By Jason Apuzzo. We’ve been pumping you up about The Devil’s Double, the new film about the mobster-like lifestyle of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday as played by Dominic Cooper.
As regular readers will recall, Libertas’ Joe Bendel reviewed The Devil’s Double at Sundance in January and absolutely loved it (see his review here). Lionsgate will be releasing the film here in the States on July 29th.
Today we’ve got another reason to get you pumped: a new poster for the film has just been released for the film (see left), featuring Dominic Cooper looking highly Scarface-like as Uday.
The vulgar splendor of this poster is absolutely beyond belief, epic in scale. Tarantino doesn’t even get posters this good.
[ANNOUNCEMENT: We’re proud to announce today that Libertas’ Joe Bendel will be covering The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Joe did tremendous work covering this year’s Sundance Film Festival for Libertas, and we’re thrilled to bring you his coverage of what promises to be an exciting 10 days at Tribeca.]
By Joe Bendel. A country surrounded by homicidal maniacs probably does not have much need for horror movies. Perhaps that is why it took over sixty years for the Israeli film industry to produce its first slasher film. It was worth the wait. Considerably more inventive than the genre standard, Navot Papushado and Aharon Kashales’ Rabies (see the trailer here) is a highlight of the Cinemania (formerly Midnight) selections at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
A funny thing happened on the way to the tennis match. A car thick with sexual tension breaks down in a secluded forest. All three of Shir’s teammates (two guys and a girl, Adi) seem have a thing for her. Their lingering jealousies and resentments continue roiling below the surface, but the quartet face more pressing problems, like the twitchy dude they find covered in blood.
Ofer and his sister Tali were running away from home for scandalous reasons implied but never outright stated when she fell into a Hannibal Lecter-worthy mantrap. Obviously this was no hunting accident. Having the drop on Ofer, the psycho responsible bloodies him up good, but not good enough. Waking in the morning, Ofer starts tearing through the forest in search of his dear sister, running straight into the four lost tennis players.
Unfortunately, when they call the cops, no good deed goes unpublished. Emasculated and humiliated by his presumably ex-girlfriend, Danny is sort of the good cop. Yuval on the other hand, is definitely the bad cop. A raging misogynist with simmering class resentments and well-documented anger management issues, his only interest is in sexually harassing Shir. With the guys off wandering through the forest with Ofer, Adi goes Thelma & Louise on the creepy copper. Things get bloody from there.
By Jason Apuzzo. War photographer and documentarian Tim Hetherington was killed yesterday in Libya, while covering the civil war there. The New York Times reports on the incident here. We extend our condolences to his friends, family and colleagues.
Tim Hetherington.
Hetherington’s extraordinary documentary about the Afghanistan war, Restrepo, was nominated for an Oscar just last year (read Joe Bendel’s Libertas review here). Hetherington was one of the leading photographers and documentarians of his generation, a courageous and poetic soul who studied literature at Oxford and who brought a writer’s sensibility to his work. He will be missed.
I invite Libertas readers to take a few moments and watch what was apparently Hetherington’s last film effort, a short film called Diary which I’ve embedded above. It’s really an astonishing piece of filmmaking – richly suggestive of what a talent Hetherington was, and of the depth of his passion for justice.
By Jason Apuzzo. We’ve been pumping you up about The Devil’s Double, the new film about the mobster-like lifestyle of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday as played by Dominic Cooper.
