Month: April 2011

Mega-Invasion Alert!: Transformers, Ender’s Game, The Martian Chronicles, Oblivion, Archangel & 3D Fish Join the Invasion!

Meet your master: "Shockwave," the new villain from "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."

By Jason Apuzzo. • It’s been a long time since our last Invasion Alert!, but I wanted to wait until the new Transformers: Dark of the Moon trailer was out before doing another installment … and that’s where we’ll start today, with Michael Bay’s spectacular trailer to what will likely be the summer’s biggest hit. I haven’t given Michael Bay enough credit in previous Invasion Alerts! for crafting what has obviously become a highly entertaining, epic-in-scale and surprisingly emotional series in the Transformers films – the cream of the recent ‘alien invasion’ genre. How much do I like Bay’s stuff? I’ll say what most critics won’t admit to but probably are thinking – which is that the Transformers movies are likely going to be remembered as among the best ‘alien invasion’ flicks since the 1950s … whether they have their innocuous origins in Hasbro toys or not.

The great thing about the Transformers films, in my opinion, is that they’re not only enormous in scale, but they get all the human touches right – with their warm, earthy characters, realistic family dynamics, and lively sense of humor. You’ve got to be a major stick-in-the-mud to not find these movies a lot of fun. The films also have a pro-American, pro-military, middle class vibe to them – and it’s hard not to like all the campy fetishism associated with the cars, motorcycles, gadgets, military hardware, hot chicks, etc. These films indulge every high school male fantasy imaginable, but do so with stye and humor.

The other aspect of these films that stands out, of course, is their War on Terror subtext – and there is a quite palpable 9/11-quality to the new Transformers trailer, with alien invaders arriving in downtown Chicago and toppling a gigantic building, with major characters scrambling to get out of it. Am I the only one who was thinking of the World Trade Center watching that sequence?

I like that Bay isn’t flinching in depicting this type of thing on-screen. We’re almost ten years past the original attacks, and I sense that people have forgotten what a horrific day that was – and what its larger implications were for our culture. This is exactly what sci-fi does at its best: in the midst of indulging our fantasies, it reminds us of the real world we’re living in and all of its challenges.

And speaking of indulging our fantasies … what are we thinking of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley? She’s looking a little plain-vanilla/girl-next-door to me in comparison to the edgier, minx-like Megan Fox.  I also preferred Ms. Fox’s blasé, cheeky attitude toward the robot mayhem; Rosie seems a little too scared in the clips I’ve seen. Just a thought.

In any case, I’m very much looking forward to Dark of the Moon – especially this cool-looking new villain (see the top of this post), ‘Shockwave,’ who reminds me of Gort. I don’t think this new Dark of the Moon trailer was quite as strong as the initial teaser trailer, and I would’ve preferred more emphasis on story than on CGI chaos, but I know the movie will be good – and probably jaw-dropping in 3D. Looking forward to it. On the news front, here’s the plot synopsis to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, here Rosie Huntington-Whiteley talks about Michael Bay’s work ethic, here she talks about wanting a wedding scene in the next film, and Bay himself talks to MTV about the film here and here.

American military studs fight alien invaders in "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."

• All of a sudden Tron: Legacy director Joe Kosinski is becoming Hollywood’s go-to alien invasion guy. His new project Oblivion – about a soldier in a post-apocalyptic future who battles savage alien life forms – just picked up Tom Cruise as its star, and Kosinski’s project  Archangel (about “a secret unit of the military that tracks and hunts down aliens among us”) just picked up a screenwriter. Plus, Kosinski is apparently shepherding Disney’s reboot of The Black Hole, not to mention the Tron sequels (see here and here). Continue reading Mega-Invasion Alert!: Transformers, Ender’s Game, The Martian Chronicles, Oblivion, Archangel & 3D Fish Join the Invasion!

LFM Review: Klitschko @ Tribeca 2011

By Joe Bendel. Mother Klitschko is no fun. She expressly prohibited her boxer sons Vitali and Wladimir from fighting each other. Of course, that is exactly what the boxing world wants to see. Sebastian Dehnhardt profiles the two well-educated Ukrainian brothers who rose to the top of the boxing ranks, got knocked down, and clawed their way back in the simply but aptly titled documentary Klitschko, which screens at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

The Klitschko brothers.

Growing up military brats, the Klitschko brothers’ father was an ardent Communist. However, he would pay for his blind faith, when his unit responded to the Chernobyl crisis without adequate protective gear. Fortunately when his cancer inevitably surfaced, the Klitschkos already had sufficient means to provide their father with the best of western medicine. Coincidentally, the now cancer-free Col. Klitschko has had a complete ideological change of heart, at least according to his sons.

