By Joe Bendel. Steve Delarue is a financial shark. France Leroi is a single mother, who is laid-off when her factory abruptly closes (but what a name she has). The former is so obviously the villain and the latter is so clearly the victim, we can surely put our brains on auto-pilot. Yet, Cédric Klapisch’s latest film is surprisingly more interesting than that (perhaps unintentionally so, but it still counts). Drawing on three year-old headlines, Klapisch tells a messy morality tale in My Piece of the Pie, which screens during the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
Karin Viard and Gilles Lellouche.
France Leroi is indeed a victim. That is not a subjective judgment; it is the essence of her identity. A union worker thrown out of work by her factory’s financial collapse, she attempts suicide during a birthday party, with her home filled with children. Fortunately she soon recovers, leaving Dunkirk to seek employment in Paris. Through a friend of a friend, she lands a gig working as the cleaning lady for Steve Delarue, a Bonfire of the Vanities style Master of the Universe recently returned to France the country after a long stint in London. Delarue is the kind of guy who administers the death knell to struggling enterprises, like Leroi’s former employer. In fact, unbeknownst to Leroi, he was exactly that guy.
Delarue dates supermodels, but treats them little better than servants like Leroi. Not surprisingly, he’s terrible father material, but fortunately Leroi is there when Delarue’s three year-old son Alban is dumped in his lap. In fact, as she assumes the duties of a nanny, employer and employee start to warm toward each other. However, a perceived betrayal launches Leroi on a reckless course of action. Continue reading LFM Review: My Piece of the Pie @ Tribeca 2011
By Jason Apuzzo. We’ve been pumping you up about The Devil’s Double, the new film about the mobster-like lifestyle of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday as played by Dominic Cooper.
As regular readers will recall, Libertas’ Joe Bendel reviewed The Devil’s Double at Sundance in January and absolutely loved it (see his review here). Lionsgate will be releasing the film here in the States on July 29th.
Today we’ve got another reason to get you pumped: a new poster for the film has just been released for the film (see left), featuring Dominic Cooper looking highly Scarface-like as Uday.
The vulgar splendor of this poster is absolutely beyond belief, epic in scale. Tarantino doesn’t even get posters this good.
[ANNOUNCEMENT: We’re proud to announce today that Libertas’ Joe Bendel will be covering The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Joe did tremendous work covering this year’s Sundance Film Festival for Libertas, and we’re thrilled to bring you his coverage of what promises to be an exciting 10 days at Tribeca.]
By Joe Bendel. A country surrounded by homicidal maniacs probably does not have much need for horror movies. Perhaps that is why it took over sixty years for the Israeli film industry to produce its first slasher film. It was worth the wait. Considerably more inventive than the genre standard, Navot Papushado and Aharon Kashales’ Rabies (see the trailer here) is a highlight of the Cinemania (formerly Midnight) selections at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
A funny thing happened on the way to the tennis match. A car thick with sexual tension breaks down in a secluded forest. All three of Shir’s teammates (two guys and a girl, Adi) seem have a thing for her. Their lingering jealousies and resentments continue roiling below the surface, but the quartet face more pressing problems, like the twitchy dude they find covered in blood.
Ofer and his sister Tali were running away from home for scandalous reasons implied but never outright stated when she fell into a Hannibal Lecter-worthy mantrap. Obviously this was no hunting accident. Having the drop on Ofer, the psycho responsible bloodies him up good, but not good enough. Waking in the morning, Ofer starts tearing through the forest in search of his dear sister, running straight into the four lost tennis players.
Unfortunately, when they call the cops, no good deed goes unpublished. Emasculated and humiliated by his presumably ex-girlfriend, Danny is sort of the good cop. Yuval on the other hand, is definitely the bad cop. A raging misogynist with simmering class resentments and well-documented anger management issues, his only interest is in sexually harassing Shir. With the guys off wandering through the forest with Ofer, Adi goes Thelma & Louise on the creepy copper. Things get bloody from there.
By Jason Apuzzo. War photographer and documentarian Tim Hetherington was killed yesterday in Libya, while covering the civil war there. The New York Times reports on the incident here. We extend our condolences to his friends, family and colleagues.
Tim Hetherington.
Hetherington’s extraordinary documentary about the Afghanistan war, Restrepo, was nominated for an Oscar just last year (read Joe Bendel’s Libertas review here). Hetherington was one of the leading photographers and documentarians of his generation, a courageous and poetic soul who studied literature at Oxford and who brought a writer’s sensibility to his work. He will be missed.
I invite Libertas readers to take a few moments and watch what was apparently Hetherington’s last film effort, a short film called Diary which I’ve embedded above. It’s really an astonishing piece of filmmaking – richly suggestive of what a talent Hetherington was, and of the depth of his passion for justice.
By Jason Apuzzo. Last week, after reading my unflattering one-line review of Atlas Shrugged, Part I, an individual I will refer to as ‘John Galt’ contacted me to express his pleasure with the review – and offer me a copy of Randall Wallace’s Atlas Shrugged screenplay from 2009, to which Angelina Jolie was attached. I accepted, being thoroughly convinced that the Atlas Shrugged currently in theaters in no way represented an adequate adaptation of Rand’s landmark novel.
