By Jason Apuzzo. Pixar has released a new trailer for Cars 2, which I’ve embedded above. I’m curious as to what people think of it.
I’m particularly interested in readers’ thoughts on Larry the Cable Guy’s ongoing performance as Mater. Here’s my question: is the ‘appeal’ of Larry the Cable Guy as a media personality real or imagined? Hollywood seems to assume Red State audiences just love this guy, that he is some sort of touchstone for middle American identity. Is that true?
Dominic Cooper as Uday Hussein in "The Devil's Double."
By Jason Apuzzo. A picture is worth a thousand words, you know? Some great new images are becoming available of of Dominic Cooper as Uday Hussein in the new film The Devil’s Double. I’ll be posting them here periodically in the run-up to the film’s release on July 29th.
For our new readers, The Devil’s Double is a new film about the mobster-like lifestyle of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday – and the moral crisis faced by his body double Latif Yahia. Both characters are played by Dominic Cooper, and the film otherwise stars French actress Ludivine Sangier as Uday’s mistress, Sarrab. The film is based on the real-life memoirs of Latif Yahia, and is directed by veteran director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, The Sopranos, Next).
The film is incredibly un-p.c. in its depiction of the notorious “Black Prince” Uday, who is portrayed in the film as a carefree, sadistic monster with a keen taste for violence and sex. As regular readers will recall, Libertas’ Joe Bendel reviewed The Devil’s Double at Sundance in January and absolutely loved it. Lionsgate will be releasing the film here in the States on July 29th.
By Jason Apuzzo. • In the time since our last Sword & Sandal Report!, trailers have been released for Immortals and also for the new version of Conan. I’ll start with the Immortals trailer. What a disappointment! As much as I love the concept of building a film around the ancient Greek hero Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur and lover of Ariadne, this Tarsem Singh take on the myth is not working for me at all based on what I’m seeing so far in the trailer … a trailer for which the term ‘derivative’ would be an understatement. About halfway through the trailer a title card reads, “From the producers of 300,” which is about as unnecessary a statement as can be imagined given how utterly identical this film looks to 300. In fact, if this film wasn’t being made by the producers of 300, I would’ve recommended they sue for copyright violation, given how close the two films are in terms of their look, styling, costuming and even color palette.
Henry Cavill as Theseus in "Immortals."
300, however, at least had a perverse/decadent sense of humor about itself, of which – thus far – Immortals seems painfully devoid. The entire Immortals trailer gives us little more than earnest speeches, slo-mo action, mugging at the camera and massed CGI armies. The dialogue sounds dreadful, featuring such chestnuts of profundity as: “To those whom much is given, much is asked.” Wow, really? I’ve never heard that line before! I thought that to those whom much is given, still more could be given – along with a free Starbucks coupon!
As for Mickey Rourke, his physical transformation into The Elephant Man seems complete, which I suppose makes him a good choice as the villain here … provided his character wasn’t wearing bronze bunny ears, and provided his mumbled dialogue was actually comprehensible, which it isn’t. And as for future Superman Henry Cavill, he does nothing for me here – and nor does Freida Pinto, who in her first big Hollywood film already seems to be taking her clothes off. That certainly didn’t take long! Welcome to L.A., young lady – you’ll fit in just fine.
In any case, I’m lowering my expectations for this film, although not to the point that I’ll avoid it altogether. (In other Immortals news, cast member Joseph Morgan discusses his role in the film here.)
• … which brings us to the new Conan the Barbarian trailer. This trailer is slightly better than the one for Immortals in that I actually understand what the story is about (“No man should live in chains …”), it has a more masculine lead (Jason Momoa), war elephants, and Rose McGowan as an insane witch. All good elements. This trailer again features too much CGI for my taste, and music that sounds a little too close to Metallica, but on the whole the film looks less annoying than Immortals. Jason Momoa as Conan is also reminding me a lot of The Rock, which is a good thing.
How will the new Conan rate against the original Schwarzenegger/Milius version? Poorly, I suspect, but it still may be entertaining. The trailer goes on a bit too long, repeating its action sequences, as if the film has little else to offer. That’s a problem. The original Conan got by on a certain amount of cheeky good-humor, based around Arnold’s over-the-top persona. Hopefully they’ve found some way to preserve some of that in this new version. Continue reading Sword & Sandal Report!: Conan, The Immortals, Hercules, Game of Thrones Rock the Pre-Modern World!
