Problem: In The Expendables Willis played a CIA front man who goes by the name ‘Mr. Church.’ [By the way, isn’t the name a little interesting there?] So it’s apparently the CIA guy again who gets to become the “super villain” in Sly’s next Expendables film.
Memo to Sly: since you’re such a patriotic guy, who believes that “America apologizes too much,” maybe the “super villain” in your next film could be … a terrorist? Or Kim Jong Il? Or one of Castro’s thugs? Or Chinese communists? Instead of the American CIA operative, again. Just a thought.
Regular Libertas readers know I haven’t been falling for this ‘Stallone has wrapped himself in a flag of patriotism’ nonsense that’s been coming from certain quarters of the media recently. The Expendables is a nasty hit-job on the CIA, pure and simple. Now we’re getting a sense of just how committed Stallone is to this anti-CIA plotline as a cornerstone for his new, mini-franchise – despite his unconvincing denials to that effect.
On the box office front, by the way, Stallone’s film slipped to third place over the weekend, against weak competition. Oh, and three weeks in Expendables still isn’t performing as well as Salt (compare the two films here and here), as Salt had made about $9 million more by its third week.
I promise to stop posting on this Salt-Expendables comparison, because it’s becoming quite obvious who’s coming out on top here.
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.
What complicates this sort of thing, of course, is that Rodriguez’s films tend to be done in a tongue-in-cheek manner … but it’s difficult to understand how the murder of a pregnant Mexican woman and her husband – mixed with the genuinely cheap, gratuitous “Welcome to America” crack – is really all that conducive to an amusing storyline.
Or to put it another way: this isn’t very funny.
Rodriguez has made quite a nice career for himself in America. Does he ever reflect on that, at all? I’ve generally been a fan of his – even through the weird, 9/11-related anti-military subplot of Planet Terror – but I’m getting the sense he might be pushing the envelope a bit too far in this film. Why? Why does he feel the need to do this?
• One of the things I neglected to mention yesterday in my remarks on James Cameron is that he also gives away too much in his interviews. Even if I was interested in seeing in Avatar: Special Edition – which I’m not – it’s become quite plain that a much longer, fuller version of the film is headed to DVD and Blu-ray. This version of the film, which will include about 16 new minutes (instead of the 9 new minutes in the current version heading into theaters today), is apparently going to include a prologue featuring Sam Worthington’s character on a “polluted, dystopian Earth … shots of lead character Jake in a sports bar” with “polluted, crowded cityscapes.” The picture to the left, taken from this website, apparently gives you the flavor of what Earth looks like in these scenes. I believe the phrase here would be ‘Blade Runner-esque.’
Beyond all this, the new Avatar DVD is also going to have about 45 minutes of unfinished and/or deleted scenes, apparently – so there doesn’t really seem to be much reason to sit through the 3 hours this weekend, except for the fetishists and/or completists.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Katy Perry talks career vs. Christianity today over at Access Hollywood. Sorry, no pin-up today! I promise to make up for it next week …
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Mr. Cameron strikes me as being something akin to a mad scientist from a 1950s sci-fi film, in that there is undoubtable genius at work in what he does … yet this ‘genius’ (which is of both a technical and narrative variety) is put to ends that are, ultimately, insane in their basic conception. The irony is that Avatar reverses so many things that Cameron’s films seemed to stand for in the past in terms of the basic justness of American military interventions abroad – whether one thinks here of Aliens or True Lies or even Rambo II (which Cameron co-wrote). Cameron has gotten lost in his own technology, his own personal Pandora of anti-Americanism, pseudo-mysticism and eco-extremism – and it’s becoming increasingly unpleasant to watch.
Blue female: Riley Steele at the "Piranha 3D" premiere.
• The Wrap thinks movie ticket prices are too damn high. They’re right. The major culprit? 3D. It’s true; I caught a 10am screening of Piranha 3D last week and the ticket cost $9, which is crazy. For that price, the underwater ballet should’ve been at least 5 minutes longer.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Piranha 3D’s Riley Steele has a birthday today, which is appropriate considering that she’ll be wearing her birthday suit on screens all across America this weekend.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
By Jason Apuzzo. Earlier today I read what has got to be one of the most unintentionally funny excrescences from a Hollywood liberal that I’ve ever encountered. Jeffrey Wells today over at Hollywood Elsewhere, a site renowned for its faux-insider musings on the industry – not to mention Wells’ retro-ducktail haircut – engages in some decidedly breathless speculations over whether Angelina Jolie might be … a closet right-winger!
