did you know that Halo: Reach made $200 million on its first day on sale … although even that was still shy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which made $310 million on its first day last year. I’m in the wrong profession.]
• The Jack Ryan reboot Moscow starring Star Trek’s Chris Pine apparently has a new screenwriter … and we’re learning a few more details about the project. Not surprisingly, the movie is set in Moscow, and will feature “terrorist acts as a backdrop.” It is also apparently about Ryan’s early career – I don’t know if that means it’s set in the past, though, or in the ongoing present a lá Bond. We’ll keep an eye on this one.
• We now have a Psycho Hottie College Roommate From Hell Movie coming out (The Roommate, see the trailer here), complete with shower scenes and subtextual lesbianism. Perfect for the start of the academic school year! [Jess Franco retired too early.] This should give parents a lot of confidence as they pack their young daughters off to college. Academia sure isn’t what it used to be! Footnote: saucy Aly Michalka from Hellcats is one of the co-stars, so that’s a plus.
By Jason Apuzzo. I’m not sure we’re going to have time today to review director Mark Romanek’s new adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go – which recently debuted in Toronto and opens in limited release nationwide today, starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield (the new Spider-Man) – so I thought I’d post an excerpt from Andrew O’Hehir’s interesting review over at Salon.
You could describe “Never Let Me Go” as set in an alternate-history version of postwar Britain, but as with all really good alternate histories, the changed universe really isn’t the point. Director Mark Romanek captures the slightly seedy and rundown reality of ’70s and ’80s British life in astonishing and even tragic detail; this is more like a period piece than a science-fiction movie. In fact, it resembles a Merchant-Ivory tragedy about doomed love in a war zone, except that the doomed love involves human guinea pigs and the war zone is not some tropic zone but the alleged good intentions of medical science.
Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in "Never Let Me Go."
There’s no way to write about “Never Let Me Go” without at least dropping hints about the ultimate destiny of Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley), the romantic triangle who meet as children in a dreary, peculiar boarding school called Hailsham House. If you don’t want to know any more about that, stop reading now. This is really never a secret in the film, although it’s concealed at first under a mask of horrifying euphemism — as an adult, Kathy becomes a “carer,” who works with “donors” until they reach “completion” — and I had read Ishiguro’s unforgettable novel and knew what was coming. Still, there’s a scene about 20 minutes into the movie when a sympathetic teacher named Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins) finally spells out what the Hailsham children need to know about their future if they’re to have “decent lives,” as she puts it, and Romanek dramatizes this hammer-blow, life-changing moment with such power that I don’t want to undermine it.
Screenwriter Alex Garland, who is himself a novelist, sticks close to both the letter and spirit of Ishiguro’s novel; this movie is a veritable clinic in precise literary adaptation. He incorporates snatches of dialogue and even voiceover (read by Mulligan) straight from the book, without swamping the human drama or overwhelming Romanek’s astonishing visual evocation of a bygone Britain. His innovations are limited, but they help set the stage in important ways: The big medical breakthrough came in 1952, we are told in an opening title, and by 1967 life expectancy exceeded 100 years. This came at a price, of course, and “Never Let Me Go” asks us to consider that price in all its dimensions. Continue reading Never Let Me Go: ‘Devastating, Dystopian’
By Jason Apuzzo. I wanted Libertas readers to have a chance today to see an extraordinary short film by Iranian filmmaker Farbod “Fred” Khoshtinat called, ATTN: Mr. Democrat. The ‘Mr. Democrat’ of the title is an ironic reference to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who actually claims to preside over a democratic republic in Iran.
Fred Khoshtinat with Hillary Clinton.
Khoshtinat is a multi-talented filmmaker who edited the music video sequences in a poignant movie I really admired this past summer called No One Knows About Persian Cats (see my review of that here).
Dissident filmmakers like Khoshtinat will always have a ‘virtual home’ here at Libertas. We wish him the best in his future endeavors, and hope the success of his film opens up another tiny crack in the Iranian regime.
PLEASE NOTE: Living with the Infidels Episode 5, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” features adult language and situations. If that might offend you, please don’t watch the webisode. Otherwise, enjoy.
By Jason Apuzzo. Here is Episode 5, the final installment of Living with the Infidels. We hope you’ve enjoyed the series. This episode may be the best. It is genuinely hilarious – in large measure because it’s dominated by the terror cell’s raging narcissist, Psycho Ali, who delivers the funniest riff on a terror video I’ve ever seen – Four Lions included. Watch him as he struggles to find his ‘actor’s moment.’ Enjoy!
By Jason Apuzzo. • I recently saw the trailer for the new Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck/Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp thriller-romance The Tourist, which also features Timothy Dalton and Paul Bettany – and I thought it looked great. Frankly, I didn’t think anybody out there made movies like this any longer (i.e., charming, Hitchcockian espionage capers with a light touch), and I’m very much looking forward to seeing it. I’m a bit concerned that the trailer gives away too much … but nonetheless I’m excited by what I see. The film looks to be what the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz Knight and Day was supposed to be but wasn’t. Jolie is obviously on a roll these days, making up for months of tabloid magazine gossip with some very solid projects. As for Depp, he still apparently feels the need to hide himself behind a bizarre exterior in order to convey whatever idiosyncratic humor he’s trying to put across. Still, I can’t fault his performances even if he’s never been my cup of tea. This looks like a film to rescue an otherwise dull fall.
• There’s a lot happening, as usual, on the sci-fi front. First let’s begin with James Cameron, who is apparently producing a new TV-series adaptation of his film True Lies. This was reported recently with great fanfare, but I’m allowed to be a little skeptical here because there are about 2,000 other Cameron-related projects that have been announced lately … so who knows? Since the original film was about fighting terrorists, I’m wondering how the storyline will be changed to fit Cameron’s new passion for indigenous resistance fighters. Anyway, Cameron has also apparently commissioned some new deep-sea explorations to the bottom of the seven-mile deep Challenger Deep (part of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific), from which he will shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated into Avatar’s sequel. [Or at least, that’s his excuse – probably so he can charge the expedition to Fox.] Cameron’s career is becoming increasingly intriguing, as he veers between Michael Moore and Jacques Cousteau. The question is: when he’s 20,000 fathoms down, will he find any beasts down there? [Inside joke.]
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … we thought we’d take a look at Amber Heard (above), who stars in John Carpenter’s new film, The Ward, which just debuted in Toronto. The Ward is set in the 1960s, and deals with a group of five comely young women in a mental institution who attempt to outlast a lecherous ghoul who haunts the hallways. It sounds a bit like working for Letterman. Anyway, I hope she makes it!
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
