Day: August 9, 2010

Who Needs Movie Stars? I Do!

By Jennifer Baldwin. It’s August and that means Stars. Movie Stars. August is the month when TCM airs its annual “Summer Under the Stars” festival — 31 days of movie stars — with each day devoted to the films of a different star. This year’s schedule includes days devoted to Basil Rathbone, Norma Shearer, Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Olivia De Havilland, Clint Eastwood, John Gilbert, Warren Beatty, Thelma Todd, and many more. Thanks to “Summer Under the Stars,” August has become a month that classic movie fans can’t help but love.

But why do we love it? First of all, we love the posters. Seriously, TCM does a phenomenal job with their advertising when it comes to the “Summer Under the Stars.” Last year’s promotional art posters were so good, in fact, that I wish TCM had sold them as full-sized glossy posters that I could put on my wall. This year, graphic artist Michael Schwab has designed eye-popping silhouettes for each of the thirty-one stars.

Why else do we love the “Summer Under the Stars”? Well, there’s the chance to see films rarely shown on TCM. When you’ve got twenty-four hours devoted to say, the films of John Gilbert, there’s bound to be a lot of movies that don’t normally make the TCM rotation. This year’s rarities include films starring Gilbert, Thelma Todd, and Woody Strode. Also, days devoted to Gene Tierney, Julie Christie, Ann Sheridan, Bob Hope, Kathryn Grayson, Lee Remick, and Robert Ryan offer the opportunity to dig a little deeper into the filmographies of stars who don’t get as much play as some of the perennial heavy hitters like Flynn, Bergman, and Hepburn.

But beyond the promotional art, and the rare films, the biggest reason we love the “Summer Under the Stars” is because we love the stars themselves. Sure, TCM shows a Katharine Hepburn movie at least once a week (and that’s on a slow week), but there’s something about watching an entire day’s worth of her films (or Errol Flynn’s, or Paul Newman’s, or Ingrid Bergman’s) that’s just… special. A big part of loving old movies means loving old movie stars.

That’s why I’m distressed to see a few articles on the web recently claim we don’t need movie stars anymore (and even more radically, that we never really needed them in the first place). Sure, the annual “Are Movie Stars Dead?” article is as predictable as the old “Did Jaws and Star Wars Kill the Movies” article. But this new trend – to not just lament the death of movie stars but to say “good riddance” as well – is a bit disturbing. Who are these people who think that movies don’t need movie stars?

It’s an idea that’s utterly foreign to me. I got into old movies because of the movie stars. I wouldn’t have become the crazy, obsessive classic movie fanatic that I am today if it hadn’t been for the movie stars I came to love. I was first introduced to old movies by my mom: folding laundry with her on the couch, a rainy Saturday afternoon, an old Hitchcock film or 1940s romance on the TV. I enjoyed these old movies well enough, but they didn’t mean all that much to me. I hadn’t fallen in love with them yet. Continue reading Who Needs Movie Stars? I Do!

Hollywood Round-up, 8/10

The great Patricia Neal.
The great Patricia Neal.

By Jason Apuzzo. • Patricia Neal has passed away, at age 84. What a great star she was.  I actually just saw her recently on the big screen at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, where they were showing The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Patricia Neal appeared in so many of my favorite films, including In Harm’s Way, The Fountainhead, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Face in the Crowd, Operation Pacific and on and on … and of course, everybody remembers her (rightly) for Hud.  Neal had the same kind of urbane, sexy, flinty-yet-romantic persona that Betty Bacall had in her prime, and she will be deeply missed.

We don’t have women nowadays on film, so much as overgrown girls.  Neal and Bacall are arguably the last of their kind.

• We’ve been talking a lot about science fiction here lately, and now some interesting news comes out today from George Lucas about the ultimate sci-fi franchise: Star Wars.  Apparently work on the much-anticipated live action Star Wars TV series has ground to a halt due to challenges associated with the sheer scale of the series.

According to George:

The live action TV show is kind of on hold because we have scripts, but we don’t know how to do them.  They literally are Star Wars, only we’re going to have to try to do them at a tenth the cost. And it’s a huge challenge, a lot bigger than what we thought it was gonna be.

On the one hand this is disappointing, because this is a series that a lot of us have been looking forward to.  On the other hand, I’m glad that they’re being ambitious with the storyline.  Knowing the way the folks at Lucasfilm are, they will probably be developing an innovative new palette of technologies in order to make this series affordable.  We’ll be watching this story as it develops in months to come.

