Cold War Update!: Angelina Jolie to Hunt Communists in New Salt Franchise + ‘X-Men’ Fallout and The New ‘Call of Duty’!

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?

• The next Bond film (James Bond #23) now has a UK release date of October 12th, 2012 (the U.S. release is Nov. 9th), and rumors are swirling that the next Bond girl may be Naomie Harris.

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.

You can also read this highly spoilerific summary of the game’s storyline, and you can catch some great footage of gameplay. This thing just looks superb, and quite intense. Continue reading Cold War Update!: Angelina Jolie to Hunt Communists in New Salt Franchise + ‘X-Men’ Fallout and The New ‘Call of Duty’!

LFM Presents YouTube Jukebox: Eva Cassidy

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.

Posted on June 6th, 2011 at 2:33pm.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo on Lars Larson’s National Radio Show

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.

Posted on June 6th, 2011 at 2:32pm.

The Cold War as Fashion Statement: LFM Reviews X-Men: First Class

She wears it well: January Jones as Emma Frost.

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

LFM Mini-Review: Kung Fu Panda 2

By David Ross. THE PITCH: The Kung Fu Panda is back and bulkier than ever: a blubbery accident in progress, though with some genuine kung fu mojo beginning to control the belly-led momentum that is his comic signature. Po’s antagonist is a Napoleonic peacock who plans to conquer China with the help of a fiendish new invention: canon. So it’s bear vs. bird, with the Middle Kingdom hanging in the balance.

THE SKINNY: The first KFP grossed $630,000,000 worldwide, and DreamWorks naturally declined to fiddle with a lucrative formula. The formula is entertaining enough, and nobody is likely to grumble.

WHAT WORKS:

• Pilferings from Jackie Chan. KFP II is basically a non-stop action sequence that makes hay with props and spaces in the classic Chan mode, and of course Po is a version of Chan in his semi-comic, semi-bumbling guise. Chan himself plays Master Monkey and presumably broke no bones in the process. Kids will love this mid-air mayhem, though parents may worry that the sequel is going to be called Visit to the Emergency Room.

• Pilferings from Zhang Yimou. Even more than the first film, KFP II richly imagines the look of ancient China. For kids, this orgy of Orientalism – gold-fretted pagodas, dragon-carved junks, mist-shrouded mountain pavilions – is bound to be a wonderment.

• Dustin Hoffman’s Master Shifu is a funny little addition to the Yoda lineage, a version of Chief Inspector Dreyfus driven crazy by an ursine Clouseau. Perhaps Shifu will develop a nervous tic in KFP III. Incidentally, my Taiwanese wife says that “Shifu” means “master,” so to call the character “Master Shifu” – “Master Master” – is pretty dumb.

• Angelina Jolie transcends her Tony-the-Tiger suit and ekes out a genuinely sexy performance, her throaty growl picking up where her curves leave off. Her sex appeal is inextinguishable, a constantly conserved force that shifts and inevitably manifests itself.

• The film naturally assumes that ordnance is evil, but it keeps the distracting and irrelevant sermonizing in check. The film is not the tiresome referendum on guns that it might have become. Continue reading LFM Mini-Review: Kung Fu Panda 2

Crouching Banker: LFM Reviews Empire of Silver

By Joe Bendel. Initially, the late Qing Dynasty’s new paper money is an economic boon, especially helpful facilitating transactions for the lower classes. Unfortunately, when the people come to suspect it is not fully backed by silver, it leads to bank runs. This is an ominous development for Lord Kang’s financial dynasty. Yet he will face even greater tribulations within his own family in Christina Yao’s Empire of Silver, which opens tomorrow in New York.

In 1899, the “piaohao” bankers of Shanxi were like Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe.” Lord Kang, or “Old Master” as he is often called, assumed four sons would be sufficient to ensure a safe line of succession for his venerable banking company. Of course, as a pious Buddhist deaf-mute, “First Master” never really counted. Unfortunately, when the Second and Fourth Masters are undone by calamity partly of his own making, old Kang is left with the dissolute playboy Third Master. Still, he is probably the most talented of the lot, but he has heretofore squandered his life out of resentment for his father’s Machiavellian management of family affairs. This is Third’s time to chart his ascendance, but it remains unclear whether he wishes to assume the mantle of leadership.

Needless to say, Old and Third Masters have very different management philosophies. However, his relationship to his young stepmother is even more strained. Quickly we come to understand Third and his former teacher had quite a bit of history before she became Madame Kang, which obviously explains much.

Silver is a big historical melodrama, but there is only a spot of actual fighting here and there. Still, the costumes, sets, and sweeping vistas are worthy of epics like Hero and Red Cliff. Jeremy Thomas, the producer of ambitious films like The Last Emperor, Little Buddha, and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, served as executive producer, lending Silver further prestige.

While Silver is indeed a finely crafted period production, Aaron Kwok is surprisingly flat as Third Master. Yes, his character is emotionally damaged, but at some point we should see some signs of life percolating. Still, Hao Lei largely compensates as Madame Kang with her exquisite expressiveness. Frankly it is just nice to see her working, considering she appeared in Lou Ye’s bold Tiananmen Square drama Summer Palace, which was duly banned by the Communist authorities. Silver also boasts a number of rich supporting performances, particularly Ding Zhi Cheng and Lei Zhen Yu as two rival branch managers – one talented but dangerously independent, while the other is deemed controllable by virtue of his mediocrity.

Yao revels in the classical tragedy of her story, but she periodically offers up shrewd nuggets of insight as well. It is intriguing to look at a proud family and their celebrated house of finance – increasingly destabilized by China’s mounting anarchy – but it might well be too restrained and respectable for fanboys. An engaging feature directorial debut for Yao (if not a perfect star vehicle for Kwok), Silver opens today (6/3) in New York at the AMC Empire and AMC Village 7.

Posted on June 3rd, 2011 at 1:37pm.