Category: News/Opinion

Never Let Me Go: ‘Devastating, Dystopian’

By Jason Apuzzo. I’m not sure we’re going to have time today to review director Mark Romanek’s new adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go – which recently debuted in Toronto and opens in limited release nationwide today, starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield (the new Spider-Man) – so I thought I’d post an excerpt from Andrew O’Hehir’s interesting review over at Salon.

From Salon:

You could describe “Never Let Me Go” as set in an alternate-history version of postwar Britain, but as with all really good alternate histories, the changed universe really isn’t the point. Director Mark Romanek captures the slightly seedy and rundown reality of ’70s and ’80s British life in astonishing and even tragic detail; this is more like a period piece than a science-fiction movie. In fact, it resembles a Merchant-Ivory tragedy about doomed love in a war zone, except that the doomed love involves human guinea pigs and the war zone is not some tropic zone but the alleged good intentions of medical science.

Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in "Never Let Me Go."

There’s no way to write about “Never Let Me Go” without at least dropping hints about the ultimate destiny of Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley), the romantic triangle who meet as children in a dreary, peculiar boarding school called Hailsham House. If you don’t want to know any more about that, stop reading now. This is really never a secret in the film, although it’s concealed at first under a mask of horrifying euphemism — as an adult, Kathy becomes a “carer,” who works with “donors” until they reach “completion” — and I had read Ishiguro’s unforgettable novel and knew what was coming. Still, there’s a scene about 20 minutes into the movie when a sympathetic teacher named Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins) finally spells out what the Hailsham children need to know about their future if they’re to have “decent lives,” as she puts it, and Romanek dramatizes this hammer-blow, life-changing moment with such power that I don’t want to undermine it.

Screenwriter Alex Garland, who is himself a novelist, sticks close to both the letter and spirit of Ishiguro’s novel; this movie is a veritable clinic in precise literary adaptation. He incorporates snatches of dialogue and even voiceover (read by Mulligan) straight from the book, without swamping the human drama or overwhelming Romanek’s astonishing visual evocation of a bygone Britain. His innovations are limited, but they help set the stage in important ways: The big medical breakthrough came in 1952, we are told in an opening title, and by 1967 life expectancy exceeded 100 years. This came at a price, of course, and “Never Let Me Go” asks us to consider that price in all its dimensions. Continue reading Never Let Me Go: ‘Devastating, Dystopian’

ATTN: Mr. Democrat Challenges the Iranian Regime

By Jason Apuzzo. I wanted Libertas readers to have a chance today to see an extraordinary short film by Iranian filmmaker Farbod “Fred” Khoshtinat called, ATTN: Mr. Democrat. The ‘Mr. Democrat’ of the title is an ironic reference to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who actually claims to preside over a democratic republic in Iran.

Fred Khoshtinat with Hillary Clinton.

Khoshtinat is a multi-talented filmmaker who edited the music video sequences in a poignant movie I really admired this past summer called No One Knows About Persian Cats (see my review of that here).

ATTN: Mr. Democrat is a short film that created a big splash recently by winning the State Department’s ‘Democracy Video Challenge,’ in the Near East and North Africa category. Khoshtinat was given the ‘Democracy Video Challenge’ award for this short this past week by Hillary Clinton.

Dissident filmmakers like Khoshtinat will always have a ‘virtual home’ here at Libertas. We wish him the best in his future endeavors, and hope the success of his film opens up another tiny crack in the Iranian regime.

Posted on September 17th, 2010 at 12:43pm.

Hollywood Round-up, 9/17

By Jason Apuzzo. • I recently saw the trailer for the new Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck/Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp thriller-romance The Tourist, which also features Timothy Dalton and Paul Bettany – and I thought it looked great. Frankly, I didn’t think anybody out there made movies like this any longer (i.e., charming, Hitchcockian espionage capers with a light touch), and I’m very much looking forward to seeing it. I’m a bit concerned that the trailer gives away too much … but nonetheless I’m excited by what I see. The film looks to be what the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz Knight and Day was supposed to be but wasn’t. Jolie is obviously on a roll these days, making up for months of tabloid magazine gossip with some very solid projects. As for Depp, he still apparently feels the need to hide himself behind a bizarre exterior in order to convey whatever idiosyncratic humor he’s trying to put across. Still, I can’t fault his performances even if he’s never been my cup of tea. This looks like a film to rescue an otherwise dull fall.