Alien babe Laura Vandervoort from "V."

• In other sci-fi related news, James Cameron talks to MTV about the future of the Avatar series (he’s working on the Avatar novel right now, and may shoot Avatar 2-3 back-to-back; it’s extraordinary to me that he believes the fans of Avatar actually read); the indie sci-fi invasion film Skyline has a new teaser website; Cloverfield director Matt Reeves says Cloverfield 2 is still a possibility (the first film had strong 9/11 overtones, incidentally, and was one of the first films – along with Indy 4 – to kick off the latest alien craze); the alien invasion thriller The Darkest Hour has had its shooting shut down due to ongoing fires outside Moscow; and there’s some fun casting news today concerning the ongoing alien invasion series V.

I can hardly believe that in my recent writings about the new wave of alien invasion films/TV shows, I actually forgot to mention V! One of the reasons this is such a glaring omission is that V (both in the original and the new miniseries) manages to harness the alien invasion theme to political commentary about America’s potential drift toward authoritarianism.  I’ve actually read Kenneth Johnson’s 2008 V novel, which could not be more obvious in its criticism of current trends in liberal governance.  (The novel even features a hilarious, narcissistic San Francisco mayor based quite blatantly on Gavin Newsom … who has an affair with a Beyoncé look-alike.)    I haven’t seen much of the new TV series – which was thought by many to offer a sub rosa critique of the Obama Administration – but the series seems to depart rather dramatically from the novel in its plotline, and appears to be more along the lines of a straight-forward reboot of the original TV show.

In any case, these trends in sci-fi continue, and we’ll be keeping an eye on them here at LFM … especially when the new season of V revs up later this year.  Btw, if more aliens looked like Laura Vandervoort, would we really mind being devoured by them?

• The Other Guys won top honors at the box office this past weekend. There was recently a debate over whether The Other Guys offers a critique of Wall Street crony capitalism.  Unfortunately the price of my entry into this debate is too high: namely, having to actually see the film.

• Recently freed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi will be on the jury for the forthcoming Venice Film Festival, which is very good news.  I’m wondering what he’ll think of The Black Swan.  Talk about a film that couldn’t be made in Iran …

Murder by shoe. OMG!

• Are we tapped out on superhero movies? [Answer: yes.]  That’s the question asked in the LA Times, ironically enough, by the director of the forthcoming X-Men: First Class.  [This is the one featuring Jennifer Stewart as Mystique, btw.]  Whether we are or aren’t, of course, we’re going to get more such films thrown at us.  Today comes news that Green Lantern 2 already has a screenwriter, and Batman 3 may be shooting extensively in New Orleans.  In related not-so-super hero news, Tom Cruise is going to be taking a paycut for Mission: Impossible 4, and Ving Rhames has confirmed his participation in that film, as well.  Yawn.

• There’s a new poster out for Piranha 3D.  Yummy.

• There are some fun pictures out today of Rachel Zoe, riffing off her endless repetition of the phrase “I die.” Click on over to Harper’s Bazaar for more.  LFM is, like, absolutely beyond being in favor of The Rachel Zoe Project.

• DAILY PSYCHO REPORT: The new Maggie Thatcher biopic with Meryl Streep is apparently going to be a full-on, unvarnished hit job on The Iron Lady, exploiting even her recent dementia … and I’m totally disgusted with Streep and her participation in what appears to be an ugly, nakedly propagandistic project.  I can only assume Streep has no conscience whatsoever, and like so many recent celebrities is simply surrendering her career – now that it’s on the down side – to tendentious partisan hackery.

The fabulous Carla Bruni.

Somewhat related, Keith Olbermann is apparently out of NBC’s Football Night in America (hooray!) … ironic in that he’s been forced into retirement sooner than Brett Favre; the Wachowski brothers’ bizarre new Iraq war project will apparently be titled Cobalt Neutral 9; and Spike Lee is now peddling more conspiracy theories … this time about the BP oil spill.  Personally I think all the oil from that spill’s been channelled into Adrian Grenier’s hair.  Which reminds me, there will probably be an Entourage movie once that series is over.

• The great Debbie Reynolds has been cast as Katherine Heigl’s grandmother in One For the Money, in which Heigl will be playing … a bounty hunter.  [Sigh.]  Is Heigl choosing her roles by way of a Ouija board these days?

