September 2011 – Page 2 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

Libertas @ The 2011 New York Film Festival: Dreileben

By Joe Bendel. There is a fugitive in the woods. He might be an innocent man, or a dangerous psychopath. Determining the truth is a tricky proposition in Dreileben, a trilogy of interlocking films produced for German television in the tradition of Red Riding, which screens in its entirety this coming Saturday as part of the 49th New York Film Festival.

Christian Petzold’s Beats Being Dead begins the cycle, but keeps most of the crime drama off-screen. While visiting his dying mother in the hospital, the convicted murderer Molesch essentially walks away from his police guard. A manhunt ensues. To shield him from inquiries, Dr. Drier gives some time off to Johannes, the nursing intern on duty that fateful night. It allows the pre-med student time to pursue a passionate in-the-moment romance with the tempestuous Ana, a Bosnian refugee working as a maid in the hotel that will eventually factor into the police investigation. He might even forget Sarah Drier, the head doctor’s daughter, who dumped Johannes in no uncertain terms.

Petzold’s Dead and Dominik Graf’s subsequent Don’t Follow Me Around are like some of Claude Chabrol’s craftier late films, presenting the nefarious business obliquely, while ostensibly focusing on the workaday lives of those seemingly on its margins. Yet Petzold creates a palpable undercurrent of menace that carries over for his filmmaker colleagues. He also presents an unusually dark and intense vision of young love (or lust) that sometimes borders on the unsettling.

Luna Mijovic burns up the screen as Ana, viscerally projecting her raw self-destructive impulses and insecurities. Jacob Matschenz is also quite effective keeping the audience off-balance as the everyman Johannes, while Vijessna Ferkic is appropriately hot and shallow as Sarah Drier. Indeed, not only is Dead the strongest film of the trilogy, it also (quite conveniently) stands alone better than its companion films.

Still, for those willing to buy into Dreileben, Graf’s Follow is also quite clever, nicely explaining a few of the confusing moments in Dead. Johanna is a single-mother police psychologist in the tradition of the old Profiler show, sent to help the corrupt and incompetent local constabulary capture Molesch. Yet, she is considerably more interested in revisiting some important episodes from her past with her old friend Vera, with whom she is staying. We also briefly meet Marcus Kreil, the one competent copper who will be featured prominently in the final film. Continue reading Libertas @ The 2011 New York Film Festival: Dreileben

A Tale of Two Releases: Red Dawn Remake Finally Gets a Distributor; Ben-Hur Blu-ray Arrives Tomorrow (9/27)

By Jason Apuzzo. I wanted to briefly comment today on two releases of note. First of all, the 1959 classic Ben-Hur is getting a lavish new Blu-ray release that arrives in stores tomorrow. I’ve embedded the Blu-ray trailer above, and you can read here about the details of this fabulous-looking set – which includes a documentary featuring newly-discovered behind-the-scenes footage from the set of the film provided by Fraser Heston (Charlton’s son). The Blu-ray set will also include a reproduction of Charlton Heston’s set diary, along with behind-the-scenes photographs taken by Heston’s wife, Lydia. All in all, it looks to be a wonderful release for one of Hollywood’s landmark films of the 1950s – an epic tale of one’s man’s struggle to regain freedom for himself, his family and for his people.

Govindini and I had the pleasure of attending the recent exhibition of Debbie Reynolds’ costume-and-props collection, at which we saw Charlton Heston’s, Stephen Boyd’s and Sam Jaffe’s costumes from Ben-Hur – along with a variety of props from the film. It was an incredible experience seeing these things in person, with the film having been such a favorite of ours over the years. I’m not certain what’s happened to those items since, in terms of whether they’ve already been auctioned; whatever their fate, it seems a tragedy that Reynolds’ collection couldn’t have been kept together. In any case, after so many years it was a thrill to see items from Ben-Hur, at all. (Amazingly, Reynolds’ collection even included Francis X. Bushman’s winged helmet from the original 1925 Ben-Hur) I hope this Blu-ray release further burnishes the film’s legacy for a new generation.

In other news, according to the LA Times today the Red Dawn remake has finally picked up a distributor, FilmDistrict (Drive). As regular Libertas readers know, Libertas is still the only media outlet that’s seen the original, uncensored version of the film (see our exclusive review of the new Red Dawn) that featured the Chinese communist People’s Liberation Army as the villains. The forthcoming, digitally-altered version of Red Dawn – which apparently features some sort of generalized Asian communist menace, led by North Korea – will now likely be arriving in theaters sometime in 2012.

reddawn3 — Chris Hemsworth and Adrianne Palicki lead the cast of the new "Red Dawn."

Somewhat lost in the controversy when we initially published our review of Red Dawn was that we actually liked the film, and were simply disappointed at the corporate decision to re-edit it in order to placate the Chinese. I still don’t like MGM’s decision to re-edit the film because of what that decision implies about freedom of speech in Hollywood, particularly at a time when many of China’s own ‘D-Generation’ (‘digital generation’) filmmakers are currently risking their lives and careers (see our review of Once Upon a Time Proletarian from just this week) in telling truthful stories about China’s oppressive regime. The re-editing/censoring of Red Dawn is a much bigger deal than, say, whether Han or Greedo shot first in the Mos Eisley cantina – because it has broader implications for what can and can’t be said by mainstream American filmmakers about the human rights situation in China.

