Day: August 30, 2010

Hollywood Round-up, 8/30

"Mad Men" star Jon Hamm (Don Draper) at the Emmys.

By Jason Apuzzo. • You couldn’t ask for a better weekend: Mad Men pulled off a rare 3-peat, winning the Best Drama Emmy for the third consecutive year, while James Cameron’s Avatar: Special Edition tanked at the box office, finishing at the #12 spot. Making this failure all the more delicious is the fact that Avatar finished behind Piranha 3D (at #11), even after Cameron recently bad-mouthed Piranha 3D (“[E]xactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s”) … even going so far as to distance himself – unconvincingly, I might add – from having directed the Piranha 2: The Spawning!

Hey, Jim, what really “cheapens the medium” is the political propagandizing you’re doing in Avatar.

• We’re apparently about to get a huge, heaping dose of World War II action coming our way because Warner Brothers has apparently greenlit a $200 million 3D Battle of Midway film, and John Woo’s Flying Tigers movie will indeed be going forward in the IMAX format, as we previously reported. We look forward to both projects.

• On the 3D front by the way, the great Werner Herzog has apparently just done a 3D documentary on the Chauvet cave paintings of southern France, called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I’m really looking forward this – I hope there’s an LA screening in the near future. What a perfect use for the 3D medium.

• If Machete isn’t enough for you … there appears to be a new genre forming: alien invasion movies set on the border … about illegal aliens of the extraterrestrial variety! Go figure. We’ve reported previously on Monsters (see an intriguing new production still for that here), and now comes the new Mexican alien invasion thriller, Seres: Genesis. The Hollywood Reporter has the new trailer for it here. Are we starting to reach the shark-jumping point in this burgeoning alien invasion genre?

The girls of "Mad Men" at The Emmys.

In related sci-fi news, there’s an interesting new rumor out about the storyline for the J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg alien invasion thriller, Super 8. According to Dark Horizons, the story for the film “revolves around a 14-year-old boy growing up in a steel town in 1979 where a train crash forces the town to come together.” The weblink from which Dark Horizons discovered this information has mysteriously vanished …

• In other random news and notes, YouTube is apparently investigating the idea of doing pay-per-view movie downloads (they’re actually already doing this for some indie projects); available for free right now on YouTube, however, is a new documentary that follows Taliban fighters as they clash with U.S. forces (why is YouTube hosting this?); and speaking of getting things for free, William Hurt will be playing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in HBO’s new movie Too Big to Fail about the 2008 financial crisis.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … wags at the LA Times ask today whether Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks (along with TV’s Sofia Vergara, and a few other gals) more or less made the case at the Emmys for 3D TVs. Answer: yes.

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

Posted on August 30th, 2010 at 2:32pm.

Jessica Alba on Machete: “I love the political message.”


Jessica Alba & Michelle Rodriguez talk Machete.

By Jason Apuzzo. Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez recently sat down for an interview with ComingSoon.net about their participation in Robert Rodriguez’s new film, Machete.

Here’s Alba, speaking about the film:

“I love the political message.  I love the exploitative platform to kind of talk about something that I feel is so relevant.  It’s been something that’s been ripe in the Latino community for a long time.”

I love the exploitative platform? I hope what she means by that is the fact that Machete is basically a 70s-style, exploitation-film knock-off … not that she loves ‘exploiting’ the platform of the cinema. [Sigh.]

In any case, ‘exploiting’ seems to be what Robert Rodriguez is doing with this film.  As we reported to you on Friday, there are some extraordinary new details we’re learning about what’s in Machete, including this tidbit from The Hollywood Reporter:

Among “Machete’s” more provocative elements are border vigilantes led by Don Johnson as a kind of avatar for Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and fake political ads for an incumbent senator whose platform is built on his “hard line against wetbacks” and a description of them as “parasites.” That the two characters murder a pregnant Mexican woman to prevent her baby from being born in America and then shoot her distraught husband while uttering the line, “Welcome to America,” underlines the point.

I’m really hard-pressed to understand how this sort of thing helps matters in terms of the ongoing immigration debate. It seems more like a flaming gas can thrown on an already roaring fire … by narcissist Hollywood celebrities who themselves won’t be around to clean up the mess after they’ve helped cause it.

Posted on August 30th, 2010 at 12:52pm.

Stallone to Target the CIA Again in Expendables 2 ?

We think: "bad idea."

"Yo! Let's go for the low-blow, again!"

By Jason Apuzzo. Someone needs to get to Sly Stallone and tell him to stop digging.

