Month: May 2010

Why Fire Megan?

A woman scorned.

By Jason Apuzzo.  I’m a little confused by this whole Megan Fox thing.

As many of you may know, Transformers star/sexpot Megan Fox was essentially fired from the next Transformers film by director Michael Bay this past week (see here) – although some reports now indicate that the comely Ms. Fox may actually have walked away from the project on her own pair of highly photogenic legs.

The reason behind the firing supposedly has to do with how difficult Ms. Fox is to work with, how she can’t get along with the crew, that she’s late, generally bitchy to borderline psychotic, that she tattoos herself (making things difficult for the makeup people), she doesn’t show up to crew parties, she’s annoyed by Middle America, she once blew off the Crown Prince of Jordan … and that she once referred to Michael Bay as Hitler.

Except for the Hitler thing, I’m not sure which of these qualities hasn’t been assigned to Angelina Jolie – but I digress.

Now here’s the thing.  Transformers is Michael Bay’s franchise.  He can do whatever he damn well pleases with it.  But my question is this: when did the behavior of Hollywood stars suddenly matter, to the degree that it cost them roles and careers?  When was the memo sent out on this, because some of us didn’t get it.  Why is it that all of a sudden it matters how stars behave?  For those of us who’ve been watching Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn and George Clooney lurch from one bizarre, histrionic episode to another over the years, this is really something new.

Let me put this another way.  Why was it OK for years in Hollywood to call Bush Hitler, but not Michael Bay? Why is it suddenly so important that a Hollywood star watch what she says, and how she acts around others?

Sin on high heels.

Or is it just that you can’t offend the wrong people.

I personally couldn’t care less about the future – or past – of the Transformers series.  I’m not really interested in ‘autocons’ or ‘decepticons’ or ‘paleocons’ or whatever pseudo-mythology Michael Bay and Hasbro are currently peddling.  The only reason I would ever watch these films would be to watch Megan Fox, actually.

And that’s where I think Bay is making a big mistake here.  I’m sure Bay’s people have a million Victoria’s Secret models on speed-dial that they can call on for the next film; or they can go with the chick from Prince of Persia, as some are reporting.  Whatever.

Ms. Fox is different, frankly.  She has the sort of wicked, carnal appeal – and brazen arrogance – that make her highly appealing to men, and very compelling in front of a camera.  I’m not really talking about acting here, obviously – I’m talking about something ineffable that we usually term ‘star power.’  She’s got it.  And you don’t throw that away lightly.  Industrial Light and Magic, as talented as they are, have no software that can replace that – regardless of what they have planned for the next Transformers.

From everything I’ve seen, Ms. Fox appears brassy, difficult, cocky, probably a little bit crazy … and you know what?  Men love that.  They absolutely eat it up.  And they have since the beginning of time.

What the hell happened to Hollywood that they no longer understand that?

Review: The Infidel

Omid Djalili as "The Infidel."

By Jason Apuzzo. A few weeks ago I was approached by a persistent if strangely insensate census worker who wanted to know what ethnic category I fell into.  Presented with a palate of government-approved options, I found myself falling into what is no doubt the least sexy category of all – that of a generic ‘white’ person, even though my heritage (as far back as I’m aware) represents a vast and colorful mosaic of southern, central and eastern Europe.

To be frank, I felt a little disappointed.  I’d assumed that since the last census in which I’d participated 10 years ago, things would’ve improved a bit.  I thought there would’ve been some kind of category for gringos like me, so that the exercise of participating in the census would somehow be less tedious.  Imagine, I thought, how exciting it would be to be, say, part Thai and part Alaskan – you’d have several boxes to fill out.  That would be exciting.

Omid Djalili’s absolutely hilarious new film The Infidel (see the trailer here) presents a different kind of anxiety from the one I faced: that of the man whose ethnic identity literally makes him a marked man.  The Infidel (which recently showed at The Tribeca Film Festival and in theaters, and is available for download below) stars the antic, Rabelasian actor-comedian Djalili as a British Muslim named Mahmud who learns by accident that he was actually born Jewish.  The revelation of his Judaism, striking as it is to him, would not be so much of an issue if it weren’t for the fact that his daughter is about to marry the stepson of a radical imam from Pakistan who preaches jihad against the infidel … and that’s really when the hijinks begin.