• Reviews are starting to come out of Toronto on Werner Herzog’s new 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and the film just got picked up for distribution by IFC. John Carpenter is also back in the saddle directing, and his thriller The Ward also just unspooled in Toronto to mixed reviews. Poor John can’t be there, though, because he’s apparently still stuck here in LA doing jury duty – an odd fate for the director of Escape from LA.

Amber Heard of "The Ward."

• There’s a lot happening, as usual, on the sci-fi front. First let’s begin with James Cameron, who is apparently producing a new TV-series adaptation of his film True Lies. This was reported recently with great fanfare, but I’m allowed to be a little skeptical here because there are about 2,000 other Cameron-related projects that have been announced lately … so who knows? Since the original film was about fighting terrorists, I’m wondering how the storyline will be changed to fit Cameron’s new passion for indigenous resistance fighters. Anyway, Cameron has also apparently commissioned some new deep-sea explorations to the bottom of the seven-mile deep Challenger Deep (part of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific), from which he will shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated into Avatar’s sequel. [Or at least, that’s his excuse – probably so he can charge the expedition to Fox.] Cameron’s career is becoming increasingly intriguing, as he veers between Michael Moore and Jacques Cousteau. The question is: when he’s 20,000 fathoms down, will he find any beasts down there? [Inside joke.]

• In other sci-fi news, the Moscow-based alien invasion thriller The Darkest Hour has resumed shooting after a long delay precipitated by Moscow’s forest fires; more new pictures are out of Mad Men hottie January Jones in X-Men: First Class; and the director of the forthcoming indie alien invasion thriller Monsters has announced his next feature, which will apparently be “an epic human story, set in a futuristic world without humanity.” One hopes he intends that description ironically. Also: Lucasfilm has just put out a wonderful trailer for the forthcoming book by J.W. Rinzler on the making of The Empire Strikes Back. Be sure to check that out. I’m looking forward to that book more than any film this fall.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … we thought we’d take a look at Amber Heard (above), who stars in John Carpenter’s new film, The Ward, which just debuted in Toronto. The Ward is set in the 1960s, and deals with a group of five comely young women in a mental institution who attempt to outlast a lecherous ghoul who haunts the hallways. It sounds a bit like working for Letterman. Anyway, I hope she makes it!

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.

Posted on September 16th, 2010 at 3:11pm.

Model Turned Filmmaker: LFM Reviews Picture Me

By Joe Bendel. Prepare to be shocked: not only is there considerable drug use in the modeling business, some unscrupulous photographers sexually take advantage of the girls — and yes, in many cases they really are girls. Such are some of the revelations in super-ish model Sara Ziff’s video diary that she and her filmmaker boyfriend Ole Schell cut and shaped into the feature length documentary Picture Me, which opens in New York and Los Angeles this Friday immediately following the conclusion of the 2010 NY Fashion Week.

Though Ziff first started modeling at age fourteen, she really began pursuing it in earnest after graduating from high school – relatively late by modeling standards. Certainly beautiful, she seems quite successful, judging by the five and six figure checks she shows the camera. The close proximity of her supportive family is also an advantage, keeping her more or less grounded. Still, as we watch her over the course of a chaotic season, the exploitative nature of the business (even at Ziff’s rarified level) takes a toll on her.

Model, filmmaker Sara Ziff.

Ziff is probably rather bright and down-to-earth by industry standards, but that does not make her a fascinating personality on the big screen. She is, after all, a young woman in her early twenties with only a high school education.  (To her credit, she does enroll in college late in the film.) Frankly, her much less successful former roommate is a far more compelling figure. She can definitely tell a bad gig story, disturbing as it might be.