For those of you who may not be familiar with Randall Wallace, he is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Braveheart, who also wrote Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, wrote and directed We Were Soldiers, and most recently directed Disney’s superb drama Secretariat from last year (see my review of Secretariathere). Mr. Wallace is in every sense an industry pro, and someone whose experience at telling freedom-themed stories on a large scale made him a highly appropriate choice to adapt this material.
And for those few of you who may not be familiar with Angelina Jolie … you’re probably not even reading this article, because you’re living somewhere in the Alpha Centauri system. Let’s simply say that Ms. Jolie is commonly regarded as one of the few modern actresses capable of convincingly playing the role of Dagny Taggart, the feisty and charismatic heroine of Rand’s epic novel. Jolie herself has referred to Atlas Shrugged as a “once-in-a-lifetime” project, and appears to have been genuinely passionate about playing the part.
The producing team responsible for the Atlas Shrugged currently in theaters has hinted darkly that they’ve been objects of ‘liberal persecution’ in Hollywood, and that a ‘faithful’ rendition of Rand’s novel couldn’t possibly have been made in the Hollywood system though conventional channels.
I’m here to tell you that based on the Randall Wallace screenplay I’ve just read, nothing could be further from the truth.
A look at what might have been.
Without getting into Atlas Shrugged’s complex history as a movie and TV project (about which distinguished Rand scholar Jeff Britting has written extensively), suffice it to say that in so far as Angelina Jolie was attached to Randall Wallace’s gripping, ambitious and faithful screenplay, there is no way that the producers of the current film can credibly claim that their downsizing of Atlas Shrugged was the necessary result of ‘liberal persecution.’ Sorry, but that dog doesn’t hunt.
When this kind of talent aligns around a project and it doesn’t come about, there are usually more prosaic reasons – typically having to do with scheduling, budgeting or poor management. Or, as was clearly the case here, the fact that writer-producer John Aglialoro (a first-time producer and screenwriter) was about to lose the rights to Atlas Shrugged – and therefore decided to rush the project into production with a shoddy script, and without proper funding or star power. That decision was tragic, based on the project that could have been made had Aglialoro surrendered the rights to people more capable of managing the film.
Reading Randall Wallace’s Atlas Shrugged screenplay (draft dated Feb. 10th, 2009) is, as a result, both an exhilarating and exasperating experience – given that it represents a vastly more thrilling, sexy, provocative, and genuinely epic telling of Rand’s story than the underwhelming effort currently in theaters.
For anyone who hasn’t yet seen Atlas Shrugged, Part I in theaters, or who hasn’t read Ayn Rand’s original novel, Atlas Shrugged centers around the indomitable and vivacious Dagny Taggart, who serves as the Vice-President in Charge of Operations for the Taggart Transcontinental railway. Surrounded by incompetents and worthless corporate bureaucrats, the detritus of a collapsing society – including, most poignantly, her feckless brother James – it’s the assertive Dagny who truly runs her family’s company, and in so doing keeps the nation’s railways operating. In Rand’s vast and quasi-apocalyptic story – set in an indefinite near-future, as America descends into abscesses of collectivism and fascistic rule – it is largely Dagny Taggart’s strength, persistence and resolute mind in the face of overwhelming odds that keeps the American economy from descending into chaos. At the same time, Dagny also becomes the focal point of a group of radical innovators and industrialists – led by the mysterious John Galt – whose intention is to overthrow the ‘collectivist’ forces in American society by means of a strike. Continue reading EXCLUSIVE: Libertas Reviews the Screenplay for the Randall Wallace-Angelina Jolie Atlas Shrugged
By Jason Apuzzo. EA has released a new 12-minute trailer (featuring extensive game play) for Battlefield 3, depicting U.S. Marines involved in intense urban warfare in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq against Iranian-backed insurgents along the Iran/Iraq border (the game is set in 2014). See the full 12-minute trailer above. The trailer is gripping and intense, and astonishingly realistic in its imagery. NOTE: THIS NSFW TRAILER FEATURES VIOLENCE AND STRONG LANGUAGE. The trailer was posted at YouTube on Thursday, and as of the writing of this post already has over 1.3 millions views.
Screen grab from "Battlefield 3."
Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter game, and a follow-up to EA’s popular Battlefield series. The game is set to debut on November 2nd, and will apparently feature battlefields in Sulaymaniyah, Tehran, Paris and New York.
Watching the trailer, I’m left with the usual questions: namely, why can’t Hollywood do something like this? I mean, fighting space aliens in downtown Los Angeles is great, but why must stories about these real world, epochal military conflicts of ours be relegated to the (admittedly large) ghetto of video gaming? The imagery in this trailer is astonishing in its detail and subtlety, and thoroughly ‘cinematic’ in its execution – to the point that I actually felt like I was watching a war documentary for much of it. And yet a full eight years after the invasion of Iraq, we’re still waiting on any sort of large-scale Hollywood effort to depict the war, while the gaming industry proves each year that there is a massive market for this kind of material.
Does EA have a movie division? They might want to consider starting one.
