By Jason Apuzzo. Because we’ve been following both of these films extensively here at Libertas, I wanted to mention that the ‘Aussie Red Dawn‘ picture Tomorrow When the War Began and Mao’s Last Dancer both took home prizes last week at Australia’s IF Awards.
From "Call of Duty: Black Ops."
Tomorrow won for Best Feature Film, while Mao won a special box office achievement prize – as that little indie production has currently made about $15 million worldwide thus far, which is fantastic. Read more about this at Hollywood Reporter.
And did you catch the early grosses on Call of Duty: Black Ops? $650 million, according to the LA Times … yowza.
Incidentally, Call of Duty is apparently set during the Cold War, and based around a special operative who saves the US from a communist plot (oddly enough, without Angelina Jolie’s assistance). The operative travels between Cuba, Vietnam and Russia – and there’s even apparently a segment of the game in which players can go on a mission to bag Castro! Hola! (The Cuban government is apparently pretty upset at this.)
I like the sound of this game. Of course, you just wonder whether it occurs to anyone in Hollywood that this extremely popular game might make for a viable movie adaptation. (Just doing a little thinking outside the box, here!)
We’re always hearing how ‘money rules’ in Hollywood, rather than politics. Here’s another nice occasion to prove it.
By David Ross. Rock has become such a ludicrous synergy of boobs without brains and b-schoolers without balls that it’s hard to remember why one ever cared. Springsteen’s Hammersmith Odeon London ’75, a sweating, writhing, heaving tent revival of an album, will remind one. When the album appeared in 2006, I knew instantly that my ears feasted on one of the supreme live albums: not a marginal addition to the giant Springsteen oeuvre, but a core masterpiece materialized out of nowhere to rival the likes of Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard (1961), James Brown’s Live at the Apollo (1963), the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East (1971), and Bob Marley’s Live (1975). When I discovered that the concert had been released on DVD – that full footage existed – I felt as if the earth had split open and coughed up something like a 39th Shakespeare play or a 10th Beethoven symphony. Indeed, the DVD revealed what may be the greatest concert ever captured on film (a musical judgment; the film itself is pedestrian). I found myself entertaining the fantastic notion that the 1975 incarnation of the E Street Band is the greatest band ever – not remotely the best assemblage of individual musicians, but the best band, absolutely cohesive, committed, and co-equal, with a jazzy adventurism that it would eventually purge in favor of the irritating thump of Born in the U.S.A. The Odeon concert represents Springsteen at his very height, as much a deity of the American spirit as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.
The record company, Rosie, gave me a big advance! This line, from “Rosalita,” of course, explodes not merely with the sense of release from tribulation but with the affirmation of the inevitability of release. It embodies what President Obama fails to understand when he says “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” etc. There is such a thing as American exceptionalism: it is rooted in an amalgam of joy (sometimes tragic joy), energy, freedom, and providential faith. Socialism fails in American not least because everybody expects their own big advance to arrive at any moment, and the damnedest thing is that it does tend to arrive, not always in the form of a fat check from New York, but in the form of a realized dream: a kid in college, a small business that turns a corner and starts to pay the bills. Though he has lately become a celebrity leftist, Springsteen understands this entirely; indeed, he understands America far better than the president does. He understands as well, in a song like “Racing in the Streets,” which may be his most moving and profoundly perceiving, that while dreams do not always become glittering realities, our glory nonetheless is to have dreamt, and to have passed through the fading of the dream into a deeper reconciliation and grace.
YouTube used to be awash in footage, but the abovementioned B-Schoolers have had it all purged. Sony might have let this one slip in the simple interest of disseminating something wonderful and assisting the efflorescence of the national spirit, but, of course, no. In any case, for the price of half an oil change you can buy the DVD.
Additional preferred rock and rock-related concert films, with dates of performance:
Miriam Makeba, Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm, Sweden, 1966
The Complete Monterrey Pop Festival (1967)
Jimi Hendrix, Live at Monterrey (1967)
Stax/Volt Revue: Live in Norway 1967
Elvis Presley, Elvis: ’68 Comeback Special (1968)
Jimi Hendrix, Live at Woodstock (1969)
The Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter (1969)
Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (1969) – deplorable generation, unmatched concert
Joe Cocker, Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1970)
The Beatles, Let it Be (1970)
The Who, Isle of Wight Festival 1970 (1970)
Led Zeppelin, Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1970 (see the compilation titled Led Zeppelin)
Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall (1971)
The Band, The Last Waltz (1976)
Patti Smith, Live in Stockholm (1976) – not exemplary, but I’ll take it.
Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Sting, et al., The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (1981)
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Live at the El Mocambo (1983)
Sorry, but Stop Making Sense doesn’t interest me in the least; irony is to be transcended, not indulged. The raison d’etre of rock is conviction, with all its potential for foolishness and pretension.
