[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Unfortunately, when they call the cops, no good deed goes unpublished.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. Last week, after reading my unflattering one-line review of Atlas Shrugged, Part I, an individual I will refer to as ‘John Galt’ contacted me to express his pleasure with the review – and offer me a copy of Randall Wallace’s Atlas Shrugged screenplay from 2009, to which Angelina Jolie was attached. I accepted, being thoroughly convinced that the Atlas Shrugged currently in theaters in no way represented an adequate adaptation of Rand’s landmark novel.
For those of you who may not be familiar with Randall Wallace, he is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Braveheart, who also wrote Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, wrote and directed We Were Soldiers, and most recently directed Disney’s superb drama Secretariat from last year (see my review of Secretariathere). Mr. Wallace is in every sense an industry pro, and someone whose experience at telling freedom-themed stories on a large scale made him a highly appropriate choice to adapt this material.
And for those few of you who may not be familiar with Angelina Jolie … you’re probably not even reading this article, because you’re living somewhere in the Alpha Centauri system. Let’s simply say that Ms. Jolie is commonly regarded as one of the few modern actresses capable of convincingly playing the role of Dagny Taggart, the feisty and charismatic heroine of Rand’s epic novel. Jolie herself has referred to Atlas Shrugged as a “once-in-a-lifetime” project, and appears to have been genuinely passionate about playing the part.
The producing team responsible for the Atlas Shrugged currently in theaters has hinted darkly that they’ve been objects of ‘liberal persecution’ in Hollywood, and that a ‘faithful’ rendition of Rand’s novel couldn’t possibly have been made in the Hollywood system though conventional channels.
I’m here to tell you that based on the Randall Wallace screenplay I’ve just read, nothing could be further from the truth.
A look at what might have been.
Without getting into Atlas Shrugged’s complex history as a movie and TV project (about which distinguished Rand scholar Jeff Britting has written extensively), suffice it to say that in so far as Angelina Jolie was attached to Randall Wallace’s gripping, ambitious and faithful screenplay, there is no way that the producers of the current film can credibly claim that their downsizing of Atlas Shrugged was the necessary result of ‘liberal persecution.’ Sorry, but that dog doesn’t hunt.
When this kind of talent aligns around a project and it doesn’t come about, there are usually more prosaic reasons – typically having to do with scheduling, budgeting or poor management. Or, as was clearly the case here, the fact that writer-producer John Aglialoro (a first-time producer and screenwriter) was about to lose the rights to Atlas Shrugged – and therefore decided to rush the project into production with a shoddy script, and without proper funding or star power. That decision was tragic, based on the project that could have been made had Aglialoro surrendered the rights to people more capable of managing the film.
Reading Randall Wallace’s Atlas Shrugged screenplay (draft dated Feb. 10th, 2009) is, as a result, both an exhilarating and exasperating experience – given that it represents a vastly more thrilling, sexy, provocative, and genuinely epic telling of Rand’s story than the underwhelming effort currently in theaters.
For anyone who hasn’t yet seen Atlas Shrugged, Part I in theaters, or who hasn’t read Ayn Rand’s original novel, Atlas Shrugged centers around the indomitable and vivacious Dagny Taggart, who serves as the Vice-President in Charge of Operations for the Taggart Transcontinental railway. Surrounded by incompetents and worthless corporate bureaucrats, the detritus of a collapsing society – including, most poignantly, her feckless brother James – it’s the assertive Dagny who truly runs her family’s company, and in so doing keeps the nation’s railways operating. In Rand’s vast and quasi-apocalyptic story – set in an indefinite near-future, as America descends into abscesses of collectivism and fascistic rule – it is largely Dagny Taggart’s strength, persistence and resolute mind in the face of overwhelming odds that keeps the American economy from descending into chaos. At the same time, Dagny also becomes the focal point of a group of radical innovators and industrialists – led by the mysterious John Galt – whose intention is to overthrow the ‘collectivist’ forces in American society by means of a strike. Continue reading EXCLUSIVE: Libertas Reviews the Screenplay for the Randall Wallace-Angelina Jolie Atlas Shrugged
By Jason Apuzzo. EA has released a new 12-minute trailer (featuring extensive game play) for Battlefield 3, depicting U.S. Marines involved in intense urban warfare in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq against Iranian-backed insurgents along the Iran/Iraq border (the game is set in 2014). See the full 12-minute trailer above. The trailer is gripping and intense, and astonishingly realistic in its imagery. NOTE: THIS NSFW TRAILER FEATURES VIOLENCE AND STRONG LANGUAGE. The trailer was posted at YouTube on Thursday, and as of the writing of this post already has over 1.3 millions views.
Screen grab from "Battlefield 3."
Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter game, and a follow-up to EA’s popular Battlefield series. The game is set to debut on November 2nd, and will apparently feature battlefields in Sulaymaniyah, Tehran, Paris and New York.
