By Jason Apuzzo. The Hollywood Reporter has an article out right now about a planned Ronald Reagan biopic from producers Mark Joseph and Ralph Winter. According to THR:
The story of Ronald Reagan’s life — from boyhood to Hollywood actor to leader of the free world — is about to spill out on the big screen in a way quite different from the miniseries that caused such a stir seven years ago. The feature film, titled “Reagan” and sporting a $30 million production budget, is set for release late next year and will be based on two best-selling biographies of the 40th U.S. president by Paul Kengor: “The Crusader” and “God and Ronald Reagan.”
Mark Joseph, who optioned the books four years ago, is co-producing with Ralph Winter and Jonas McCord wrote the script. Winter’s producing credits include four “X-Men” movies, two “Fantastic Four” movies and the 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.” Joseph, a marketing and development executive, worked on “Ray,” “Holes,” “Because of Winn-Dixie” and “The Passion of the Christ.”
McCord, whose credits include “Malice” and “The Body,” said he wasn’t a fan of Reagan but was drawn to the project as he researched the former president’s upbringing. “I was of the opinion that at best he was a bad actor and at worst a clown,” McCord said.
Mark Joseph is an acquaintance of mine, and I first spoke to him several years ago about this project when he was initially trying to get it off the ground. Mark was very passionate about the project, particularly in terms of how he wanted to explore Reagan’s Christian faith and the role it played in the development of his anti-communist worldview.
According to THR, the film still doesn’t have all its financing, and does not yet have a director or cast attached – but I’m glad the project has gained momentum, and we’ll keep an eye on it as it develops.
I will confess to being somewhat discomfited that the screenwriter on this project initially thought of President Reagan as “at best … a bad actor and at worst a clown.” I know several screenwriters – with major credits – whose enthusiasm for President Reagan is of a much less qualified variety. In any case, we wish Mark and his team the best with this film.
[Footnote: Fred Ward starred as Ronald Reagan this summer in the taut Cold War thriller Farewell, which co-starred Willem Dafoe. Read the Libertas review of Farewellhere, and you can catch the trailer over in the right sidebar.]
Scenes from Wang Bing's anti-communist drama "The Ditch," surprise hit of the Venice Film Festival.
By Jason Apuzzo. • The surprise hit at the Venice Film Festival right now is a movie by Wang Bing called The Ditch, that apparently takes an unflinching look at the history of political persecution in Communist China. The film has been very warmly received thus far, and is in strong contention to win the festival’s top prize. Here’s a description of the film from Reuters:
“The Ditch” tells the little-known story of some 3,000 people deported for “re-education” to labor camps on the edge of the Gobi desert, in western China, and struggling to survive extreme climate and acute food shortages. Billed as right-wing enemies by the government for even mildly criticizing the Communist party or simply because of their background, many died of starvation, disease and exhaustion in the ditches that served as dormitories. Director Wang Bing spent three years tracking down survivors and wardens of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui Camps for the film, a surprise entry in the main competition line-up that was only revealed on Monday. “For 10, maybe 20 years, independent Chinese cinema has focused above all else on the social problems of the poorest working classes in contemporary China,” Bing says in the production notes. “The Ditch is perhaps the first film to deal directly with contemporary China’s political past, talking as it does about the ‘Rightists’ and what they endured in the re-education camps. It’s still a taboo subject.”
Needless to say, the film is unlikely to be released in China itself. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one. And do I need to say it again? Please go see Mao’s Last Dancer if you haven’t already, because the better that film does, the more likely it is that The Ditch will get North American distribution. They really need a better title, though. [Sigh.]
• In the meantime, state-sponsored Chinese filmmakers are now embarking on the second half of a massive new propaganda film to glorify the history of the Communist Party. I don’t know why they bother funding these things, when 20th Century Fox (Machete, Avatar) would probably be happy to foot the whole bill.
Season 1 of "V" hits DVD on Nov. 2nd.
• The summer movie season is now over, and George Clooney’s The American and Robert Rodriguez’s Machete finished #1-2 at the box office this past weekend, closing the summer on a whimper. We didn’t even bother reviewing The American here, under the assumption that probably very few of you were going to spend your Labor Day Weekend watching Clooney. [Whereas I thought there was some risk of you fanboy-types seeing Machete, as I did.] On balance I think it was a weak summer. The most fun I had this summer was probably watching Piranha 3D – it was one of the few films that felt like a summer movie, although I was quite happy with Salt, as well. The biggest disappoint easily was Clash of the Midgets, which curiously got released under another title. I thought that the debate over Inception was possibly the most interesting event of the summer in terms of what it revealed about film critics. Beyond that, though, there won’t be much of long-term interest to come out of this summer other than the enormous wave of sci-fi projects greenlit in Avatar’s long wake.
