“I was nervous about doing a movie about Latinos. I’ve usually stayed away from it,” she told 24 Frames, saying she found most depictions of Latino culture on the big screen to be one-note and marginal. “But after I read the script, I realized this is about a symbol of hope. It was kind of the way we felt about Obama when he was first elected …”
The depiction of Machete as a symbol of hope for a Latino community, at a time when, as the movie noted satirically, immigration fears were running riot, heartened Rodriguez. And to the extent it shows Latinos and whites working together, she says, it felt even more ideological.
“It was like seeing Run DMC and Aerosmith doing that video together,” she said, referring to “Walk This Way.” “It was like, ‘Yeah, man, we can all do this together and laugh about it.’ “
By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday, after my post on the new film Tomorrow When the War Began (which appears to be a kind of Australian Red Dawn), a reader named Psudo reminded me that this new film is coming out at roughly the same time as the new videogame Homefront– which is actually written by Red Dawn writer/director John Milius, and is quite obviously inspired by the subject matter of his original film. Check out the two trailers for the game, above and below. My understanding is that Homefront will be coming out in February.
John Milius' forthcoming video game.
Homefront is actually set about 15 years from now. The idea is that North Korea has become a mini-expansionist empire, invigorated by a young new leader, and that this empire grows to consume both South Korea and Japan. Meanwhile, the United States’ economic and military profiles continue to weaken. The North Koreans then launch some kind of advanced electronic pulse weapon that takes out our defense systems. Enter North Korean invaders.
Whether one finds this scenario especially plausible, by the way, isn’t really the issue here. What’s fascinating is how prevalent this type of scenario is becoming in current projects.
We’ve been documenting these invasion scenarios here at Libertas all summer, as regular readers know. These scenarios are truly starting to appear everywhere – most prominently in science fiction films. Suffice to say that Homefront is looking not only a lot like the forthcoming MGM remake of Red Dawn, but also this new Australian film Tomorrow When the War Began, plus the forthcoming web series Red Storm, and about a hundred different sci-fi invasion stories coming down the pike. Plus, this summer we’ve seen the return of films depicting the Cold War Soviet spy threat in Salt and Farewell, and vivid depictions of communist tyranny in indie films like Mao’s Last Dancer, Disco & Atomic War, and The Red Chapel (which deals specifically with North Korea).
How big of a trend is this? It’s a very big one that’s impacting us in many different ways. Two recent films greenlit with $200 million budgets – Universal’s Battleship and the Warner Brothers Battle of Midway – both seem to partake in the trend, for example. [Midway was the World War II battle that permanently scuttled any Japanese hopes of invading America; Battleship is a World War II-style naval battle, set in the future, pitting a combined Earth navy against an invading alien force.]
We’ll keep an eye on all this here at Libertas, to be sure. I personally think these films reflect deep domestic anxieties about the direction the country’s going in … and I don’t think these anxieties are waning. They’re only growing in intensity.
One final word: I spent a pleasant evening several years ago with John Milius; we smoked cigars and talked about the White Rajah of Sarawak … and, ironically, about Mao. I want to wish him the best with this new project.
A new Australian film called Tomorrow When the War Began, distributed in Austalia by Paramount (starting September 2nd) and based on an Australian teen novel series of the same title, is getting a lot of buzz right now (see The Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog and Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood today) because the film is currently unspooling for potential distributors at the Toronto Film Festival. The film marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Stuart Beattie, whose credits include Collateral and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Here’s the HeatVision summary of the project:
“Tomorrow” is based on the best-selling Australian novel by John Marsden, which is the first in a series of seven books that have sold over two million copies in Australia and New Zealand. In a “Red Dawn” from Down Under way, it tells the story of a group of high school teenagers who decide to take an end of the year camping trip and return home to find houses deserted and phone lines cut. They soon learn that their country has been invaded, and they’re forced into a battle of life and death against the deadly occupying force.
Check out the trailer above – the parallels to Red Dawn are quite obvious. You can otherwise read some early reviews of the film here and here.
The film, and John Marsden’s original novels, are coy on the matter of who the invading force happens to be – but all indications are that they are most likely the communist Chinese, potentially with the aid of other southeast Asian forces. Tellingly, Marsden apparently dedicated the most recent book in the Tomorrow series to “the people of Tibet, East Timor and West Papua” … all of whom have been invaded either by China, or Indonesia. For an in-depth look at the controversy over this project in Australia, I strongly advise watching the interview below with Marsden – who talks about the novels and the film, and discusses the political implications of both. Expect this exact same controversy to play out once this film is released in the U.S. – assuming that’s allowed to happen.
It’s fascinating to me that films like this are suddenly getting made right now (e.g., Salt) – although certainly a great many more of them are getting made outside Hollywood (and America, generally) than from within. [In American films right now, fears of foreign invasion are currently being sublimated into the science fiction alien invasion genre. See my exchange with the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein here.]
Most recently, for example, it was an Australian production team that made Mao’s Last Dancer, which is in theaters right now (see the LFM review). Mao’s Last Dancer deals with a ballet dancer’s defection to the United States, in a much-celebrated case that even involved the intervention of (then) Vice President George H.W. Bush, and yet it was apparently impossible for that film to be made here in this country by American filmmakers.