Watching the trailer, I’m left with the usual questions: namely, why can’t Hollywood do something like this? I mean, fighting space aliens in downtown Los Angeles is great, but why must stories about these real world, epochal military conflicts of ours be relegated to the (admittedly large) ghetto of video gaming? The imagery in this trailer is astonishing in its detail and subtlety, and thoroughly ‘cinematic’ in its execution – to the point that I actually felt like I was watching a war documentary for much of it. And yet a full eight years after the invasion of Iraq, we’re still waiting on any sort of large-scale Hollywood effort to depict the war, while the gaming industry proves each year that there is a massive market for this kind of material.
Does EA have a movie division? They might want to consider starting one.
By Joe Bendel. The late 1970’s were a time of stagflation and economic malaise (sound familiar?). However, there was one booming business that offered a chance for any idiot to make serious coin: pot smuggling. Director Billy Corben explores the diversity and eccentricity of the South Florida smuggling scene in its heyday with profiles of three very different sets of co-conspirators in Square Grouper: The Godfathers of Ganja (trailer here), which opened Friday in New York.
Those who were in or around the 1970’s smuggling economy will recognize “Square Grouper” as the term for the bales of marijuana periodically found bobbing in the waters off Florida’s shores. As for the rest of us, well now we know. Needless to say, everyone Corben interviews knows what it means.
The Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church did not have to chase after stray bales. They were probably the most powerful and successful syndicate profiled in Grouper. They were also an officially recognized church, combining the hippie lifestyle with aspects of evangelical Christianity, namely rather judgmental attitudes regarding homosexuality and sexual relations in general. Weed, on the other hand, was a sacred sacrament. With connections running deep into the Jamaican government, the Ethiopian Zions had a professional operation and extensive property holdings. Yet their evangelical zeal proved to be their undoing, when media footage of underage kids toking it up in their compound turned the public against them.
Perhaps Grouper’s middle story is its saddest. Robert Platshorn was a working-class salesman from Philadelphia’s South Street who fast talked his way into a profitable drug-running gig, at least for a little while. However, he became infamous as the leader of the media-dubbed “Black Tuna Gang.” Corben clearly suggests Platshorn was a small fish victimized by an overzealous prosecution and grandstanding in the press by Griffin Bell, Carter’s Attorney General. Perhaps, but even if it is not an outright crime, Platshorn is clearly guilty of some big league stupidity. Continue reading The Cure for Malaise? LFM Reviews Square Grouper
By David Ross. Sigrid Nunez was during the mid-1970s Susan Sontag’s secretary and her son David Rieff’s lover. Her recently published memoir Sempre Susan (read a racy excerpt here) has improbably returned Sontag to the spotlight, just when her long slow fade seemed to have begun in earnest. A mandarin even by the standards of the intelligentsia, Sontag did much to instate the European art film as a phenomenon of the intellectual vanguard during the 1960s and 1970s.
So too her look and bearing codified what it meant – and still means – to be a ‘serious intellectual.’ Sontag always struck me as feline: elegant, self-contained, sharp-clawed, well-groomed (intellectually and physically). To extend my metaphor, I imagine her as a silky Persian cat perched atop a garden wall, occasionally glancing with disdain at all the mere dogs clumsily being dogs below – romping idiotically, smelling each other’s behinds, crapping in the bushes, having fun.
This semester I gave my students Sontag’s essay onGodard’s Vivra Sa Vie, one of several self-consciously ‘important’ essays on film anthologized in Sontag’s breakthrough volume Against Interpretation (1966). I admire its elegant minimalism (rather like the movie itself), but I find it lacking in heft and emotional engagement (again like the movie itself). I paired Sontag’s essay with our own Jennifer Baldwin’s photo-essay on Vivra Sa Vie, which in many ways I consider more satisfying because more immediate and more human. My students laughed at Jennifer’s cri de femme: “I want Nana’s fuzzy black coat.” Sontag did not make the students laugh. I wonder if she ever made anybody laugh. Possibly not.
Virginia Woolf said of Yeats, “Wherever one cut him, with a little question, he poured, spurted fountains of ideas.” This Titanism – this quality of thinking and being on a grand scale, of bringing to bear the whole of one’s self – is the hallmark of the great intellectuals. Sontag never pours or spurts. She makes a clinical exercise of what should be a vast excitement.
Sontag at work.
In terms of film criticism, I favor Pauline Kael, if only because she understood the cardinal romantic truth that intellect is merely an expressive device of the personality. Kael suffers from serious lapses in taste and judgment, but her wild and woolly prose is more alive than Sontag’s and her passions more transparent and seemingly sincere. Sontag was more sophisticated in her range of interests and enthusiasms, but only more serious and ambitious in a way. She was interested in exploring her own capacity for exploration, interested in her own mind and what it could figure out. Her form of criticism is a kind of intellectual ceremony, a kind of Japanese tea ceremony in which Sontag dispenses herself in refined and smallish doses. In the end, Sontag is a bit too astringent for my taste. A film should not be an intellectual puzzle or a pretext for critical experiment; it should be a hub of personal meaning.
I reread yesterday Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” also from Against Interpretation. It’s a brilliant little piece, but it says far more about Sontag herself than about camp. Its real content is the curious involutions of its own form and expression. It is about itself, and in this regard functions more like a poem – a clever but dry one – than like criticism properly defined. Continue reading Sempre Susan