Though not technically twins, the Klitschko boys were always big and nearly impossible to tell apart. The older Vitali actually started out as a kick-boxer while so-called “Western martial arts” were prohibited in the Orwellian Soviet Union. Eventually the Klitschkos switched to boxing, where fighters could make serious money. Due to inopportune injuries, they lost several high profile bouts they should have won. The elder Klitschko was especially dogged by the quitter epithet. Yet, both brothers would have their Rocky moments in the ring.

Klitschko the film is definitely produced with boxing fans in mind. However, those who follow post-Soviet politics will also find Dehnhardt’s documentary engaging. A reformer, the elder Klitschko was even elected to the Kiev City Council for two stormy terms. The film is also unexpectedly (and unfortunately) topical, given the increased interest in the Chernobyl disaster following the near-repeat in Fukushima. Continue reading LFM Review: Klitschko @ Tribeca 2011

LFM Review: Flowers of Evil @ Tribeca 2011

By Joe Bendel. The wave of protests sweeping the Middle East started in Iran, but it was the Islamist government that supplied all the rage. Their crackdown was swift and violent. The almost-revolution was not televised, but it was on YouTube, where a young Iranian expat breathlessly follows the tumultuous events rocking her country from the safety of France in David Dusa’s Flowers of Evil, which screens at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

Rachid Youcef in "Flowers of Evil."

When the French-Algerian Rachid (a.k.a. Gekko) first meets Anahita, he does not make a strong impression. He is the one carrying her bags when she checks into her upscale hotel. It is not snobbery. The attractive Iranian is understandably preoccupied with the government’s brutal response to the “Green” pro-democracy demonstrations. It is not just political. She has a number of friends and relatives ominously missing. Yet Rachid’s joie de vivre appeals to her, particularly as she faces the reality of Iranian oppression.

Anahita and Rachid initially connect through Facebook, and social media is deeply ingrained in their daily lives. Though both are Muslim, their socio-political backgrounds are radically different. Naturally she is the moderate, though he wisely refrains from judging her occasional glass of wine (much). Initially they appear to be a good match, with Anahita drawing off his energy, while he learns from her to appreciate the French culture he had always taken for granted. She even introduces him to the poetry of Baudelaire (hence the title). Unfortunately, her survivor’s guilt often manifests itself in bouts of depression, which the immature Rachid has little patience for. Continue reading LFM Review: Flowers of Evil @ Tribeca 2011

Tina Fey & Her Wounded Nerd Ego

Tina Fey.

By David Ross. You’ve heard of yo-yo dieters; I’m a yo-yo subscriber to the New Yorker. Some clever piece by Adam Gopnik (solitary throwback to the versatile, stylish intellectualism of the New Yorker’s heyday) will catch my eye in a dentist’s office and I will subscribe once again. I will read the thing for a year, mostly on the toilet; grow increasingly annoyed with its coastal smarminess and inability to interrogate its basic assumptions about the world or even recognize them as assumptions; flush the toilet; cancel in a huff; re-up a year later; etc. This pattern has governed my entire adult life.

With each renewed subscription, I notice changes that are probably invisible to those who read steadily. My latest return leaves me appalled. The old champagne fizz of the New York mind is gone; the metropolitan dandyism embodied by the magazine’s Eustace Tilley mascot is caput. The cartoons are crudely drawn and often just crude. David Remnick, who became The New Yorker’s fifth editor in 1998, began as a dowdy geopolitical journalist for the Washington Post and has lately become a starry-eyed chronicler of the Obama millennium. Presumably in Remnick’s image, The New Yorker has become clunky, earnest, wonkish, didactic, and condescending. Just like the president whom Remnick so much admires, it seems desperate to clarify ‘the big picture,’ to sweep away all those stubborn, uneducated misconceptions that interfere with the progressive renovation of the world.

Even worse, the New Yorker has brought in Tina Fey for comic relief (see here and here). Woody Allen and Steve Martin have long wasted space in The New Yorker, but you could dismiss their pointless little sketches as vanity material designed to gussy up the table of contents and burnish their own idea of themselves as intellectuals. Tina Fey is both a better writer and a more ambitious contributor: she is not merely trading on her name, but attempting to bring her personality to bear, to stage a theatrics of the self. This makes her harder to ignore, while not making her any less cloying. Continue reading Tina Fey & Her Wounded Nerd Ego

UPDATED: Atlas Shrugged Producer Throws in The Towel, Blames ‘Critics’ for the Demise of the Franchise

"Sorry, Dagny, I'm quitting."