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Carla Bruni has been offered a role on CSI, which would be just about the only reason to watch that show, nowadays.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on August 9th, 2010 at 2:40pm.

DocuWeeks LA: LFM Reviews My Perestroika & Summer Pasture

By Joe Bendel. Probably no division of the Academy Awards has more byzantine rules than the documentary wing.  Their mandated seven day theatrical runs in both New York and Los Angeles can be difficult hurdles for nonfiction filmmakers to clear.  However, every selection of the 2010 DocuWeeks will be officially Oscar eligible once they finish their week long runs at the ArcLight and IFC Film Centers.  As is seemingly the case with every documentary series, this year’s DocuWeeks is a mixed bag, but two films in particular offer intriguingly intimate glimpses into lives of ordinary individuals living a world away from the arthouse cinema scene.

Even though he was badly hung-over, he knew there was a national crisis.  Though the bleary-eyed Russian did not know at the time the hard-line Communist coup had deposed Mikhail Gorbachev, he saw that Swan Lake was the only program on television.  For some reason, the Soviets always broadcasted the Tchaikovsky ballet during periods of internal turmoil.  It is telling details like this that connect the personal to the grandly historical in Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika, which screened earlier this year at New Directors/New Films.

A Russophile in high school, Hessman was working for LENFILM, the Soviet film agency based in what was then Leningrad, at the time of the infamous coup.  Through her time working and studying in Russia, Hessman developed a keen appreciation for the stoic nobility of average Russian citizens, which is clearly reflected in Perestroika.  Using five former classmates as representative everymen, Hessman subjectively presents the last forty-some years of Russian and Soviet history through their reminiscences and home movies.

Yes, there is a certain nostalgia for their childhood years lived under the yoke of Soviet tyranny.  However, they are really wistful for their lost innocence rather than the supposed virtues of the Brezhnev era.  As becomes clear in their interviews, as the Perestroika generation came of age, it also became quickly disillusioned.

Still, not all of the film’s lead voices are doing badly.  An entrepreneur with a small chain of high-end men’s clothing stores, Andrei has done quite well for himself.  He is also the most vocal critic of the current Putin regime.  While none of the five have led exceptional lives, Hessman had the good fortune to find participants who had been somewhat in the vicinity of great events.  Indeed, the experiences of Perestroika’s subjects defy easy classification, at various times lending credence to wide array of political interpretations (though it is hard to find much in the film to justify any faith in Putin’s puppet government).

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Tibet is also changing drastically, which is exactly what China wants.  For instance, it has become increasingly difficult for Tibetans not fluent in Chinese to conduct business transactions.  Such are the challenges facing a young nomadic family in Tibet’s eastern Kham region as presented in Summer Pastures, an intimate new documentary from Lynn True and Nelson Walker (with co-director Tsering Perlo), also currently screening as part of DocuWeeks LA.

In many ways, Locho and Yama are much like any other parents you would find anywhere else on Earth.  Their greatest hope is for their daughter to have greater opportunities in her life than have been available for them.  However, their daily chores are far removed from those western audiences will be familiar with, including the daily spreading and drying of manure for fuel that starts Yama’s daily routine.  It is a hardscrabble life, but it is what they have always known.

Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the nomads’ way of life will be sustainable much longer.  Inflation constantly drives up the price of their supplies, while they seem to have less to show for their labors.  Adding further uncertainty, Yama suffers from a persistent heart ailment, yet she keeps working like an ox – in contrast to Locho, who often seems like an overgrown kid herding their livestock.

Even in their remote corner of Tibet, Locho and Yama feel the impact of great macro forces.  However, True and Walker focus their sites on their deeply personal family drama, (somewhat timidly avoiding the occupying Chinese elephant in the room).  Yet by conveying such a strong sense of the nomadic couple’s personalities and relationship dynamics, Pasture will have most viewers rooting for this family as the film unfolds.

Pasture forgoes filmmaker commentary, instead capturing the nomads’ lives unfiltered, in a style not incompatible with that of Digital Generation Chinese independent filmmakers.  Though it requires some patience, it is certainly rewarding to meet Yama and Locho, whose spirit and resiliency the filmmakers capture quite vividly.  Both Pasture and Perestroika are difficult films to pigeon hole, but they have more merit than most docs released this year.  They are currently screening in Los Angeles, as DocuWeeks continues at the ArcLight.

Posted on August 9th, 2010 at 9:32am.