By Jason Apuzzo. The first official image has come out from Paramount of Sacha Baron Cohen as a Saddam Hussein-style despot in Cohen’s forthcoming comedy, The Dictator. The official, cheeky description of this project is that it tells “the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed. It is inspired by the best selling novel, Zabibah and The King, by Saddam Hussein.” Perfect!
Cohen is very hit-and-miss to me in terms of his comedy, but he’s obviously quite talented and when he hits he’s almost at Peter Sellers’ level. Anyway, this could really be fabulous if it’s done properly …
By Joe Bendel. They were part of the Finnish Greatest Generation. In the notorious Winter War and the subsequent Continuation War, small democratic Finland went toe-to-toe with the Soviet Empire, putting the Allied forces in a difficult diplomatic position. Prominent Finnish husband and wife architects documented the physical destruction of the war and the emotional toll it caused in the letters and Super-8 films director Pia Andell edited and molded into the compelling documentary Y in Vyborg, which screens today as part of DocPoint’s tenth anniversary celebration in New York.
Ragnar Ypyä, or “Y” as he was simply known, had a bustling architectural firm in the eastern border city of Vyborg. Martta (or “Mirri”) Ypyä complimented her husband as a near perfect draftsmen. Together they raised a family and led prosperous, professionally rewarding lives, until the Soviet bombs started falling.
During the Winter War, Finland was fighting an Axis-aligned power. However, when the Continuation War began, Stalin had since joined with the Allies, while Germany provided limited support to Finland. Yet the Finns were still fighting to protect their independence and democratic system of government, while the Communist forces were still fighting a war of imperial conquest. Though Vyborg largely focuses on the personal, the grit and resolve of the Finnish people comes through forcefully. So does the constant stress and frustration expressed by the Ypyäs as they struggled with their involuntary separation and numerous privations during the war years. Continue reading The Soviet War against Finland: LFM Reviews Y in Vyborg
By Jason Apuzzo. • So the fantastic news from yesterday is that the Angelina Jolie anti-communist thriller Salt, which we loved here at LFM, is likely to get a sequel. Deadline broke the story yesterday that Sony is moving forward on the project, with Jolie returning to star and Kurt Wimmer returing to write the screenplay. It’s not clear at the moment whether Phillip Noyce will be returning to direct, which is a key issue in my opinion – as Noyce is an old pro who really guides such projects masterfully. But nonetheless this is fabulous news, as Hollywood currently now has its own full-fledged communist-hunting franchise up and running. What could be better?
As LFM readers will recall, we were very enthusiastic over this film last year, not because the film was a masterpiece, but because it represented a return to the classic, Cold War anti-communist ethos that has been missing not only from mainstream Hollywood cinema – but also from the broader culture. Salt as much as any film was the reason we began doing Cold War Updates! – although other projects like MGM’s new Red Dawn (which we’d privately seen, way in advance) or Mao’s Last Dancer contributed to this Cold War Update! series being created, as well.
As we know, the communist threat has very much shifted from West to East, with China and North Korea emerging as potent threats to America – but Salt dwells on what has always been a great subject for spy cinema, which is the threat of communist infiltration here at home. (Specifically, Salt deals with Russian communist sleeper agents here in America left over from the Cold War, who are ultimately intent on returning Russia to its Soviet past.) Nowadays one might well ask whether communists need to even bother hiding themselves, anymore … incidentally, have I ever mentioned to Libertas readers that Van Jones is an old acquaintance of mine, and of Libertas contributor David Ross? … but perhaps that’s a story for another day.
What’s even more remarkable about the Salt ‘franchise’ – if we can call it that now – is that it’s emerging without the help of Fox News, talk radio, or the conservative blogosphere, all of whom appear curiously unaware of this film – even though Jolie is easily the biggest female star in the world, besides being daughter to Jon Voight. What gives? I often hear conservatives complain about ‘films that Hollywood won’t talk about’ or films that Hollywood is somehow trying to ‘suppress’ – such as Atlas Shrugged or American Carol, or a seemingly endless parade of conserva-documentaries – but box office hits like Salt (nearly $300 million worldwide) or even superb indie dramas like Mao’s Last Dancer ($22 million worldwide) or Peter Weir’s The Way Back ($20 million worldwide) seem to now be the films conservatives themselves won’t talk about.
Why is that? Is it because they’re not made by the ‘right’ people?
Just for fun, by the way, I’d like to float an idea out there: that with Michael Bay concluding his work on the Transformers series, that the Brocollis consider giving him the Bond franchise … and Michael Fassbender the role of 007. Wouldn’t this be great? Feel free to comment below on the idea. You never know, after all, who might be reading this site.
• A boffo new trailer for the Call of Duty 3: Modern Warfare game is out, a game that will continue the Call of Duty storyline of a Russian invasion of America … this time involving Russian sponsorship of worldwide terror-attacks. The trailer is really something – absolutely epic in the scope of the villains’ all-out assault on the Western world – so be sure to check it out above.
By David Ross.In a new feature, Libertas will excavate the YouTube cave of treasures, drawing attention to certain heroes of film, music, art, and literature – and preferring as always the vintage, the homemade, and the un-co-opted. YouTube Jukebox will be an ongoing demonstration of genuine creativity – a recurrent potshot, if you will, aimed at the ventilation shaft of the Hollywood Death Star.