By Patricia Ducey.The Taqwacores is one of a few notable films lately (like Four Lions) nibbling at the margins of mainstream cinema with Muslims as its subject. Supported and developed at Sundance, and distributed by Strand Releasing, The Taqwacores is an original and winning little marvel.
The word taqwacore itself is a mashup of “taqwa,” meaning piety, and “core,” for hardcore – and the movie itself was adapted from Michael Muhammad Knight‘s 2003 novel, The Taqwacores, about an imagined Muslim punk scene in the U.S. – which in turn inspired an actual Muslim punk scene in America, then a documentary about it, and then this movie.
Strangely,The Taqwacores has been outright reviled by mainstream critics, but well-liked by audiences – Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 11% approval by critics and 51% by audiences – illustrating the apparently growing divide between the critical community and moviegoers. (I first began to notice this divide five years ago when I read a review of Memoirs of aGeisha, a movie I enjoyed and felt surpassed the novel, which stated that while the movie was well done and compelling, the reviewer felt he could not give it a thumbs up because its subject was a Japanese woman who engaged in and enjoyed – yes, shockingly, enjoyed! – an affair with an American military man in post-WWII Japan.) Sadly, it seems as though too many critics are either intimidated by political dogma, or feel obligated to uphold the politics and aesthetics of their mentors, to give little films like The Taqwacores a fair hearing.
Actress Noureen DeWulf, when not wearing a burqa.
The most unique aspect of The Taqwacores is that, for once, American Muslims are portrayed as the subject of a narrative and not as an objectified “other.” The Taqwacores is actually a coming of age story told from within a unique strata of American culture, with young people and their hopes and fears propelling the story. We are viewing the story of young American Muslims as they tell it to us in the way they want to tell it.
By contrast, a ‘mainstream’ Hollywood narrative would probably have involved a journalist writing about a punk rock scene that was pulling in local Muslim youth and ‘contaminating’ them with Western values. Somehow he would save these poor, besotted naifs; and, music swelling, the youths would return to the more pure, authentic lifestyle of their Muslim parents. (Or maybe a burned-out, disabled U.S. military vet would travel to another planet and rescue these well-meaning young people from American imperialism?)
In doing this, you might say that The Taqwacores revives the genre of politically incorrect cinema. I have not seen a movie that turns cliché on its head with such relish since the superb Last King of Scotland, a film that was as much a scathing indictment of western do-goodism as of Idi Amin.
As we hear the worried telephone voiceover of his mother, we meet young college kid Yusuf (Bobby Naderi), an American of Pakistani origin, arriving at a student rooming house run by “good Muslims,” as his mother assures him. Yes, a devout brother, Umar, does greet him and show him to his neat room, outfitted with a Koran – but as the day goes on, Yusuf begins to suspect that something is not quite halal about this place: metal music blares from the floor below; the refrigerator is filled with beer and nothing but beer; the one sister in the house, Rabeya (Noureen DeWulf) greets him – in a burqa covered with punk patches – and chats casually with him. A woman and man alone together, alcohol and rock and roll! What has Yusuf gotten himself into?
He spends the rest of the movie finding out. Soon he meets the other roommates – most notably the charismatic Jehangir (Dominic Rains), lead guitarist and resident punk theoretician. Jehangir has conceived his own anarchistic and liberating version of Islam, as expressed in his music. But Jehangir loves all music and especially idolizes Johnny Cash – “Johnny ruled the world” – and Jehangir is tired of being small. He wants out of submission and into relevance.
The roommates conduct Friday prayers, but with the woman, Rabeya, giving the sermon, and the prayers are usually followed by an all out drunken bash. Yusuf eventually falls for pretty former Roman Catholic Lynn, who has embraced Islam for its seeming lack of hierarchy that stands in contrast to her Catholic faith. But she and her freewheeling sexuality prove too much to Yusuf at the moment. Gradually though, Yusuf comes to understand and appreciate these new feminist and radical interpretations of his beloved Islam. He respects and is even thrilled by the way his housemates question and argue and embrace the Big Questions of life, like students everywhere, but he can’t jump into the mosh pit quite yet. And even though Yusuf is devout, he harbors no hostility to anyone – in contrast to angry young man Umar. He soon develops real affection for his housemates and their motley crew of hardcore rockers, feminists, and gays.
Yusuf changes, and he grows.
Actors Bobby Naderi and Dominic Rains.
Bobby Naderi plays Yusuf with the winning innocence of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. I would call this a breakout role for Naderi, except that America’s critical establishment has frozen out this little film and Mr. Naderi along with it. Dominic Rains brings handsome, tragic Jehangir to life, and the supporting characters all shine. Shot in primary colors against the grey sky of Buffalo’s winter, the camerawork echoes the graffiti slathered over every inch of the Taqwacores’ corner of the concrete jungle, and frames its characters like they are jumping off the page of a graphic novel.