Some wholesome friends of the Imam.

The Infidel is essentially a fish-out-of-water comedy in which a guy who believes himself to be a modern, liberal Muslim is faced with the reality of having to suddenly (and covertly) integrate into the Jewish world … while trying to retain his street-cred as a Muslim.  Does this sound rife with comic possibilities?  It is – and Infidel screenwriter David Baddiel and director Josh Appignanesi exploit every one of them.

Mahmud’s guide on his journey back to Judaism – Mahmud’s real name is ‘Solly Shimshillewitz’ – is a Jewish cabbie named Lenny, played with droll, understated humor by veteran TV star Richard Schiff (The West Wing). Lenny does his best to give Mahmud a crash-course in Judaism, a course which includes such ‘essential’ Jewish activities as: learning how to dance like Topol, how to say Oy vey! with the proper shoulder-shrug … and telling a Barbra Streisand joke at a bar-mitzvah.  Watching Mahmud, the pseudo-devout Muslim, struggle trying to perform these ‘basic tasks’ provides some of the biggest laughs of the film.  My favorite moment in Mahmud’s training is when Lenny sits him down to listen to a sad dirge by Mendelssohn.  Lenny says of the music: “Doesn’t it make you want to put all your possessions in a wooden cart and slowly, sadly pull them away from your burning village?”

Ethnic humor of the kind that fueled My Big Fat Greek Wedding some years ago is basically what fuels The Infidel – but one senses that the stakes in this film are much, much higher than in Nia Vardalos’ delightful comedy.  The inability of certain radicalized sectors of Islamic society to reconcile themselves to the modern world is largely what’s causing so many problems nowadays … and it’s precisely the intransigence of imam’s like the one depicted in The Infidel (played with silky menace by Yigal Naor) that is destroying relations between the Islamic east and democratic west right now. Continue reading Review: The Infidel

Loving The Cold War Lifestyle: “A Kiss From Tokyo”

[Editor’s Note: those of us here at LFM tend to love the ‘Cold War lifestyle’ – the spies, the bikinis, the shiny orbiting satellites and dry martinis.  This is the first of an occasional series from LFM contributor Steve Greaves taking us back to that altogether tastier era.]

By Steve Greaves. Your mission, should you accept to view it:

“A Kiss From Tokyo”, Theatrical Trailer (1964) – Yuki 7 dashes around the world in hot pursuit of the tantalizingly tricky Diamond Eye, who is stealing parts and plans and leaving behind a path of murdered scientists in her quest to build a missile inside her volcanic lair …

OK, it’s not really from 1964, but is in fact vintage today.

I had the pleasure of seeing this faux-trailer and meeting Yuki 7 creator and artist Kevin Dart late last year. His work and more from the Fleet Street Scandal art duo opened at the very ginchy Nucleus Gallery in not-too-scenic Alhambra, CA.

As a lover of all things mid-century and of spy-dom in particular, what can I say about the Yuki 7 trailer?  It’s stylistically satisfying at every level.  Hits all the vital notes needed to evoke the world of Bond and far beyond.

The Japanese elements throughout all the Yuki 7 art make for an ultra-hip edge, since so much film and design of that period was reflected in Asian cop and spy films, which often out-did more accessible American and British spy fare in terms of cheesy melodrama, space-age sets and generally self-conscious kitsch factor – call it the Gojira quotient.

Japanese G-men in boxy sedans and construction-helmeted henchmen guarding missile silos abounded then – as they do here – in the savvy Mr. Dart’s (along with co-director Stephane Coedel) motion picture equivalent of his devastatingly cool Yuki 7 film posters … all of which are for fictitious action-girl spy films I would watch if they existed.

’64 is the perfect year to tie this concept to, when brims were extra stingy and the whole cold war spy phenomenon was just beginning to gel as it’s own entertainment genre – separate and distinct from earlier gumshoe and cop fare that lacked the visual possibilities afforded by easy international travel by jet and the booming space age.

So check the ‘trailer’ out above … I can’t wait for the sequel.

