Month: May 2011

Sony to Distribute Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Hunt for Osama bin Laden’ Film

Director Kathryn Bigelow.

By Jason Apuzzo. As you may have heard by now, the word in the industry (see here and here) is that Sony is negotiating to distribute Kathryn Bigelow’s long-gestating movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a movie that’s changed – unsurprisingly – since bin Laden’s demise at the hands of Navy SEAL Team 6. According to Nikki Finke over at Deadline:

Mark Boal, Bigelow’s partner on the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, is finalizing a script that changes the film from a drama about an unsuccessful attempt to hunt the Al Qaeda leader into a methodical hunt that culminates in his death. The film is being fully financed by Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures. Production will start in the early fall and the pic will be ready for release in 2012.

The project currently has no title, and is apparently projected to have a budget between $25 million-$30 million. Producer Megan Ellison is the daughter of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and she also recently paid $20 million for the rights to the Terminator franchise. Additionally, her brother David Ellison is the person currently trying to revive the Top Gun franchise, as well as Star Blazers. So the Ellison siblings are obviously becoming major players here.

On balance, I think this is very good news – a promising development – and we’ll obviously look forward to the film. Ideally I’d love to see a project of this sort have a higher budget in the $100 million range, but that sort of thing depends on the how the story is being told. Certainly a great deal can be done these days using digital technology on a $30 million budget.

Bravo to Megan Ellison for stepping up quickly and making this happen, and congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow. Govindini and I met her briefly while she was doing post-production on K-19, and she couldn’t have been nicer. LFM NON-SUBLIMINAL HINT: Chris Hemsworth would make a great SEAL …

UPDATE: I’d like to add, on a further note, that I think it’s wonderful and appropriate that the producer/financier and director of the ‘getting bin Laden’ movie are both women.

Posted on May 25th, 2011 at 12:53pm.

The Aerosol Arts

Saber, "Dissent," 2011.

By David Ross. L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art has opened an exhibition of graffiti art, in response to which Heather Mac Donald (see here) has written what is perhaps the single most effective and thorough demolition of radical chic that I have ever encountered. Here’s her lead, all of which she elaborates to devastating effect:

MOCA’s exhibit, Art in the Streets is the inaugural show of its new director, Jeffrey Deitch, a former New York gallery owner and art agent. Deitch’s now-shuttered Soho gallery showcased vandal-anarchist wannabes whose performance pieces and installations purported to strike a blow against establishment values and capitalism, even as Deitch himself made millions serving art collectors whose fortunes rested on capitalism and its underpinning in bourgeois values. MOCA’s show (which will also survey skateboard culture) raises such inconsistencies to a new level of shamelessness. Not only would MOCA never tolerate uninvited graffiti on its walls (indeed, it doesn’t even permit visitors to use a pen for note-taking within its walls, an affectation unknown in most of the world’s greatest museums); none of its trustees would allow their Westside mansions or offices to be adorned with graffiti, either.

Even this two-facedness pales beside the hypocrisy of the graffiti vandals themselves, who wage war on property rights until presented with the opportunity to sell their work or license it to a corporation. At that point, they grab all the profits they can stuff into their bank accounts. Lost in this antibourgeois posturing is the likely result of the museum’s graffiti glorification: a renewed commitment to graffiti by Los Angeles’s ghetto youth, who will learn that the city’s power class views graffiti not as a crime but as art worthy of curation. The victims will be the law-abiding residents of the city’s most graffiti-afflicted neighborhoods and, for those who care, the vandals themselves.

I intended to add certain withering comments of my own, but Mac Donald leaves nothing unsaid. She delivers a pounding. She pounds into fragments and then into dust and then she sweeps the little pile of refuse into the sewer and bids it arrivederci. If you want to know how to conduct a culture war, look no farther. Continue reading The Aerosol Arts

The New Trailer for Showtime’s Homeland Series

By Jason Apuzzo. I’m curious as to what readers think of this trailer for Showtime’s forthcoming war-on-terror themed series, Homeland. The series, from what I’ve read, involves a CIA officer (Claire Danes) convinced that a recently-rescued American POW (Damian Lewis) may be a brainwashed al Qaeda sleeper-agent charged with carrying out a terrorist plot here in America. The series also stars Mandy Patinkin as the CIA officer’s mentor.

The eagerness with which the networks always want to depict Americans as the ‘true’ villains never ceases to amaze me, even when it’s done in this convoluted form.

Posted on May 23rd, 2011 at 4:25pm.

The Pixar Story & The Lessons of Pixar’s Success

By David Ross. We all have a vague idea of the ‘Pixar story’: John Lasseter, Steve Jobs, technological innovations of some kind, fractious dealings with a decadent Disney, eventual world-wide success measured in billions of dollars and universal critical adulation. The 2008 documentary of the same name fills in the historical detail and provides human color.

If the documentary itself is merely workmanlike, the story it narrates belongs amid the July 4th bunting of the American pageant. It’s a chapter in the tale of Graham Bell, Edison, the Wright Brothers, Disney, and Apollo 11, an episode in the cheerful reinvention of the world on the basis of something deep and generous in the American spirit. There’s very little for which contemporary Americans will not have to apologize to whatever god or superior alien race is watching, but Pixar speaks well of us. It mitigates just a little the malls and video games and rap music, everything we might, following Allen Ginsberg, call “Moloch.”