So here comes Jeffrey Wells stumbling into the mix, with his conspiratorial musings on whether Jolie is some kind of puppet for her “saliva-drooling Tea Party nutter” father (Jon Voight), along with some Rat Pack-level psychology on the female of the species. [By the way, all of this comes fast on the heels of the LA Times’ Tom O’Neil political ‘profiling’ of Ernest Borgnine, based solely and exclusively on Borgnine’s refusal to see Brokeback Mountain.]
Here’s Jeffrey Wells, sans irony:
Angelina Jolie isn’t just the once-estranged daughter of Hollywood’s worst saliva-drooling Tea Party nutter, Jon Voight. She may also be a closet ally of Voight’s, at least in terms of despising Barack Obama. (Call this a flimsy maybe.) She also seems to be a supporter of America’s military adventures in Iraq and perhaps also Afghanistan and…well, basically anywhere that the poor are suffering due to the deprivations of war. …
I only know what Jon Voight has said and stands for, and that I saw him standing near his daughter and Brad Pitt inside a roped-off area at the Salt premiere after-party. And the old cliche about the acorn not falling too far from the tree flew into my mind, especially considering her rep as a closet rightie (including her alleged support for McCain during the ’08 campaign) and that “stay the course in Iraq” Washington Post article she posted in ’08. And being…okay, maybe she’s more of an Ayn Rand libertarian, given her interest in making a film version of Atlas Shrugged.
The basic conservative impulse is to bow down and show total allegiance to authority. This obviously links up with the old cliche about right-wing women (like Rand) being especially passionate about worshipping strong males, which is incidentally why they’re said to be so great in bed. This could be one possible explanation for those reportedly overheard sounds that suggested “an animal being killed.”
I’m not one to take unsourced Us magazine quotes as anything to rely upon, but combine the Washington Post op-ed piece with this 11.09 non-attributable quote that Jolie considers Obama to be a “closet socialist,” and I’m at least thinking “hmmm.”
The term “closet socialist”….well, what’s so bad with that? FDR was one, and he had it right in my book. Anyone who uses such a term is clearly a closet rightie. I mean, that’s a symmetrical way of looking at it.
“‘She hates [Obama],” a source close to Jolie told an Us reporter, according to the article. “She’s into education and rehabilitation and thinks Obama is all about welfare and handouts. She thinks Obama is really a socialist in disguise.”
So let me summarize some of what we’ve learned from Mr. Wells here, because it’s really quite fascinating.
• One of the reasons Jolie might be a right winger is that Mr. Wells spotted her standing next to her father at the premiere of Salt. My, that does seem incriminating!
• Another reason she must be a conservative is that she was interested in playing the Dagny Taggart role in Atlas Shrugged … which, apparently unbeknownst to Wells, famous Hollywood liberals like Charlize Theron and Julia Roberts have also been attached to because it’s a great female role. Does that make them ‘closet righties’ too, Jeffrey?
Right wing women: "great in bed."
• “The basic conservative impulse is to bow down and show total allegiance to authority,” asserts Mr. Wells. And blissfully unaware of the ironies involved, just a few lines later Wells goes on to praise the presidency of FDR. I’ll leave that fun little contradiction alone because I don’t believe in shooting turkeys while they’re squawking in a barrel.
• This is my favorite Wells-ism, though: that right-wing women worship strong males, and for this reason are “great in bed.” Well! Among other things, we’re learning here about what Mr. Wells himself apparently thinks makes a woman “great in bed”: namely, the worship of “strong males” … like him? Fascinating! It’s amazing how retro some of these ‘liberal’ guys can be!
• I also like Wells’ efforts to tie Jolie’s right-wing politics to celebrity gossip about some apparently loud lovemaking (the “animal getting killed” stuff) between Jolie and Brad Pitt at an African resort, from five years ago. Apparently in Wells’ mind that’s a strong journalistic lead in the hunt to uncover Jolie’s secret, reactionary worldview!
I could go on here, but I think you get the point. I’m less interested here in whether Jolie is actually a right-winger (I doubt that, frankly) than in a typical Hollywood liberal’s image of what a conservative must be like.
I’m also intrigued by what Mr. Wells’ heated musings suggest about what the average Hollywood liberal really thinks of the female of the species, by the way. Who’s really the caveman here? It sounds like it’s you, Jeffrey. Or maybe you’re just not getting your ducktail stroked enough.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Sean Connery turns 80 today, and we want to wish him a Happy Birthday. Connery’s done many great films and created many great characters over the years, but his lasting achievement is obviously going to be having created the most memorable characterization yet of James Bond. Indeed, due to the combined efforts of both Connery and Ian Fleming, 007 probably became the most iconic literary and /or filmic character of the Cold War era.