So we now apparently have a case where a kind of ersatz remake of Red Dawn, made by Australians, may actually hit theaters before MGM’s ‘official’ Red Dawn remake (due to MGM’s complex financial situation). Personally, by the way, I’m still waiting for Chris Morris’ incredible new film Four Lions to get its U.S. release (see the LFM review); that release seems very much up in the air, sadly, due to frightened domestic distributors.
So what’s going on here? I think it’s this: that the climate for freedom-oriented filmmaking is actually better these days outside the United States than within. What a shift that represents. And what a tragedy.
Let’s hope Tomorrow When the War Began gets a U.S. release. We’ll be keeping an eye on this story as it develops.
By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday we reported on how both: 1) Avatar: Special Edition tanked at the domestic box office, debuting behind Piranha 3D; and 2) how James Cameron had bad-mouthed Piranha 3D’s use of the new 3D technology as “exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D.” Furthermore, and perhaps most tellingly, Cameron distanced himself from his own direction of Piranha 2: The Spawning.
Today, Piranha 3D producer Mark Canton (who also produced 300, another technically innovative thriller I liked) bites back!
As reported today at the LA Times’ 24 Frames blog, Canton has apparently fired off an open letter to Cameron on a variety of issues – including not only Cameron’s proprietary attitude toward 3D, but also the narrative problems with Avatar. Good for Canton.
Here are some choice excerpts from Canton’s letter:
“Mr. Cameron, who singles himself out to be a visionary of movie-making, seems to have a small vision regarding any motion pictures that are not his own … Let’s just keep this in mind Jim — you did not invent 3D. You were fortunate that others inspired you to take it further … To be honest, I found the 3D in ‘Avatar’ to be inconsistent and while ground breaking in many respects, sometimes I thought it overwhelmed the storytelling … Technology aside, I wish ‘Avatar’ had been more original in its storytelling.”
As you can imagine, I’m very much in agreement with Canton about this. You know what Avatar is without the cumulative impact of 3D, ILM and Weta Digital? It’s Green Zone. That’s the little secret Cameron wants to hide, and why he’s weirdly distancing himself now from his roots in the world of campy, Roger Corman-inspired cult movies like Piranha 2. Cameron’s above that stuff now, you see – because he’s got 20th Century Fox and a massive production apparatus backing him now. What a phony.
By the way, I’ve actually seen Cameron’s Piranha 2: The Spawning, and the original Joe Dante/Roger Corman Piranha – and, of course, Alex Aja’s new Piranha 3D … and I can tell you that Piranha 3D is easily the best of the three, and Cameron’s film is easily the worst.
Is that part of the subtext here? Could Cameron possibly be that venal – that he doesn’t like being reminded of his all-too humble origins … just as some younger guy borrows ‘his’ technology and makes an obviously better film?
Perhaps the true problem Cameron faces is that – unlike George Lucas, and unlike Peter Jackson – he’s just a litte too easy to copy.
[UPDATE: in the wake of Piranha 3D’s surprising success as a critical and cult phenomenon, we’re apparently now going to be getting Shark Night 3D, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog today. The film is set in the Louisiana bayou, with the usual sexy teenagers as fish chowder. Also read today how James Cameron – with Guillermo Del Toro’s help – is about to ruin H.P. Lovecraft’s classic sci-fi horror novel, At the Mountains of Madness, with their new 3D film adaptation. A new, highly unflattering script review of that film is out.]
• If Machete isn’t enough for you … there appears to be a new genre forming: alien invasion movies set on the border … about illegal aliens of the extraterrestrial variety! Go figure. We’ve reported previously on Monsters (see an intriguing new production still for that here), and now comes the new Mexican alien invasion thriller, Seres: Genesis. The Hollywood Reporter has the new trailer for it here. Are we starting to reach the shark-jumping point in this burgeoning alien invasion genre?
The girls of "Mad Men" at The Emmys.
In related sci-fi news, there’s an interesting new rumor out about the storyline for the J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg alien invasion thriller, Super 8. According to Dark Horizons, the story for the film “revolves around a 14-year-old boy growing up in a steel town in 1979 where a train crash forces the town to come together.” The weblink from which Dark Horizons discovered this information has mysteriously vanished …
“I love the political message. I love the exploitative platform to kind of talk about something that I feel is so relevant. It’s been something that’s been ripe in the Latino community for a long time.”
I love the exploitative platform? I hope what she means by that is the fact that Machete is basically a 70s-style, exploitation-film knock-off … not that she loves ‘exploiting’ the platform of the cinema. [Sigh.]
Among “Machete’s” more provocative elements are border vigilantes led by Don Johnson as a kind of avatar for Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and fake political ads for an incumbent senator whose platform is built on his “hard line against wetbacks” and a description of them as “parasites.” That the two characters murder a pregnant Mexican woman to prevent her baby from being born in America and then shoot her distraught husband while uttering the line, “Welcome to America,” underlines the point.
I’m really hard-pressed to understand how this sort of thing helps matters in terms of the ongoing immigration debate. It seems more like a flaming gas can thrown on an already roaring fire … by narcissist Hollywood celebrities who themselves won’t be around to clean up the mess after they’ve helped cause it.