The Pixar Story is informative cultural history, but its implicit lessons have wider and more important application. For better and for worse, corporations now infiltrate every crevice of our culture, and it has become crucially important to weigh how corporatism and cultural meaning can be reconciled. Pixar represents a rare digital-age example of a corporation that’s deepened rather than debased the culture. The lessons are not particularly abstruse, but difficult to drive home and implement, viz.:

1) Corporations must construe themselves as communities rather than machines. Communities consist of autonomous and interactive people; machines consist of inanimate parts that exist in a paradoxical state of mutual dependency and complete isolation. Pixar resists the temptation to rationalize, regulate, and formalize presumably because those at the top – Lasseter et al. – are so free of the usual egomaniacal impulse to control and subsume. The result is an organization that’s supple, organic, and decentralized, as loose and yet unified as an eighteenth-century village. I imagine that Chuck Jones’ Warner Brothers team was much the same. Continue reading The Pixar Story & The Lessons of Pixar’s Success

Avast! LFM Mini-Review of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Ian McShane as Blackbeard in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides."

By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: With seductive mermaids, the Spanish fleet, and a cranky Geoffrey Rush standing in their way, Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow leads saucy pirate wench Penélope Cruz and Ian McShane as Blackbeard on a quest for the mythical Fountain of Youth.

THE SKINNY: After the previous film’s reportedly $300 million budget, Disney’s formidable Pirates franchise goes on a diet – as this slightly undernourished sequel jettisons the heavy VFX sequences of the past, but makes up for them with humor and a colorful turn by Ian McShane as the legendary, real-life pirate Edward Teach/Blackbeard, along with a long-overdue love interest for Captain Jack in the form of a fiery and duplicitous Penélope Cruz.

Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow.

WHAT WORKS:

• Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow schtick has been refined down to a pleasant bouillabaisse of squints, smirks, pirouettes and self-effacing one-liners. It all works here again, like clockwork, and it’s the key to what makes these films tick. While most of the Pirates cast typically get lost in their costumes or heavy make-up, Depp is the only one who really seems to feel at home – always bringing a lightness of touch to the proceedings. Whatever Disney’s paying him, it’s worth it, as the franchise would be lost without his good humor.

• Even though they’re a bit too covered-up for my tastes, the film’s exciting mermaids add to the growing catalogue of vivid mythological creatures already encountered in this series.

• Typical of the Pirates series, the film’s production design is rich and sumptuous. Also helping matters out in giving the film a lavish touch is Hans Zimmer’s score, aided here by guitar flourishes from the Mexican musical pair Rodrigo y Gabriela.

• An absolutely priceless cameo from Keith Richards, who utters what’s probably the film’s most memorable line.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK:

• Geoffrey Rush is an actor I’ve never warmed to, and this film doesn’t help matters. For someone so vexatious, with a permanently constipated look on his face, he certainly gets a lot of screen time.

• In comparison to the vast VFX spectacles of the past, this new Pirates feels a little on the smallish side – and some sequences feel like filler. Also: I’m not certain that the film’s payoff at the end – at the Fountain of Youth – really packs enough of a punch, given what we’ve become accustomed to from this series.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Continue reading Avast! LFM Mini-Review of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

The 1 Year Anniversary of Libertas Film Magazine

By Jason Apuzzo. Today, May 19th, is the one year anniversary of our re-launch of Libertas as Libertas Film Magazine (LFM). Govindini and I want to thank all of our writers – including (in alphabetical order) Jennifer Baldwin, Joe Bendel, Patricia Ducey, Max Garuda, Steve Greaves, David Ross and The Joker – for their wonderful contributions of this past year. It’s a great pleasure putting this site together with you all each day, and we sincerely thank you for the insight, dedication and good humor you’ve brought to this new version of Libertas. We could not do LFM without you. Our thanks also go out to Lars Larson for featuring Govindini regularly on his national radio show and for publicizing our efforts, and also to Michael Apuzzo, and to special friends of Libertas Gretchen Brooks and Rebecca Julian for their kindness and enthusiasm.

And on behalf of all of our writers, we also want to thank our readers. If there’s any group of people who make this site go, who make Libertas an exercise in communication, it’s our readers – who contribute so much in the comments section each week, and always turn what we do here into a productive and colorful conversation. We thank you humbly for your attentiveness.

When we launched this new version of Libertas last year, we described the site in our inaugural post as having “a different emphasis from that of its predecessor … Whereas the prior Libertas spent most of its time critiquing the ideological content of Hollywood entertainment – much of which is still inimical to freedom – the new Libertas Film Magazine is focused on positively promoting films that celebrate freedom, democracy, and the dignity of the individual.”

Having launched the site with that new mission, I had one major concern: whether there would be enough films to even talk about! Little did I know what a task we were actually setting ourselves – because easily the most pleasant surprise we’ve had over the past year is how many new films we’ve been able to discuss that are infused with these basic values. This has easily been the most encouraging aspect of doing this site – what filmmakers all around the world have contributed to it, by way of their creativity. And in a sense, it’s really to them that Libertas is dedicated. Their courage, devotion and vision demand a voice – and that’s what Libertas endeavors to provide.

So again, let me thank everyone, and encourage our writers to keep writing, and our readers to keep reading and commenting … but most importantly, I encourage filmmakers out there, many of whom read this site, to keep making films. You and your inspirational efforts, ultimately, are why we’re all here.

Posted on May 19th, 2011 at 9:48pm.