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.
By Joe Bendel. Gangster and self-styled revolutionary Jacques Mesrine never lacked for nerve, but he might have started to believe his own hype. That never turns out well. At least we have good reason to believe he will not go quietly at the conclusion of Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, the second part of Jean-François Richet’s two-film bio-epic, which opens today in select theaters nationwide.
After his notorious detour through Quebec, Mesrine is back in France, plying his chosen trade. A celebrity criminal who assiduously cultivates the media, his capture becomes the top priority of Police Commissaire Broussard. Actually, catching the flamboyant Mesrine seems relatively easy – keeping him behind bars was the tricky part. When he teams up with François Besse, an unassuming but equally slippery fellow inmate, all bets are off.
Largely eschewing the personal drama of Killer Instinct, Public features two shoot ‘em up escape sequences, a number of mostly disastrous capers, some cold-blooded killing, and the brilliantly edited conclusion. Essentially, Public delivers the pay-off on Instinct’s emotional investment. Yet all the really juicy supporting turns come in the second, action-driven film. As Besse, the perfectly cast Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is an intense counterpoint to blustery Mesrine. Likewise, Dardenne Brothers regular Olivier Gourmet brings some heft to Broussard, making him a worthy antagonist for Mesrine. Instinct standout Michel Duchaussoy also makes a brief but touching return appearance as the gangster’s meekly loving father.
Of course, it’s problematic using terms like “hero” or even “anti-hero” with regard to the Mesrine films. While most of his outright misogynistic episodes come in the first installment, he is consistently presented as a problematic figure, albeit one not without charm. Arguably, though, it is his effort to preserve his good press that contributes to his undoing. Vanity—it’s a killer.
While Instinct had the occasional slow patch, Enemy speeds along like an escaped fugitive. It is all held together by Vincent Cassel’s dynamic lead performance and the film’s cool, retro-70’s look. Of course, the Mesrine films are best seen as a whole, but of the duology Enemy is definitely the superior film. It opens today in select theaters nationwide.
By Jennifer Baldwin. This week, Don wins a Clio award (on the same night Mad Men is up for Best Drama at the Emmys … Hey! I see what you did there, Matt Weiner!)
• Peggy and the new guy in creative (Stan Rizzo, played by actor Jay R. Ferguson) turn nudists for the night so they can finally get some work done on the Vicks cough drop account.
• Roger’s wife, Jane, sends her inept cousin, Danny, to SCDP to try to get a job using a portfolio filled with other people’s ads – and one lame-brained original idea he recycles over and over and over (and over) again.
• Ken Cosgrove gets hired by SCDP, but Pete’s withering stare and boss-man attitude turn poor Ken from cocksure account man to chastened puppy dog.
• And Roger writes his memoirs.
And, oh yeah: Don has finally lost it. No matter his personal problems in the past three seasons, Don has always been a star when it comes to advertising. When he’s in the room with a client, he’s golden. He’s always got a clever slogan or a winning ad campaign, and even when the clients don’t go for Don’s ideas, we the audience can tell that Don is an advertising genius. But in this episode, Don’s drinking, his depression, his out of control behavior — it all catches up to him and he flounders and embarrasses himself in the boardroom with the clients. It was painful.
Don — drunk as a skunk — pitches his idea to the Life cereal execs, but they find the idea too ironic, too clever and worry that their Middle America customers won’t get the joke. Don’s horrible attempts to come up with a new slogan on the fly are so excruciating to watch, I almost had to avert my eyes. When he finally steals a lame-brained idea from poor Danny Siegel (“The cure for the common … breakfast”), of course the Life execs love it. Weiner really is trying to destroy the Don Draper mystique, isn’t he?
Don’s drinking and self-destruction have gotten so out of control that he wakes up on Sunday morning thinking it’s Saturday — he missed an entire day thanks to drink — and forgets to pick up his kids from Betty. He got wasted at the Clio awards after-party on Friday night, met a brunette there, and took her back to his apartment.
Don & Roger.
In a beautifully done bit of filmmaking and cinematic screenwriting, we close-up on Don’s face as he lies in bed and the brunette from the Clios makes her way down his torso and out of view. The lighting of the scene is dark; it’s night. Don closes his eyes and falls asleep. Slowly a bright light glides in — the light from the sun that we think indicates the next morning.
But Betty’s phone call awakens Don, her furious anger is as disorienting for us as it is for Don, until the camera cuts to another shot and we get an ever-so-slight glimpse at the woman in bed with him — a blonde! Not the woman from the Clios! The way the scene plays out, we are as confused and distraught as Don. The moment we realize just what has happened, we feel that same punch to the gut that Don must feel. He’s lost an entire day. He’s slept with a woman and doesn’t even remember meeting her. He’s missed his day with the kids thanks to his out of control drinking. I know I’ve said this before for other moments in season four, but this moment is rock bottom for Don.
Don & Faye.
“Waldorf Stories” is an episode of parallels and pairs, opposites and foils. A young Don (from Roger’s flashbacks) and Danny Siegel as the eager, pushy newbies trying to break into the ad game. A younger Roger (in his flashbacks) and present-day Don are the older, established execs; functioning (and not always functioning) alcoholics who end up giving the young neophytes jobs thanks to the influence of booze. Peggy, the girl who seems old fashioned and prudish but is really liberated, and Stan, the guy who claims to be liberated but can’t really handle it when Peggy calls his bluff. Pete and Ken, opposites in almost every way, rivals since the first season, with Pete usually on the losing end — only this time, Pete, in almost Michael Corleone-style fashion, brings Ken to heel.
And then there’s Faye Miller and the brunette from the Clio awards after-party. Again, Don tries to put the moves on Faye and she wisely resists. But the brunette throws herself at Don. She’s caught up in his success and new-found fame, and, of course, his good looks. She sleeps with him right away and she is a symbol of everything that is destructive in Don’s life: the drunkenness; the pursuit of prestige and acclaim; the selfishness; the meaninglessness; the empty nothingness. Don has just won his industry’s highest award and in the end, he has nothing. He’s so drunk, he forgets his Clio at the bar. He’s so drunk, he forgets his kids.
In a nice touch, we find out that Roger made sure to hold onto the Clio at the bar and he gives it to Don later. The friendship between Roger and Don is one of the few real relationships Don has left. But as it is right now, I doubt that their relationship will be enough to save Don from self-destruction.
