Day: July 27, 2010

Hollywood Round-up, 7/26-27

Jolie in Tokyo.

By Jason Apuzzo. • Angelina Jolie premiered Salt in Tokyo yesterday, as her world tour of the film continues.  I’m not trying to turn LFM into a Jolie fansite, but she’s making that awfully difficult.  [Re: the picture to the left … I’m still wondering why they couldn’t dress her like this in the film, even for one scene!]  In other Salt news, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura does an interesting interview about the film and his many other projects today.  He might be the hottest producer currently working in Hollywood.

• Did you know that Vaclav Havel is directing a film? [All he ever wanted to do was direct!]  The name of the film is Leaving, an indie production based on his stageplay of the same name.  With nods to King Lear and The Cherry Orchard, Leaving is apparently a (characteristically for Havel) witty and autobiographical story about a former chancellor of an unnamed country who’s been unceremoniously booted from his sumptuous government villa.  I’m very eager to see this once it’s completed.  Havel has always been a hero of mine, an almost inconceivably perfect mixture of intellectual and statesman, a courageous man of letters who stood up to the communists when doing so could easily have cost him his life.  Would that we had such men here in the States rather than the charlatans of both parties we currently have to put up with.

Alien invaders from "Skyline."

• How much do you care about what happened at Comic-Con?  Personally, I’m still trying to keep myself from confusing The Green Hornet with The Green Lantern.  It all seems like one, big, infantile, hyperglycemic blur – you know?  Here’s what I can tell you: the trend toward alien invasion pics is now officially out of control. Comic-Con saw presentations on Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens (Harrison Ford showed up to that panel), Battle: Los Angeles, Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming TV series Falling Skies, and the latest example of an FX-laden indie sci-fi invasion project (we’ve been talking a lot about those here lately) called Skyline (see here, here and here), that will be released by Relativity Media in December.  Oh, and if that’s not enough for you, word comes today that Bobby Glicker (I loved his Iraq/zombie short Road to Moloch – why did he pull it off Vimeo?) made a spec sci-fi trailer that Michael Bay loved (supposedly it’s a cross between Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield) … and now the project has been greenlit by Paramount as a $12 million sci-fi alien abduction feature.  And there isn’t even a script yet!  So we’re going to get that project from Paramount next year … along with J.J. Abrams’ alien movie Super 8, and the Paranormal guy’s new movie Area 51, and the alien invasion movie set in Moscow called The Darkest Hour … and why are all these alien invasion projects suddenly being done?  Is it that we feel that we’re being invaded?  Lucas and Spielberg ignited this trend with Crystal Skull, and it still hasn’t let up.

Harrison Ford at Comic-Con.

• In related Comic-Con news, Machete has a new Red Band trailer out (very gory, but funny – emphasizing Danny Trejo’s lethal abilities with machetes); a new trailer is out for 300 director Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch (so-so; too many images, too little narrative); Rihanna will be starring in the new adaptation of the Battleship boardgame; and Die Hard 5 is apparently soon to be greenlit.  Hey Bruce – will you be fighting terrorists this time?  Or is that beneath you now?  I’m hoping the title of the next film is simply Dead.

• Amanda Bynes, age 24, has now officially un-retired from acting. Even better than that, though, is the news that Carla Bruni is back before the cameras in Paris … unfortunately for the benefit of Woody Allen’s new film.  Oh, well – you can’t have it all!  It’s hard to watch anything Woody does this days without feeling that you need to take a shower afterward.

• Oliver Stone has been behaving badly lately (see here and here) – so badly that I think he’s probably cooked this time.  Unfortunately he still has several projects in the pipeline that he’ll be inflicting on us, starting with Wall Street 2.  [Sigh.]  When will the long, public nightmare of this person’s career end?

• Poor Snooki!  Over the weekend the “Jersey Shore” star got semi-blasted by The New York Times, and now even the Governor of New Jersey is condemning her show.  [She did, however, get to open the New York Stock Exchange today.]  My favorite piece of reportage about this diminutive Italian American firecracker is the great Q&A she did recently with Meghan McCain for The Daily Beast.  You’ll learn that Snooki voted for (Meghan’s father) John McCain, for example, “because he was really cute and I liked when he did his speeches.”  Here’s my other favorite exchange from that article:

Snooki: Um, I really don’t see the reason why there would be a tax on tanning, because so many people go tanning even though they’re not, like, Guido/Guidettes. People go tanning because they like to feel tan. You feel more sexy when you’re tan and I don’t understand why you would tax on that, because you’re making yourself feel more happy about yourself. So I really don’t understand why that would be, but you know, whatever.