By Patricia Ducey. One day in 1967, a Palo Alto high school student asks his history teacher how the German people could have missed the signs of the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by the Nazis. This innocent question ignites an idea, and teacher Ron Jones launches a classroom “simulation,” or experiment, to illustrate how good Germans -how anyone – could fall prey to totalitarian thinking.
Forty years later, Philip Neel, one of the students who participated in that experiment dubbed The Third Wave, has produced a documentary, The Lesson Plan, featuring interviews with students who participated, and with teacher Ron Jones himself.
Jones reorganized his classroom that week into a simulation of a prototypical fascist youth group. He enforced physical discipline and uniformity in the students’ posture and speech per his first-day dictum, “Strength Through Discipline.” He meant it to end there, he now avers, but students were eager for more. He added more simplistic, effective sloganeering on the following days: strength through community, through action, through unity and finally through pride. Strength through Community meant, for instance, that students were to share grades. Top students helped the lower students. Jones was heartened by the increased level of participation of the weaker students, while he banished to the library for the remainder of the semester some more successful students – who of course resented lowering their grades so students who did not do the work could get higher grades. Similarly, anyone who spoke against The Third Wave faced a mock trial and banishment. At Jones’s urging, students secretly “informed” on other students who spoke against the Third Wave, and the car club guys appointed themselves as Jones’s bodyguards. Jones found out only at the reunion that a few of these guys beat up a student journalist who was writing a non-flattering article on The Third Wave. When an outsider student asked a Third Waver to explain what they stood for, he could not give an answer.
By Joe Bendel. Would you buy a second-hand heart from this man? Yankele Bride genuinely wants to make love connections, even for those who cannot afford to pay. Of course, the dodgy contraband in the storeroom is another question altogether. 1968 proves to be a tumultuous year for Bride and his adolescent assistant in Avi Nesher’s The Matchmaker, one of the highlights of the 2011 Israel Film Festival in New York.
Bride was literally scarred by his time in the concentration camps, yet he still believes in love. He is a realist though, telling his clients he “gets them what they need, not what they want.” Despite his many dubious enterprises, he scours the neighborhoods looking for the marginalized in need of his match-making help. That is how Arik Burstein initially encounters him. Fatefully, Burstein’s attempt at a practical joke at Bride’s expense backfires when it turns out he is a long lost classmate of his Romanian émigré father, Yossi. Before he knows it, young Burstein is working as Bride’s assistant, which largely involves trailing prospective clients to make sure they are on the up-and-up.
Although romance is Bride’s business of choice, he must settle for a close but chaste friendship with Clara, the love of his life, who remains profoundly haunted by her Holocaust experiences. In contrast, Burstein struggles against his attraction to Tamara, his best friend Benny Abadi’s sultry hippy cousin, who finds herself spending her summer with the Jewish Iraqi family.
By Patricia Ducey. If Satan were to come to Earth today, he would need a cover. I would suggest he consider that of a bureaucrat – the stony-eyed glare of the city guy who cites you for running your sprinklers half an hour early, or the DMV clerk who reduces all who cross her path to beaten dogs – those suggest a certain affinity to the Devil. But these small-timers can be fired; after all, their bosses are elected (or un-elected) by the people, and up the chain of command there remains an element of accountability. By contrast, a UN bureaucrat might be just the ticket. No accountability at all, and a steady stream of money from the gullible U.S. government and the myriad side “businesses” of its minions. Potential witnesses may fall down elevator shafts – terrible accident, that – humanitarian aid may be diverted to tyrants and their democratic enablers, but you can’t change the world overnight and think of all the good the UN does!
Larysa Kondracki’s brutal and riveting film, The Whistleblower, tells the true story of Nebraska police officer Kathryn Bolkovac, who signed on for six months as a highly paid UN peacekeeper in the 1990s and found herself in the hell on Earth that was Bosnia. Officer Bolkovac soon finds that “monitoring” human rights abuses means something less than actually “investigating” crimes or “arresting” anyone, and “peacekeeping” means mostly keeping a bribe-fed lid on the quiet barbarities that sputter-on well after the big guns stop. Continue reading Exposing UN Abuse: LFM Reviews The Whistleblower @ The Newport Beach Film Festival