Unfortunately, I suspect The Taqwacores will come and go quickly from theaters (not unlike Memoirs of a Geisha). So for an evening with Yusuf and his friends of smashing taboos and shocking the neighbors – set against the music of real taqwacore groups like The Komanis – you’ll have to move fast.
By Jason Apuzzo. Imagine this storyline: foreign invaders launch a spectacular strike on a major American city, killing thousands of people and destroying huge buildings in the process. The strike takes place in the early morning hours, when most citizens are still sleeping or just getting up for the day. At the same time, these invaders aren’t merely out to kill – but in a weird way they’re also here to ‘convert’ and/or steal the minds of their human prey, so humanity can be subsumed into their larger cause. And upon this ‘conversion,’ human beings begin to feel unnaturally powerful and aggressive – just before suicidally extinguishing themselves.
Oh, and the only human recourse to this horrific invasion is the massive intervention of the U.S. military, up to and perhaps including nuclear strikes.
Sound familiar?
No, this isn’t a movie about 9/11 – and yet it might as well be. Following in the footsteps of J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (and to some extent Abrams’ Star Trek) – not to mention, of course, James Cameron’s Avatar – Skyline is the latest sci-fi film to use a 9/11-style event as a framing device for its story of alien-vs.-human conflict.
How good Skyline is, however, is another question entirely.
The easiest and most obvious thing to say about Skyline is that it’s a low-budget, indie riff on the increasingly familiar alien invasion theme, and that it exploits certain aspects of post-9/11 anxiety to full effect. Much like J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield or Star Trek, Skyline puts a group of largely vacuous 20-somethings into a high-pressure, Pearl Harbor-style situation in which its young leads need to to grow up and mature – very quickly.
"OMG!" An LA blonde under attack from alien invaders.
At the same time, what Skyline makes perfectly apparent – and here, comparisons to Cloverfield and Gareth Edwards’ recent low-budget alien invasion thriller Monsters are apt – is that a burgeoning problem with the ‘alien invasion genre’ is the overall vacuity and narcissism of the young people depicted.
To put the matter simply, you may not care whether these young people survive at all.
***SPOILERS AHEAD***
But back to the story. If you’ve seen Independence Day, Cloverfield, or War of the Worlds (either version) – or, for that matter, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers – you know the drill here. Big ships with big bugs/fish inside them show up over a major American city – Los Angeles, in this case – and start laying waste to the place. Are the details of the invasion important in the case of Skyline? Not particularly – except that in Skyline, these malevolent alien creatures aren’t simply interested in conquest and destruction. The alien invaders in Skyline are actually creatures of light who use a kind of unearthly, blue penumbra to attract the attention of human beings, much like drawing moths to a flame. And once human beings stare into this light, the human mind is actually subsumed by the aliens – who apparently need the energy and vitality of human minds in order to keep going. [Why, in that case, they would travel to Los Angeles of all places to harvest brains is never explained.] The creatures then extract the brains from human bodies – through an unpleasant process similar to that from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (or Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters, for that matter) – chuck the human bodies, and go about their merry way.
Except that, in what is perhaps the film’s one interesting twist, we also learn that human minds can ultimately affect the outlook of the aliens, as well …
Like moths drawn to a flame.
So that’s the basic setup for Skyline. And even if the film has a kind of derivative, late-night TV feel to it – almost like an Asylum movie on CGI steroids – there are some things to recommend it. First of all, the second half of Skyline features some exceptional action sequences – particularly of the U.S. military vs. alien invader variety – that are really spectacular, and astonishing for having been accomplished on a budget under $10 million. Unlike in Independence Day, the huge aliens in Skyline – some of which look like the Balrog from Lord of the Rings – come down out of their ships and get down and dirty in the streets of LA. They climb buildings, fight helicopters, squash cars, and generally cause headaches of both a literal and figurative variety. Kudos to the Strause brothers – who both directed this film and handled its visual FX – for staging such gnarly and compelling action sequences with their modest resources.
Also, it’s great to see the intervention of the American military treated in such a positive and heroic light. Skyline goes in the exact opposite direction of Avatar and Monsters by depicting the U.S. military as almost (if not exclusively) our primary hope in this kind of crisis.
How gung-ho is Skyline? Downtown LA gets nuked by the U.S. Air Force as a preventative measure – and nobody utters a peep of complaint. Admittedly, it is LA we’re talking about here …
Channeling anxieties over catastrophic attacks.