Classic Movie Update, 5/23

John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey and the cast of "The Alamo."

By Jason Apuzzo. Those of you who remember the old version of Libertas remember how important classic movies are to us here. This week we introduced a new series to LFM called ‘Classic Cinema Obsession‘; but we’ll also be keeping you up-to-date on classic movie news each week.

• There’s a 50th anniversary benefit screening of The Alamo this week at John Wayne’s birthplace, with Wayne’s daughter Aissa in attendance.  The benefit event, a fundraiser for the John Wayne Birthplace Museum and Learning Center, takes place over 2 days – May 28th and 29th.  Wayne directed The Alamo himself (with spot 2nd unit direction from John Ford) – a huge, sprawling and satisfying epic, featuring an extraordinary musical score by Dmitri Tiomkin – and The Duke considered it his most important film.  Wayne considered the film a parable of America’s place in the world as the lone outpost of freedom.  The Alamo famously went up against Kirk Douglas’ left-leaning Spartacus at the 1960 Academy Awards … with both films ultimately losing to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.  If you’re anywhere near Wayne’s birthplace of Winterset, Iowa, you should certainly catch this wonderful-looking event – and feel free to purchase your own copy of The Alamo in the LFM Store below.

• In related news, The Criterion Collection has just put out a new, restored version of the John Wayne/John Ford Classic Stagecoach on DVD and Blu-Ray.  You can buy this version in the LFM store above.

Anna Karina in Godard's "Vivre sa Vie."

• I’m obsessed with Godard and his films, so I was thrilled this past week to learn that one of the few Godard classics I haven’t seen, Vivre Sa Vie, also just received the Criterion DVD/Blu-Ray treatment.  You can read a review of this new disk here. As a side note, Richard Brody’s marvelous biography of Godard, Everything is Cinema, has just been released in paperback. It’s the definitive biography of one of Europe’s most visionary and mercurial filmmakers of the past 40 years, so check out both Vivre sa Vie and Everything is Cinema in our store above.

• I recently had the pleasure of reading Michael Sragow’s wonderful biography, Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master.  If there is a forgotten man in the history of cinema, it’s clearly Fleming.  All Fleming did was direct Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (in the same year, Hollywood’s Annus mirabilis of 1939), while shaping the careers of such stars as Clark Gable, Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, Clara Bow, Douglas Fairbanks – in countless box-office smashes like Red Dust, Captains Courageous, Bombshell, The Virginian, The Rough Riders … where does one begin?

Jean Harlow, in Victor Fleming's "Bombshell."

Sragow’s meticulously researched book challenged my assumption that John Ford, Frank Capra and Howard Hawks were the undisputed masters of mid-century American movies.  I now have the sense that Fleming may have been the greatest of them all.  Fleming was absolutely instrumental in developing the ‘man’s-man,’ Hemingway-esque persona of such stars as Fairbanks, Gable and Cooper – yet he was a gifted director of women as well … something aided by the fact that he was also one of Hollywood’s reigning lotharios (i.e., he knew his subject).

I will likely do a full review of Sragow’s biography down the line, but let me simply remind everyone out there who’s so impressed with Avatar‘s box office total that Fleming’s Gone With the Wind in 2010 dollars would have grossed $1.6 billion domestically.  And this was by no means unusual for Fleming’s career; Fleming produced box-office smash after box-office smash – big, emotional, humanistic films that were popular around the world to a degree unrivaled except when speaking of Walt Disney’s films.  Disney, Cecil DeMille and possibly Steven Spielberg are Fleming’s only rivals in terms of producing huge popular hits over a long period of time.  [Funny footnote: Fleming urged Louis Mayer to sign the unknown Disney when Disney was shopping his “Steamboat Willy”/Mickey Mouse series around Hollywood; Mayer refused, thinking American housewives would never enjoy watching a rodent on screen.]