• Will Robert Rodriguez’s Machete now be receiving tax credits from Texas? [It’s hilarious that the official page for film production tax credits at the Texas Film Commission website has a production still from Rodriguez’s own Spy Kids 3-D.] Apparently a project can be rendered ineligible if it violates Section 43.21 of the Texas Penal Code covering “obscenity.” Here is how obscenity is defined in Texas’ code. You lawyers out there – feel free to comment.
• On the European film scene front, Jean-Luc Godard and the late Oriana Fallaci experienced their share of controversy over the years. Now comes word that Godard won’t be showing up in Hollywood to pick up his honorary Oscar (standard procedure for Jean-Luc), and Fallaci’s memoir A Man has finally been optioned. I’m an admirer of Fallaci’s writings, although she was certainly a bit histrionic at times. Nonetheless, we have no journalists here in America of her eloquence, erudition, passion – or even physical bravery. Back in the day she was quite a fox, too. She is deeply missed.
By Jason Apuzzo. I had basically walked away from the whole issue of Stallone’s trashing of the CIA in The Expendables until a Libertas reader (we have great readers) named VW recently pointed out something extraordinary to me in the comments section of this recent post.
Check out this one particular exchange below [emphasis is mine]:
FAN: Are you having any problems with the studio about editing out some violence in ‘Rambo’ to achieve a lower rating or can you release the balls-out movie you promised with that (now legendary) trailer? You are simply the best and most entertaining movie star of all time. Thanks.
STALLONE: This film [Rambo] has its balls intact. The original premise was met with objections by certain powerful personalities in the studio because of the inherent violence. I told them to water this down to make a sugar free war movie, something that is diluted would be a true disservice to the millions of slaughtered Burmese. Then it was suggested that the tone of the film should be more about corruption within the system. For example, the ubiquitous corrupt CIA official or a film that deals with a “caper”, such as Rambo goes to Burma and finds Americans selling plutonium rods to the enemy or some other viral horse crap. I truly hate “caper” movies. I think if I ever developed a cancer, it’ll be a caper tumor lodged at the back of my brain. So, I said to the studio, “What’s wrong with doing a film about man’s inhumanity to man and sometimes God’s indifference to his loyal followers?” To their credit, they said, “Go for it.”
I will go so far as to say that this exchange constitutes a smoking gun. Let me explain why: Stallone admits here that he knows exactly the type of stereotype he’s peddling in The Expendables (i.e., “the ubiquitous corrupt CIA official”), and yet in the interval between Rambo and his new film he obviously decided to go forward with that type of stereotype anyway. And since he both wrote and directed The Expendables, he can’t claim ignorance.
I would not continue on with this subject, except for the fact that in certain media quarters Stallone continues to be treated as if he’s done America some kind of patriotic service by making The Expendables – as if Stallone had actually served in combat on behalf of his country, rather than having simply been a movie actor who made a so-so action movie.
In reality, Stallone is peddling an ugly stereotype of the CIA at a time when we can least afford it, changing his story about how he feels about such stereotypes, and is not even owning up to what’s in his own film. Some hero.
By Jason Apuzzo.THE PITCH: Bad-ass ex-Federale ‘Machete’ (Danny Trejo) turns renegade in order to exact revenge on a Mexican druglord named Torrez (Steven Seagal) – and the corrupt, right-wing political machine in Texas that he secretly controls. Along the way, Machete gets help from some angry chicas played by Jessica Alba (a conflicted ICE agent) and Michelle Rodriguez (a kind of female Che Guevara who runs a taco truck).
THE SKINNY: I never thought I’d see a boring Robert Rodriguez film, but this one is. Rodriguez apparently decided to flesh out the Machete story from the original trailer with endless plot twists, political sloganeering and exposition. Do you think Inception was hard to follow? Or Salt? Try following Machete – it’s basically impossible. At 1 hr. 45 minutes the film is at least 30 minutes too long; it’s a kind of Roger Corman version of Traffic. And the politics? Off-the-charts left wing, and trite in the extreme.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK:
• Much like Planet Terror,Machete isn’t so much a film as a series of gags or skits that Rodriguez jammed together with the idea that somehow, some way, it would all fit together in the editing. You can just imagine him and his buddies swigging Patron Silver and thinking: “Let’s have a scene where Lindsay Lohan shows up in a nun’s outfit and starts blowing people away! … or a scene where Michelle Rodriguez shows up dressed like Snake Plissken and starts blowing people away! … or a scene where Machete tokes-up with a priest!,” etc. The film is a bloated, episodic mess that never gains any momentum – and is still ‘explaining’ its impossibly convoluted plot even in the midst of the final fight scene between Trejo and Seagal.
