By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday we posted about a forthcoming web series called Red Storm that looks exciting. Today we wanted to introduce LFM readers to another forthcoming web series that’s gotten a fair bit of pre-release hype, called The Mercury Men.
The Mercury Men is a 1940s-style adventure serial about a lowly government office drone who finds himself trapped, when deadly alien visitors from the planet Mercury seize his office building and use it as a staging ground for a nefarious plot. Aided by a daring aerospace engineer from a mysterious organization known as “The League,” the office drone must stop the invaders and their doomsday device, the Gravity Engine.
• You get the sense James Cameron’s been let out of a cage, or something. Now he’s going to be directing Black Eyed Peas videos in 3D. This must be driving the studio brass at Fox nuts as they tap their fingers waiting for the Avatar 2 launch date.
• The fix is in. You’re going to like Christopher Nolan’s Inception (see here and here) … or else! Wake me when someone writes a review of this film that doesn’t look like it came out of the Warner Brothers press packet …
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … somehow I missed that actress Gloria Stuart turned 100 on the Fourth of July! Happy Birthday! Govindini and I met Gloria a few years ago at an Academy event, and I actually ran into her at a Beverly Hills post office a few years ago, as well. What a charmer. She looks phenomenal, and has that old-school Hollywood graciousness in person that is so rare nowadays. We wish her the very best.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …
By David Ross. David Mamet is our leading playwright as well as an incisive, cerebral film director. He made a splashy conversion to conservatism in 2008, publishing a hoot of an essay called “Why I am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal” in The Village Voice.
I was pleased but not surprised. All artists of real aspiration must eventually come to terms with conservatism, great art being rooted in the same values and perspectives that conservatism is rooted in – rooted in the assumption, for example, that human beings are more than automata of history, accidents of chemistry, points on a graph, sheep in need of a governmental shepherd.
I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
