LFM was invited to visit the set of an important and much-discussed new film last week. We had a wonderful time – and the cast, crew and production team could not have been friendlier.
We’ll be reporting on this in coming days … and breaking some news. So stay tuned.
Posted on July 19th, 2010 at 6:02pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday’s LFM post on Michael Moore being voted to the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors was mentioned yesterday in Patrick Goldstein’s LA Times piece on the controversy. We want to thank Patrick for his regular readership of our site.
I also wanted to respond to one point made in Patrick’s article:
Inside the industry, reaction was more muted, with one screenwriter musing: “If the academy has any brains at all, they’d better frisk Moore before every meeting to make sure he doesn’t try to bring a hidden camera. If you thought Wall Street and General Motors were fat targets for muckraking, that’s nothing compared to the academy.”
This is actually the first thing I thought of when I heard about Moore’s election – not so much that he would bring a camera into board meetings (a droll idea, by the way), but that he would grandstand in public over matters that might otherwise be kept in-house. The basic métier of people like Moore is to turn everything into a public, political controversy – essentially a circus spectacle, with him as ring master. It’s all too easy to imagine this sort of thing happening in the case of, say, the awarding of honorary Oscars. An acquaintance of mine on the Board, for example, was involved some years back in the controversial decision to give Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar. What would Moore have made of that? Would he really have kept his mouth shut?
The ironic thing here is that Moore’s career has basically been on the slide since Fahrenheit 9/11, and all this sort of thing does is reanimate him like some shambling vampire from an Ed Wood movie.
Beyond this, it’s come to my attention that certain on-line conservatives are actually praising this election of Moore on the basis of him being a gifted documentarian. What a farce. Moore has absolutely destroyed documentary filmmaking, turning it into a cheap vehicle for filmmaker narcissism and half-assed propagandizing. Moore has absolutely reversed all the advances that Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker (Primary, Monterey Pop, The War Room) or Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) brought to documentary filmmaking from the 1960s forward, in terms of letting the documentary camera tell stories without the intrusiveness of narration or editorializing. This is what American documentary filmmaking represented at the height of its influence on the world cinema stage – when filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard, George Lucas, Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese cited the American documentary school as their chief influence.
As Pennebaker said back in 1971:
“It’s possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide whether it tells them about any of these things. But you don’t have to label them, you don’t have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it’s good for you to learn.” Continue reading Libertas in The LA Times + Moore’s Shoddy Legacy in Documentary Film
By Jason Apuzzo. As reported at Deadline Hollywood, Michael Moore (along with Kathryn Bigelow, and Lawrence of Arabia editor Anne Coates) has been elected to the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors.
Forgive me, but the election of this Riefenstahl-in-a-fat-suit is repulsive. Utterly contemptible, divisive – and richly evocative of the climate of fear that currently pervades an industry in which dissent from the left-liberal line is not tolerated. I could not be more disgusted by this.
What most people don’t know is that at least one of the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors is a conservative. But I can’t say who it is – because of course, I don’t want this person getting in trouble. That’s the way this town really works.
I don’t even know where to begin on this one, folks. The ongoing ruination of what was once a special institution continues unabated, apparently with no adults around to stop it.
[Update: The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein links to this post today (7/7) in his own piece on Moore’s election. I’d like to respond to one point in Patrick’s article:
Inside the industry, reaction was more muted, with one screenwriter musing: “If the academy has any brains at all, they’d better frisk Moore before every meeting to make sure he doesn’t try to bring a hidden camera. If you thought Wall Street and General Motors were fat targets for muckraking, that’s nothing compared to the academy.”
This is actually the first thing I thought of when I heard about Moore’s election – not so much that he would bring a camera into board meetings (a droll idea, by the way), but that he would grandstand in public over matters that might otherwise be kept in-house. The basic métier of people like Moore is to turn everything into a public, political controversy – essentially a circus spectacle, with him as ring master. It’s all too easy to imagine this sort of thing happening in the case of, say, the awarding of honorary Oscars. An acquaintance of mine on the Board, for example, was involved some years back in the controversial decision to give Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar. What would Moore have made of that? Would he really have kept his mouth shut?]
Posted on July 7th, 2010 at 12:55pm.
We want to thank Senator Fred Thompson for having LFM Co-Editor Jason Apuzzo on his national radio show today to talk about MGM’s forthcoming Red Dawn, and other issues we’ve been covering here at LFM.
We want to welcome Fred’s listeners to LFM. Fred is a warm, engaging person whose extraordinary career has encompassed both Hollywood and Washington – and we thank him for his interest in what we’re doing here at LFM.
To hear the show, and for more information on Fred’s program, please visit the Fred Thompson Show’s official website. To see Fred in action on-screen, LFM recommends two classics from early in Fred’s career: The Hunt for Red October, and Die Hard 2 …
Posted on June 18th, 2010 at 11:12am.
We want to thank Lars Larson for having LFM Co-Editor Govindini Murty on his national radio show yesterday to talk about MGM’s forthcoming Red Dawn, and other issues we’ve been covering here at LFM.
Lars is a fun and intelligent guy who runs one of the best talk shows on radio, and we hadn’t even known that his father appeared in the original Red Dawn …
To hear the show, and for more information on Lars’ program, please visit the show’s official website.
Posted on June 12th, 2010 at 7:21pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. Our recent post about MGM’s forthcoming remake of Red Dawn (see here) has gotten quite a bit of attention around the internet.
First of all, we want to thank Patrick Goldstein of The LA Times who just did an entire piece today on our reaction to Red Dawn. We especially want to thank Patrick for his kind words about LFM:
“… Libertas Film Magazine, a newly revived version of the blog that set the standard for smart conservative film writing and in its first weeks of new life has already easily surpassed Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, if for no other reason than that Apuzzo and his film-loving cohorts (including the always provocative Govindini Murty, who recently weighed in with a stirring defense of “Sex & the City 2″) don’t spend all their waking hours simply bashing all the usual lefty Hollywood suspects.”
That’s very kind of Patrick, and we want to thank him for stating, in just a few words, what we feel makes us unique.
Also, since our initial post, we’ve spoken to an executive at MGM about the new Red Dawn, and he provided us with some exciting details about the film. Additionally, he confirmed a few basic points about the film: 1) the negative cost for the film is actually around $42 million; 2) Red Dawn as yet has no release date due to the complex situation at MGM; 3) Connor Cruise appears in the film, but is not actually the film’s main star. However, the great news is that the film is apparently going to be as hardcore as it seems, and based on what we’ve already been told conservatives will be electrified by this film.
We’ll have a lot more to report about Red Dawn down the line.
Posted on June 10, 2010 at 11:32am.