• Rarely have I seen a filmmaker show such complete contempt for anyone in his audience who might be politically to the right of, say, Pol Pot. Eisenstein and Pudovkin were really warm, cuddly, humanistic filmmakers compared to Robert Rodriguez. [They were also more talented.] Here are a few things you will be treated to in the film: a scene of a right-wing Texas senator (Robert De Niro) and his Minute Man-style henchman (Don Johnson) murdering a pregnant Mexican woman and her husband in cold blood along the border, and topping the moment off by shouting “Welcome to America!”; a right-wing Texas businessman (Jeff Fahey) crucifying a priest (Cheech Marin) on the altar cross in his own church, even driving the final nail into his wrist. This sort of stuff didn’t exactly put me in a great mood for the rest of what Rodriguez was dolling out, which wasn’t much to begin with.
Insane nurse twins.
• Robert De Niro is apparently under the impression that he has a gift for comedy. He seems to have believed this for many years, actually – despite ample evidence to the contrary. Every scene he appears in in Machete is a disaster. His mugging and grimacing as a nasty, demagogic, murderous right-wing Texas politician is so awful and inane as to be almost indescribable. Hey Bobby, do us all a favor and retire to New York and the cannoli – so we can live off memories of Godfather II, OK? You’re currently ranking below Snooki on my Italo-meter, both in personality and talent.
WHAT DOES WORK:
• Danny Trejo and Steven Seagal, more or less, to the extent that I care. Trejo’s face is like some kind of leathery Picasso painting. I’ve never seen anything like it on screen, actually; he makes Mickey Rourke look like Max Headroom. Otherwise, there wasn’t nearly enough of Steven Seagal in the film. Seagal is who Stallone should’ve had as the villain in The Expendables but didn’t.
• Every character in a Rodriguez film is vivid, whatever else one might say about them. Even Lindsay Lohan manages to pull it together here – although she isn’t exactly stretching herself by playing a drug-addled, rich-girl/internet porn queen.
• There are a few decent, pseudo-iconic cult moments in the film that almost redeem the tedium and the obnoxious politics: Trejo’s gory escape from a hospital; vengeful Michelle Rodriguez showing up in black leather and eyepatch at the end; the final Trejo-Seagal confrontation. But that’s about it.
The final showdown.
Robert Rodriguez must be a strange, angry hombre. Most guys who start in the world of cult filmmaking – Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, etc. – don’t want to stay there. They want to move up and out to a bigger audience. They want to deal with bigger themes, create larger myths. Another way of putting it is that they have old-fashioned middle class aspirations, they want to rise.
Rodriguez is the rare filmmaker who seems intent on remaining in the cult ghetto – peddling angry niche politics – no matter how well funded he is. That’s part of the political posturing of Machete – this idea that Rodriguez is himself part of a persecuted minority here in America, when in actuality he’s a rather well-funded filmmaker with swanky friends. Nobody’s really persecuting Robert Rodriguez, so far as I’m aware. It’s just a pose on his part.
I actually think Rodriguez stays in the world of niche films with niche politics because he’s afraid of trying anything really ambitious … because he might fail. So long as he sticks to ‘cult’ filmmaking, to making expensive shlock films with leftist messages, he gets to cruise.
This is precisely the reason, ironically, that he’s never going to reach the level of the filmmakers he obviously so admires – one thinks here of Sergio Leone, in particular, whom Rodriguez compulsively copies in film after film, Machete included. [Check out the opening title sequence of Machete – it’s right out of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.] At Rodriguez’s age, Leone himself was doing everything he could to break out of the Italian sword-and-sandals ghetto to which his career had been confined. He was a striver, an achiever, who longed for the type of career that big American directors like Howard Hawks had. Leone re-charged his career by creating big, mythic landscapes populated with timeless characters like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, or Eli Wallach’s Tuco. It’s becoming quite clear that Robert Rodriguez does not have it in him to do anything that. Rodriguez is essentially becoming a kind of well-funded, Latino Roger Corman – although he doesn’t have Corman’s warmth or intelligence.