By Jason Apuzzo. After my one-line review of Atlas Shrugged, Part I I’d intended to stop talking about the film, but events keep making that impossible. Today, a mere week after bragging to The Hollywood Reporter about his great marketing plan, Atlas Shrugged, Part I producer John Aglialoro essentially tells the LA Times that he’s throwing in the towel on making Parts II and III. He’s also backing-off plans to expand Part I to 1000 screens.

Here are the LA Times money quotes, in which Aglialoro blames the demise of his incipient franchise on “critics,” rather than on his film:

“Critics, you won … I’m having deep second thoughts on why I should do Part 2. … Why should I put up all of that money if the critics are coming in like lemmings?” Aglialoro said. “I’ll make my money back and I’ll make a profit, but do I wanna go and do two? Maybe I just wanna see my grandkids and go on strike.”

So the critics who disliked his film are “lemmings.” I’m laughing at this because these “lemmings” would apparently include Kurt Loder of Reason Magazine, and a host of other like-minded critics I could name. But why bother? I’m sure we’re all just part of the vast leftist/Looter conspiracy out to get Mr. Aglialoro and his film.

Taylor Schilling with John Aglialoro.

What’s particularly galling here is that in his LA Times interview, Mr. Aglialoro indicated no plans to release the rights to Atlas Shrugged from the purgatory they currently inhabit while in his hands. As Libertas reported recently in our exclusive review of the Randall Wallace-Angelina Jolie Atlas Shrugged screenplay, so much more could’ve been made of this project – but Aglialoro’s intransigence in holding onto the rights is keeping better versions from being made.

What this currently means, of course, is that Atlas Shrugged, Part I will now join Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I among other unfinished film franchises – the difference being that Brooks’ was actually intended to be a joke.

[UPDATE 4/28: Now Mr. Aglialoro is telling The Hollywood Reporter that he in fact will make Parts II and III, “even though critics hate the movie and business at movie theaters has fallen off a cliff.” He also continues to claim political persecution on the part of critics. “It was a nihilistic craze,” Aglialoro said. “Not in the history of Hollywood has 16 reviewers said the same low things about a movie. … They’re lemmings,” he said. “What’s their fear of Ayn Rand? They hate this woman. They hate individualism.” Apparently these ‘nihilistic lemmings’ who ‘hate individualism’ would also include Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media, who referred to the film as a “fiasco.”

What a farce this is. It’s quite obvious that Mr. Aglialoro felt the need to make a public pronouncement as to whether he intends to passively squat on the rights to Atlas Shrugged, now that his first film has tanked. Possibly this was a result of our pressing him on the rights matter here at Libertas, since no one else in the media has brought this up. Who knows? There is a phrase for how Mr. Aglialoro is handling all this, however: amateur hour. Expect that Part II and Part III will not be made, and the rights quietly sold away in months ahead.]

Posted on April 27th, 2011 at 10:49am.

LFM Review: Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame @ Tribeca 2011

By Joe Bendel. He was a legendarily honest and perceptive administrator during the turbulent reign of Wu Zeitan, the first and only woman to rule China in her own right. However, most westerners know him as Judge Dee, the protagonist of Dutch Asian scholar Robert van Gulik’s detective novels. Dee, or more properly Di Renjie’s powers of deduction, are such Wu Zeitan plucks him from prison to ferret out the truth behind a series of grisly deaths threatening to derail her coronation in Tsui Lark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, which screens during the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

One look at the giant Buddha statue under construction outside the Imperial palace (complete with internal staircase and observation deck) should tell viewers something spectacularly disastrous is in the offing. Currently, a former associate of Die Renjie is scrambling to finish construction in time for Wu’s official ascension. Suspiciously, the court architect and lead investigator spontaneously combusted there (presumably after seeing something sinister), setting work slightly behind schedule.

Through his animal avatar, the mysterious Imperial Chaplain tells Wu Zeitan who she’s gonna call: Die Renjie. Dispatched to fetch the imprisoned Die Renjie, the trusted Jing’er finds him fending off a horde of assassins with the help of his blind prison mentor.  There will be plenty more for her blade over the course of their investigation, as well as a considerable helping of sexual tension with the tentatively rehabilitated Die Renjie.

Pei Donglei in "Detective Dee."

Continue reading LFM Review: Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame @ Tribeca 2011