In a recent exchange I had with the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein, one of the things I pointed out was that the whole theme of alien invasion is one that tends to pull filmmakers in the direction of a more ‘conservative’ view of the world, films like Monsters or TV shows like The Event notwithstanding. Skyline is a perfect example of this. The film’s retro-, Cold War vibe is right out of the 1980s or 1950s – although the film makes a few clumsy efforts to make everything seem ‘relevant’ to today’s MTV generation (i.e., hip-hop music, and a cast that looks like it’s straight out of The Hills). With some exceptions, I expect most films in this new alien invasion genre to follow this overall Cold War pattern, updated (obviously) for the era of the War on Terror. Continue reading Fears of Another 9/11? LFM Reviews Skyline
By Joe Bendel. When did skepticism become a term of derision in the scientific community? In truth, Bjørn Lomborg is not a so-called global warming “denier.” He agrees the Earth’s overall temperature is rising, but he takes issue with some of the more inflated estimates. It seems Lomborg’s primary sin though, is his application of rigorous risk assessments and cost-benefit analysis to the global warming debate. Having been likened to Adolf Hitler (yes, seriously) by Dr. Rajendra Pachuari of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Lomborg gets a chance to speak for what he considers the maligned middle ground of the warming debate in Ondi Timoner’s new documentary, Cool It, which opened this past Friday in select theaters nationwide.
The Danish Lomborg always considered himself “lefter than left,” but when he chanced across an article by the late iconoclastic economist Julian Simon, his apostasy began. Simon argued, contrary to popular belief, that the state of the Earth was actually improving – in large measure due to the benefits of capitalist prosperity. Professor Lomborg took up the refutation of Simon’s book as a long-term class project, but his class found itself confirming far more than they contradicted. When he published their findings in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg’s name quickly became anathema to many of his academic colleagues.
Indeed, the extent to which Lomborg has been vilified, even persecuted, for deviating from politically correct orthodoxy is simply scandalous. Yet the Dane appears to be a happy warrior, embracing the warming debate as the next great fight. In conceding the general warming premise, he glosses over many legitimate questions about the integrity of the data often sited. Yet, he still gives warming partisans fits. For instance, Lomborg is tacky enough to actually run the numbers on the Kyoto Protocols, finding that at a projected cost of $250 billion in lost GDP annually, the EU’s plan to cut emissions 20% below 1990 levels will only cool the planet a negligible 0.1 degrees F. That is an inconvenient truth.
Indeed, the Al Gore documentary takes it in the shines and the credibility throughout Cool. Not simply held up as an example of reckless scare-mongering, Lomborg eviscerates several of Gore’s claims that gained particular traction in the public consciousness, including the Hurricane Katrina canard. Perhaps the best example of Lomborg’s rigorous methodology comes courtesy of the poor polar bears supposedly jeopardized by global warming. According to Lomborg, at the cost of $250 billion annually, implementing Kyoto might save one single polar bear a year (whose population has been steadily increasing over the past several years). In contrast, he suggests those truly concerned about polar bears work to crack down on poachers who kill 250 to 300 each year. Continue reading The Somewhat Skeptical Environmentalist: Cool It
By Joe Bendel. Kofi Annan has blood on his hands. He might not have personally fired a shot in Rwanda, but his actions ensured the violent Hutu extremists remained heavily armed. So claims Lietenant-General Roméo Dallaire, the French-Canadian military commander of the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda. Based on Dallaire’s memoir, Roger Spottiswoode’s Shake Hands with the Devil, opening today, is an incisive indictment of the UN’s willful negligence during the 1994 mass killings.
Dallaire is a haunted man, haunted by the ghosts of 800,000 Rwandans who were murdered while he stood idly by, handcuffed by the UN’s restrictive rules of engagement and a lack of supplies. It need not have been so. As he first arrives at his post, the situation appears promising. All sides profess to want peace and are actively engaged in UN sponsored negotiations. Yet there are troubling signs, like the growing presence of informal Hutu militias strutting through the streets.
Initially, the UN Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) seems to get a lucky break when a well-placed source steps forward with information about huge weapons stockpiles in the ruling Hutu party headquarters. However, before Dallaire can launch his planned operation to seize the arms, the UN peacekeeping command orders him to stand down. Instead of confiscating the arms, he is to inform the hard-line Hutu president of what they know, and he is forbidden to offer asylum to his informer. At this point, the die is cast. Annan and the UN might as well have issued a proclamation declaring genocide season officially open.
A strong likeness of the real Dallaire, Roy Dupuis (who could also pass for Bruce Campbell’s older brother) gives a depressingly good performance, vividly showing the General’s military bearing cracking under the weight of the horror and futility of his position. Indeed, Shake is a rare film that genuinely respects military figures, like Belgian Colonel Luc Marchal – portrayed with genuine humanity by Québécois actor Michel Mongeau. Continue reading LFM Review: Shake Hands with Devil and Genocide in Our Times