Rodriguez comes across to me these days as a kind of spoiled rich kid who doesn’t want to grow up. And his act is wearing thin – microscopically thin, actually, given Machete’s incendiary politics. I’m awfully tempted to tell Mr. Rodriguez to go screw himself, but then he would claim he’s being persecuted. Which is a joke, like his film.
I hope you boys in Iran enjoy this picture I found above of France’s First Lady. I tried to find something smoky, sinful-Western-decadent, and sharia non-compliant … just for you! Pull up a bowl of pistachios for yourself and check out what we get to enjoy here in the West, while you boys gawk at black robes all day.
By the way, it would be wonderful if our own First Lady showed the slightest interest in these matters – you know, human rights abuses against women – while she’s busy during her frantic vacation schedule.
• We’re now learning that the Discovery Channel gunman was apparently a radical environmentalist who experienced an ‘‘awakening” after he watched An Inconvenient Truth – how genuinely inconvenient. This would also seem to imply that he actually stayed ‘awake’ during the film. No wonder he went crazy. [Did he make it through Avatar, too?]
Based on what I’ve read about this guy (he apparently thought that human beings needed to be exterminated from the Earth, in order to make room for the animals), it’s surprising to me that he would’ve been so disgruntled about cable programming these days. Didn’t he see Life After People ?
I know it’s tragic that this person has lost his life – and I apologize if I seem insensitive here – but I’m allowed to be completely unsurprised, and downright cynical, about the fact that our entertainment industry is actually instilling psychosis in our citizens, implanting lies about humanity (that we’re a curse to our planet, etc.) that are now bearing an awful fruit. You might call this process ‘inception,’ so to speak.
Talulah Riley of "Transmission."
• Variety just did a feature on Mao’s Last Dancer, and the incredible challenges of shooting that film in China. Still waiting for Fox News to do feature story #1 on this film. Anybody awake over there?
• On the sci-fi front, you really didn’t think there could be another alien invasion film greenlit, did you? Well, you’d be wrong, because we have another, called Transmission. This time it’s “a British sci-fi feature being shot in 3D and centered around an alien invasion during an solar eclipse,” with the film being described as “Pitch Black meets 28 Days Later.” Proposed cast: Bob Hoskins, Jason Flemying, Talulah Riley, Willem Dafoe. So here we go again. Why the aliens would bother to wait for a solar eclipse is anybody’s guess – but at least this film they’ll be shooting natively in 3D, as opposed to post-converting it. With respect to Ms. Riley’s presence in the film (see right), the 3D approach certainly seems like a good idea.
• Apple is re-booting Apple TV, and is now going to be streaming TV shows through iTunes. Everyone seems to be underwhelmed by this news. I think the problem here is that everyone is looking for the 1 great app that will unify all digital content consumption (TV, phone, web, DVDs, etc.) and that’s never going to happen. We’re just going to keep getting these little advancements until someone invents a Brain Chip. I assume Google is working on that.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … we thought we’d take a look at British star Talulah Riley (see above), who will apparently be battling alien invaders (who isn’t these days?) in the forthcoming British thriller, Transmission. Let’s hope she’s up to it – she may have to quit smoking, first.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
By Jason Apuzzo. The ironies on display here are too much. Recently I came across this award-winning Russian film called 9th Company, which is essentially about the late stages of the Russian war in Afghanistan. You can watch the trailer for the film above; the film’s just coming to DVD and Blu-ray right now, although it actually dates from 2005.
The Russian invasion of Afghanistan was a brutal and sadistic affair all the way around. What’s so striking to me, though, is that even the Russians have apparently been able to muster sufficient national pride in the valor of their soldiers to make this relatively large-scale film about their experiences in Afghanistan.
And what do we get here in America from Hollywood about our own Afghan war? The ostensibly ‘just’ war (in contrast to Iraq, so the story goes)? We get nothing.
As I mentioned in my recent post on the new Aussie film Tomorrow When the War Began, the climate here in the United States for freedom-oriented filmmaking is really lousy. Here we have a situation in which the biggest DVD release of a war film set in Afghanistan is being provided to us by the Russians. Perhaps we should import some of their politicians, while we’re at it. I’m no longer sure it would make much difference.
And by the way, you know how I found out about this film? They were advertising on Harry Knowles’ site(!). What a country we’re living in.