Sean Connery.
I just recently was watching Goldfinger and Thunderball, and the thing that struck me most about those films was the studied ease with which Connery mixes machismo, and a dry, urbane wit. Very few actors have ever been able to combine those things as well as Connery did in his prime. Daniel Craig and Sam Worthington, please take note: you become an action star by doing more than just sneering at the camera and head-butting your co-stars. It takes a dash of intelligence, and more than a little humor. The key factor with Connery is the fun he’s having along with the audience as his character is put into increasingly more insane situations. That fun is utterly infectious, and is what makes the early Bond films so droll and delightful. Happy Birthday to the estimable Scotsman.
In related Connery news, somebody in the UK recently dug up a previously-thought-lost copy of the BBC Anna Karenina that Connery did in 1961 with Claire Bloom, just one year before Connery became a megastar with Dr. No. It will be out on DVD next month.
I didn’t think reality TV could be more frightening than “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” but this surely is. The courage of the men and women who do this sort of thing for a living is beyond anything I can imagine.
• You all know that we’re fans of Frank Miller here at Libertas, and now there’s a bit more to see of Frank’s forthcoming new ad series for Gucci … which has a bit of old-fashioned James Bond flair, perhaps? Check out the new ad below. It’s very sexy, love what Frank’s doing here.
• Did you know that vampire-related entertainment properties have brought in about $7 billion to the Hollywood economy? That’s what the Hollywood Reporter is claiming today. I’m going to assume for the moment that it’s young female audiences who account mostly for this. As I’ve been saying here for months, I think that the Harry Knowles-style fanboy is slowly in the process of being displaced by romance-starved young women as Hollywood’s primary consumer. This is just another sign of it.
• Speaking of romance-starved young women … do you remember the satiric review I did the other day of Piranha 3D? The purpose of that review was to satirize how a progressive-Marxist style intellectual might react to that very silly, very fun little film. Well, would you like to read what an actual, progressive-Marxist style reading of Katy Perry’s new album looks like? Read the LA Times review of Perry’s new Teenage Dream album. I kid you not: the LA Times reviewer is convinced that Perry’s music is essentially a paean to rampant American consumerism.
Here’s an excerpt from the review below:
More than her Christian background or the chick-lit limits to her take on sexual liberation, what makes Perry a controversial artist is her essential hollowness. “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?” she sings in the power ballad “Firework.” Perry felt like that bag, but then realized what a bag was for: to be filled up with shiny, purchasable things.
Though her lyrics generally recount familiar scenarios on the road to romantic fulfillment, Perry’s real subject is consumerism. [Emphasis mine.] From the bouncy-house Scandinavian beats provided her by super-producers Max Martin, Stargate and her mentor Dr. Luke to the childlike enthusiasm with which she embraces lyrical clichés to the vocal style that combines sports arena chants with karaoke croons to her Halloween store look, Perry is the living embodiment of what it means to be bought and sold.
Her songs are like ads, with hooks that hit like paintballs and choruses that exhort like slogans; she delivers them with the gusto of a pitchwoman. On “Teenage Dream,” the songs alternate between weekend-bender celebrations of hedonism and self-help-style affirmations encouraging listeners to get an emotional makeover. Either way, acquisition is the goal: of a great love, a happy hangover, a perfect pair of Daisy Dukes.
I think Prof. de Molay will be emailing this reviewer shortly, as they probably have a lot to talk about.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Woody Allen says in an interview that French first lady and Libertas favorite Carla Bruni was “very professional” on the set of his new film Midnight in Paris – and that working with her was “smooth and pleasant.” We expected no less. Carla apparently plays a guide at the Rodin Museum, and she was so good Allen’s going to keep all her scenes in. This may be the first Woody Allen film I see in years.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
By Jason Apuzzo. I’m curious as to what people think of this preview (above) for NBC’s forthcoming series, The Event. Here are the main elements I’m getting from this trailer:
• Heroic, charismatic young black President.
• CIA conspiracy involving illegal detainees.
• A secret detention facility in Alaska?
• Some sort of 9/11-type event.
I believe this is what is referred to as ‘on the nose’-style filmmaking. And we apparently now have the Obama Administration’s own version of The West Wing.
Somehow you knew this was coming, didn’t you?
[Special thanks to LFM’s Patricia Ducey for tipping me off about this.]
[Special thanks to Hot Air for linking to this post.]