The real question is just what her freeloading b.f. did to earn his co-director, co-editor, and d.p. credits. In addition to being the subject, Ziff clearly shot much of the footage of her friends and fellow models herself. Hopefully Schell was very active in the editing bay. He certainly was not picking up any checks. In fact, some of the scenes he did indeed shoot feel almost as intrusive as the creepy lechers backstage snapping photos of the models as they change (a practice designers and agencies inexplicably tolerate, though it must violate American labor laws).

There are probably better modeling exposés available, but Picture should be sufficient to make parents think twice about allowing their daughters to pursue such a career. Even though one might expect it to have a glitzy E! sheen, Picture is a fairly dark and dingy looking affair, shot in backstage dressing rooms and crash pads on handheld consumers video cameras. Hardly glamorizing the model’s lifestyle, it shows the behind-the-scenes reality, zits and all.

It is hard to make a truly boring movie about beautiful women who are often skimpily clad. However, aside from a few insightful interviews with Ziff’s less successful colleagues, Picture is largely dependent on the sex appeal of its participants to hold audience interest. As a result, it is unlikely to make much of a lasting impression with viewers, unless they are fascinated by the modeling world to an unhealthy degree or have been stalking Ziff.  The film opens in New York and Los Angeles this Friday (9/17).

Posted on September 15th, 2010 at 1:24pm.

Hollywood ♥’s Shepard Fairey

Dreamworks "Megamind" poster to the left, Olivia Wilde ACLU ad to the right.

By Jason Apuzzo. Obama adulation in Hollywood has apparently not yet waned completely. Some are still apparently holding out hope … trying to resuscitate the dream, as its embers fade in the cold wind of Obama’s own narcissism. Note above-left the new Dreamworks Shepard Fairey-inspired poster for Megamind, with the villain depicted as an opponent of Obama-style hopefulness.

Perhaps more depressingly, since such partisan nonsense is to be expected from Dreamworks, is Tron’s Olivia Wilde (above-right) in a new Shepard Fairey-inspired ad for the ACLU. Is this the kind of activism we can expect from Ms. Wilde when Tron debuts in December, with what may be some subtle political messaging already embedded in that film?

I think it’s the smugness of these posters that bothers me most, their basic triteness, beside the fact that they feel like they’re about two years behind the times. Who is actually persuaded by this nonsense anymore – other than the young, poorly educated and easily impressionable … oh, right, that’s quite a lot of people these days. [Sigh.]

Posted on September 15th, 2010 at 10:36am.

Slackistan Gets UK Distribution

By Jason Apuzzo. As we’ve been reporting a great deal to you recently, many new filmmakers are emerging in the indie filmmaking scene who are challenging the reigning Hollywood narrative by which the Islamic world is depicted simplistically as a supine victim of American imperialism – rather than as a complex society, struggling to emerge out of punishing religious intolerance into a Westernized, middle class future. [See the Living with the Infidels web series below as an example.] A interesting example of this new wave appears to be London filmmaker Hammad Khan’s Slackistan, which Variety reports just got picked up for distribution in the UK, and which will be opening the forthcoming Raindance Film Festival.

Slacker babe from Hammad Khan's "Slackistan."

Since we obviously have a lot of new UK readers here at Libertas, we encourage you to go see the film when it’s released later this year, and come back to us with reviews. The film reminds me somewhat of a film coming out later this year here in the States called The Taqwacores, which showed at Sundance and which we’ve talked about previously here at Libertas. [Another film that comes to mind: No One Knows About Persian Cats, which showed at Cannes and which we reviewed here.] From a cultural standpoint, if you’re looking for signs of hope in the Islamic world, these films would seem to be it – although this ‘hope,’ of course, comes wrapped within the irony that young Islamic youth are becoming more like us in the West every day.

Are we happy about that? Is Fast Times at Islamabad High just around the corner? I can hardly tell whether this film is set in Pakistan or Encino.

Posted on September 15th, 2010 at 9:46am.