On Sly’s Twitter account from three days ago, he indicated that he wants Bruce Willis playing a “super villain” in Expendables 2.

Problem: In The Expendables Willis played a CIA front man who goes by the name ‘Mr. Church.’ [By the way, isn’t the name a little interesting there?] So it’s apparently the CIA guy again who gets to become the “super villain” in Sly’s next Expendables film.

Memo to Sly: since you’re such a patriotic guy, who believes that “America apologizes too much,” maybe the “super villain” in your next film could be … a terrorist? Or Kim Jong Il? Or one of Castro’s thugs? Or Chinese communists? Instead of the American CIA operative, again. Just a thought.

Regular Libertas readers know I haven’t been falling for this ‘Stallone has wrapped himself in a flag of patriotism’ nonsense that’s been coming from certain quarters of the media recently. The Expendables is a nasty hit-job on the CIA, pure and simple. Now we’re getting a sense of just how committed Stallone is to this anti-CIA plotline  as a cornerstone for his new, mini-franchise – despite his unconvincing denials to that effect.

On the box office front, by the way, Stallone’s film slipped to third place over the weekend, against weak competition. Oh, and three weeks in Expendables still isn’t performing as well as Salt (compare the two films here and here), as Salt had made about $9 million more by its third week.

I promise to stop posting on this Salt-Expendables comparison, because it’s becoming quite obvious who’s coming out on top here.

Posted on August 30th, 2010 at 11:52am.

Review: Mesrine, Part I: Killer Instinct

[Editor’s Note: Mesrine was the #1 film at the indie box office this past weekend.]

By Joe Bendel. Jacques Mesrine was white and bourgeoisie, but he wanted to be the French Iceberg Slim.  A veteran of Algeria, Mesrine became France and Canada’s “Public Enemy #1,” eventually getting his wish, dying in a hail of bullets.  Before the inevitable, he glamorized his exploits in two memoirs/novels, making him something of a cult hero to the French-speaking counter-culture.  As a result, he became a very PR-conscious public enemy, who would be delighted to know his story has now been adapted in Jean-François Richet’s two-film bio-epic, the first of which, Mesrine: Killer Instinct opened Friday in select theaters nationwide, with Part Two to follow a week later.

In Algeria, Mesrine killed and tortured without a second thought.  Returning to France, he is incapable of following in his timid father’s footsteps of working, middleclass respectability.  Of course, he has certain talents to offer, which the “establishment” gangster Guido recognizes.  While Mesrine takes to racketeering like a fish to water, his wild streak is an obvious liability.  He also has issues with women.  While his conquests are many, he also seems primed for some rather ugly misogynistic violence.

Vincent Cassel as Mesrine.

Despite his unruliness, Mesrine eventually finds himself married with children.  When he even gets a straight job after an early prison stretch, it appears Mesrine might be ready to settle down.  Unfortunately, when he is laid off during an economic downturn, Mesrine soon returns to Guido’s organization.

Ironically, as the violence of Mesrine’s criminal endeavors escalates, his press becomes increasingly favorable.  He became the gentleman bandit, with a strict code of conduct and New Left street cred.  When things get too hot for Mesrine in France, he takes a sojourn to Quebec, falling in with French nationalists – further refining his revolutionary persona.

Killer Instinct is a decent gangster movie on its own, but it is really meant to establish the characters and storyline that continues in Public Enemy No. 1, the second film (that confusingly has the number one in the title).  True to its function, Instinct handles the heavy-lifting of character development, setting up the slam-bang action sequences of Enemy.  Yet, Richet presents a compellingly unvarnished portrait of Mesrine in the first film, never ameliorating his abusive behavior.

The bulked-up Vincent Cassel is like a French old school De Niro as Mesrine, vicious yet undeniably charismatic.  Gérard Depardieu also adds plenty of color as the Jabba the Hutt-like Guido.  Unfortunately, Mesrine’s women (even his Spanish wife) are not well delineated either in the script or in the various supporting performances, problematically seeming to exist only as plot devices.  Still, Instinct is not bereft of humanity, thanks to Michel Duchaussoy’s touching turn as Mesrine’s father.

After a tour-de-force opening, Richet allows Instinct to lag somewhat in the middle.  This is definitely not a problem with the next installment opening September 3rd.  Essentially, Instinct sets up the pins and Enemy knocks them down.  Altogether, it is an ambitious, shrewdly executed crime drama worth the investment of two trips to the theater.

Posted on August 30th, 2010 at 8:11am.