How compelling and emotional and universal was the appeal of Fleming’s filmmaking?  It’s said that Stalin himself wept when he saw Fleming’s The Great Waltz, and refused to give-out medals to Soviet directors until they could match Fleming’s style.   [Oh … and did I mention that Fleming was an ardent anti-communist?] Continue reading Classic Movie Update, 5/23

On David Lynch’s Inland Empire

David Lynch

By David Ross. By pure chance, I recently happened upon Michael Atkinson’s discussion of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). I was struck by Atkinson’s antic way with words and by his nimble intelligence, so much so that I checked for Atkinson on Wikipedia. He’s made a name for himself as a novelist and poet, as it turns out. I further discovered that he has a blog with much the same air of acuity. Among other things, Atkinson offers his list of the fifty top films of the decade (in order no less – no wimpy relativism there).

Atkinson is right to observe that the organizing principle of Inland Empire is not psychological, in this respect differing from Bergman’s Persona (1966) and most other experiments in pure cinema.  But he seems to imply that the film’s dissociative chaos has no unifying principle or organizing logic, and that the search for codes and readings is a kind of category mistake. Atkinson comes closest to the mark when he observes that Inland Empire is purely a movie and nothing else. It strikes me that the film’s organizing principle is cinematic possibility, and that we witness, in essence, a kaleidoscope of set-pieces involving sub-genres of screen gothic (Southern gothic in the traditional sense, mean street gothic, mafia gothic, redneck gothic), though none are fully realized or contextualized. Continue reading On David Lynch’s Inland Empire

The 30th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of The Empire Strikes Back.  Along with 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, Empire is very likely the greatest movie sequel ever made.  Our congratulations to everyone involved who made that marvelous picture possible, and in particular to director Irvin Kershner.

Although it’s difficult to appreciate today, the film took several enormous risks – among which were: 1) George Lucas putting up all of his own money to get the film made (only an emergency bank loan saved the picture after the production dragged on for months); 2) basing so much of the film around an untested character named Yoda, brought to life as a rubber puppet; 3) the film’s dark tone; 4) the most whopping end-of-film revelation in movie history.

I have a very distinct memory of seeing Empire in a theater when I was 9 years old.  I was in a theater in Redondo Beach, near the present-day Redondo Galleria.  I recall being thunderstruck at the revelation that Luke’s father was Darth Vader – to such a degree that I was actually a bit skeptical.  [Vader must be lying!  How could it be true?]  But the overall effect of the film was so powerful that at the end, as the credits rolled, a grown man sitting in front of me shot up out of his chair and cheered.  You always hear about that sort of thing happening, but rarely ever see it.  The sense in the theater was that the film was so good, nobody wanted to leave!  I actually thought for a second that the theater was going to be barricaded so the next audience couldn’t come in.  [We did, eventually, let people in.]  I’m not sure I’ve ever had that experience since.

On a personal note, I’d like to congratulate Empire‘s director, Irvin Kershner.  I’m one of the many filmmakers whom Kersh has mentored over the years, and am proud to call Kersh a friend.  Kersh has had an extraordinary career both as a director of huge franchise pictures (he’s the only person to have directed both a “Star Wars” and James Bond film), and also some wonderful indie gems (my favorite is probably Hoodlum Priest).  Kersh has touched so many lives, and has had such an extraordinary legacy among filmmakers – and on this day I just want to thank him and wish him the very best.

Needless to say, they’re not making large-scale films of this quality any more.  The factors that make Empire work so well are not so much the visual effects – as wonderful as they were – but the psychology of the film, the interactions of the characters.  One thinks here not only of Luke’s relationship with his father – but  also the budding, sparkling romance between Han and Leia, and Yoda’s tumultuous training of Luke as the last remaining Jedi.  There’s something refreshingly adult and mature about this film.

It’s debatable, I think, whether Empire is actually a better film than the original Star Wars as so many critics say.  Star Wars was so fresh and original – and came out of nowhere – and its purpose and tone are different.  But no sequel has enlarged and deepened a film series, and taken such risks, like Empire did.

As a final note, I’m very much looking forward to J.W. Rinzler’s forthcoming book, The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.  You can pre-order Rinzler’s book through LFM by clicking on the link below.  Rinzler’s previous Making of Star Wars was a marvelous read; I had no idea what a harrowing production that film was, and what George had to do to get the film made.  I’m looking forward to learning more about the huge effort associated with getting Empire made, and about the true origins of Boba Fett …