The D.C.-area chanteuse Eva Cassidy (1963-1996) died young of cancer, so we can enjoy her work only elegiacally and with the kind of autumnal wistfulness with which we listen to Sandy Denny (see here), a similar and even greater singer-songwriter who departed all too soon. I stumbled upon Cassidy’s epochal version of “Autumn Leaves” only because my daughter happened to be learning the song on the piano. I was stunned. Nearly seventy years after the song was written, Cassidy reinvents it and claims it utterly, much as Coltrane claims “My Favorite Things” and Hendrix claims Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” Her talent is not remotely theirs, but her desire to speak through the song is enormous and urgent. She recorded the song at Blues Alley in Washington on Jan. 2, 1996. Did she know she was dying? Perhaps she did, in which case the image of ‘autumn leaves’ is pregnant indeed.
Yves Montand debuted “Autumn Leaves” – originally called “Les Feuilles Mortes” (“The Dead Leaves”) – in Marcel Carne’s 1946 film Les Portes de La Nuit. Here Montand reprises his signature tune in the 1951 film Paris Is Always Paris. In 1947, Johnny Mercer rewrote the song in English and it has been a jazz standard ever since.
I hazard to say that nobody has ever taken the song as seriously as Eva or so fully grasped its expressive possibilities. “Autumn Leaves” was supposed to be a smoke-ring of 40s-era café sentimentality; it was never meant to have the emotional weight she gives it. Compare Eva’s life-and-death version to Montand’s unctuous crooning or to Stanley Jordan’s gymnastics on two guitars. She sings closed-eyed with the effort of permanent statement.
Thankfully, the Blues Alley concert is available on CD, though the album does not include, perhaps for copyright reasons, Eva’s fine version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” a gorgeous melody that Eva rescues from its original synth-heavy context.
LFM Co-Editor Jason Apuzzo subbed for Govindini on Lars Larson’s national radio show Friday talking about X-Men: First Class and other current releases.
Special thanks, as always, to Lars and his staff for inviting Govindini and I on. We always have fun appearing on his show.
Lars’ show is broadcast on over 200 stations nationwide, and runs at different times across the country, so to find his show be sure to check out his website here.
By Jason Apuzzo. I tend to approach comic book movies like someone working on a bomb-disposal squad: I dutifully suit up, say a fond farewell to my wife, head to the theater and pray nothing explodes in my face.
So for several months I’ve been eyeing X-Men: First Class, the latest entry in a franchise I’ve not generally liked, in hopes that this stylish-looking film – which mixes 60s spy chic, Cold War nostalgia and January Jones in a gravity-defying bustier – in hopes that the film would revive or at least agitate my interest in comic book fare.
Alas, it didn’t.
That’s not to say that X-Men: First Class doesn’t have its moments, or that the film isn’t entertaining. A film that riffs so freely and enthusiastically off James Bond films (of the Connery vintage), 60s go-go/mod culture, The Avengers, Cold War military thrillers like Ice Station Zebra, and even Dean Martin’s cheeky Matt Helm movies can’t be all bad, right? No, it certainly can’t – and X-Men: First Class is a diverting, two-hour plus voyage back into the Kennedy era, a period in which the West seemed a bit more self-confident, stylish and cohesive than it does today.
But First Class is a voyage that carries so much baggage with it – so much 2-cent teen psychology, so many embarrassingly campy characters (Beast, Banshee, and some chick who flies around like Tinkerbell with exploding saliva), and so much equivocating about the relative moral weight of America and the Soviet Union, that I’m unable to say I really enjoyed it.
And that’s a shame. You really have to work to make me not like a film of this kind. You have to do things like: suggest that America’s military establishment (along with the Soviets’) during the Kennedy era was being manipulated by a sadistic ex-Nazi … who likes to quote lines (of the “for us or against us” variety) from George W. Bush. You have to depict the CIA and America’s military high command as bumbling and incompetent at best, corrupt and ruthlessly exploitative of innocent peoples’ lives at worst.
You also have to give Kevin Bacon a major starring role. Do we still need that in 2011? I thought the 1980s had taught us better.
Everybody wears great jackets ... but what's Jennifer Lawrence staring at?
X-Men: First Class is the fifth film to mine the seemingly inexhaustible lore of the original X-Men comic book series, and it’s a film that has taken the unusual step of going all the way back to the series’ origins in the early 1960s – bravely eschewing Hollywood’s fear of losing teen audiences in period detail. It’s so easy to imagine the Fox executives to whom this film was pitched nervously asking, “Will teenagers know who the hell Kennedy was? Will we have to explain to them who the Soviets were, and why they were the bad guys? Does anybody still remember that Nazis fled to Argentina?” We tend to forget that the younger generation nowadays isn’t taught any of this stuff, and so can’t be counted on to have the same emotional response to the sight of, say, a May Day military parade in Moscow. For this reason, I applaud the makers of this film – and Brit director Matthew Vaughn, in particular – for having the ‘courage,’ if that’s the right term, to ignore conventional wisdom and trust that the glamour and romance of early 60s Cold War culture would shine through. It did. Continue reading The Cold War as Fashion Statement: LFM Reviews X-Men: First Class