Meghan: Got it.

Katy Perry, on the cover of her new album.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … I’m getting the distinct impression that Katy Perry is about to take over the entire planet, or something.  She seems to be everywhere.

It’s impossible to turn on the radio without hearing her and Snoop do “California Gurls,” which I now learn has 25 million views on YouTube?!  Does this mean we have to do a Teenage Dream review?  I don’t know who to ask, because I’m in my 30s.

All I can say is, if she can keep Lady Gaga out of the media for the next month, I’m all for it.

Posted on July 27th, 2010 at 10:45pm.

Rockin’ The Wall Premieres Sept. 9th at National March on D.C.

By Jason Apuzzo. Filmmaker, best-selling author and former rock drummer Larry Schweikart recently sent me the trailer (see above) for his forthcoming documentary, Rockin’ The Wall.  Rockin’ The Wall is about the liberating force of rock music for young people living behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.  The film is based in part on a segment of Larry’s book, Seven Events That Made America America.  Many of you also may remember Larry as the co-author of the #1 New York Times best seller A Patriot’s History of the United States.  [Both of these books are available in the LFM Store below.]

Rockin’ The Wall deals with how rock music served as a source of hope for young kids growing up in the communist world, and how the music subverted the grip that totalitarian regimes held over societies within the Eastern Bloc. Larry and his team interview rockers from the Cold War era, including the band Mother’s Finest – a black funk-rock band out of Atlanta who played East Berlin two weeks before the Wall came crashing down.  Also interviewed are young eastern Europeans from that era whose lives were changed irrevocably by rock music and the cracks that music opened up – literally and figuratively – in their otherwise repressive world.

One of the great details that Rockin’ The Wall apparently goes into is how the communist regimes – seeing what a powerful force rock music was among the youth – tried to co-opt the music for their own purposes.  In the Soviet Union this lead to the Russians actually creating a ‘Ministry of Rock'(!).  I’m hoping Larry has some samples from that Ministry’s music – it must be hilarious.

Rockin’ The Wall reminds me of a marvelous film from the Los Angeles Film Festival that we recently reviewed here at LFM, called Disco & Atomic War.  Disco & Atomic War is an extraordinary new Estonian documentary about the so-called ’soft power’ influence of American and Western culture on the minds of Soviet citizens living in Estonia during the Cold War, who were able through clever means to watch Finnish television broadcasts emanating from just over the border.  As Disco informs us (in amusing detail), American popular culture – especially in the form of glamorous TV shows like “Dallas,” or movies like Star Wars and even Emmanuelle – was deeply feared by Soviet authorities due to the ideas and expectations such programming planted in the minds of Soviet citizens.  This led to amusing co-optings, such as the Soviets creating their own officially sanctioned disco instruction course for TV (shades of the ‘Ministry of Rock’?).

You can read the LFM review of Disco and Atomic War from the LA Film Festival, and also read LFM Contributor Joe Bendel’s review of the film from yesterday.

Rockin’ the Wall premieres in Washington, D.C. on September 9, at the national Tea Party “March on D.C.” event. You can also pre-order the DVD here, and follow the film on Facebook here.  We wish Larry and his creative team the best with this project.

Posted on July 27th, 2010 at 11:49am.

Arguing the World and ‘Neo-Conservatism’

Irving Kristol in 1976.

By David Ross. The word “neo-conservatism” suffered a wild and unfortunate distortion during the last nine years, coming to mean something like “the neo-fascist philosophy of George W. Bush and his Satanic cohort,” or even more simply, “the wicked tendency to invade other countries.”

Given this slippage of meaning, I cannot recommend highly enough Joseph Dorman’s documentary Arguing the World (1998), which provides a thoughtful and accurate account of neo-conservatism as it traces the careers of literary critic Irving Howe, political thinker Irving Kristol (father of Bill), Columbia/Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, and Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer. The story will be familiar to conservatives who know their own lineage: bookish, Jewish New Yorkers arrive at City College; fall under the spell of Trotsky; revolt against the murderous tyranny of Stalin; begin to qualify their leftism; cast their lot with the high modernism of Partisan Review; found Commentary; begin to take seriously the Soviet threat; increasingly recognize the perverse incentives and disincentives created by LBJ’s Great Society; recoil from the brainless nonsense of the counter-culture; begin creating the intellectual foundations of modern conservatism in a series of groundbreaking books and articles; preside over conservatism’s return to power on the back of their own ideas.

While remaining strictly neutral and objective, Arguing the World explains these weighty developments in American political and intellectual history and rescues an important tradition from cartoonish caricature.

Posted on July 27th, 2010 at 10:11am.