As Charlton Heston himself used to say, “Film is our best export next to freedom,” and it’s best when the films America exports also say something about freedom. Red Dawn had that opportunity – an opportunity to say something sharp, poignant and specific about one particularly tyrannical modern regime (in the same way John Milius’ original Red Dawn had) – but the makers of the film apparently flinched when corporate profits were on the line.

That’s not a very inspiring example, certainly not in the way Ben-Hur was.

Posted on September 26th, 2011 at 4:32pm.

A Perilous Educational Journey: LFM Reviews Journey from Zanskar

By Joe Bendel. The geography of Zanskar is decidedly harsh. While physically cold and arid, its position as a minority Buddhist enclave amid the tinder box of Kashmir is politically and culturally precarious. As a result, the needs of Zanskaris, particularly the education of their children, have not exactly been a high priority for either the national or local Indian authorities. Concerned with the nearly uniform illiteracy in Zanskar and the potential extinction of the Tibetan language, two monks led a group of Zanskari children to distant Manali, where a place in school and hope for a better life awaited them. Their arduous trek is documented in Frederick Marx’s Journey from Zanskar: a Monk’s Vow to Children (trailer here), which opened in New York this past Friday.

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, “Geshe” is an honorific bestowed on the completion of an advanced course of academic studies. As a Geshe originally from Zanskar, Geshe Lobsang Yonten keenly understood the value education and was alarmed by the lack of opportunities for children in his native region. Identifying Zanskar’s most promising children, the Geshe and his order arrange their enrollment at a school in Manali, where they will be taught both Tibetan and western academic curriculum. However, getting there will be a trick. Continue reading A Perilous Educational Journey: LFM Reviews Journey from Zanskar

YouTube Jukebox: Stevie Ray Vaughan Plays “Lenny”

By David Ross. In the annals of the prematurely departed, nothing compares to the world-catastrophe of Keats’ death. English literature lost its best chance at another Shakespeare; Western civilization lost its most promising spokesman. Here’s my Hall of Fame of Bereavement, my Tenebrous Top Ten, in descending order of regret:

• John Keats (1795-1821)
• Percy Shelley (1792-1822)
• Jane Austen (1775-1817)
• Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970)
• Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986)
• Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)
• Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
• Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828). Perhaps the most gifted of all British painters.
• Sandy Denny (1947-1978). See here for additional elegy.
• Stevie Ray Vaughan (1954-1990)

Steve Ray comes last on this list only because the blues is a relatively blunt instrument. All the same, his death is a raw and bitter recollection. While Jane Austen and possibly even Charlotte Bronte had entered a terminal pattern, Stevie Ray was in the process of transcending the constraints of I-IV-V and taking up the kaleidoscopic jazz fusion that Jimi Hendrix had initiated (see here) before wastefully doing himself in. Listening to “Lenny,” recorded at Toronto’s El Mocambo Club in 1983, we’re haunted by the sound of things never to come. The song is an epitaph for Jimi, for Stevie Ray, and for an entire school of American music that was conceived but never born.

Posted on September 26th, 2011 at 1:46pm.

Small Market Blues: LFM Reviews Moneyball

By Joe Bendel. In the dead of December, New York sports fans turn their attention to Major League Baseball’s Winter Meetings. Of course, Yankee fans are always hoping their well-heeled team pulls off a blockbuster deal. Yet the business side of baseball holds a fascination even for fans of so-called ‘small market’ teams. Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane tried to radically alter the business operations of shallow-pocketed teams. His somewhat successful efforts spawned a host of imitators, a nonfiction bestseller from Michael “Liar’s Poker” Lewis, and a subsequent, long-in-development Hollywood adaptation, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, which opens today nationwide.

As a teenager, Beane was recruited hard by MLB scouts. Foregoing a full-ride Stanford scholarship, Beane pursued glory on the baseball diamond and failed badly, scratching out a front office management career instead. As Moneyball opens, his team has just been knocked out of the post-season by the dreaded Yankees and is about to be gutted by free agency. With an owner unwilling to pony up the big bucks, Beane spurns the star system of free agency, using unconventional methods to select players.

With the help of his Ivy-League educated numbers cruncher, Beane signs statistically under-valued players, placing greater emphasis on on-base-percentage than sexier stats like home runs or stolen bases. This produces a roster full of players considered rejects by the sports media, because they mostly were. They were cheap, though, and could fulfill their specific roles.

Not surprisingly for a film co-written by Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball takes a few liberties with the historical record, ignoring the fact that Beane’s predecessor (and current Mets GM) Sandy Alderson initiated the team’s “sabermetric” approach. Unfortunately, Alderson looks nothing like Brad Pitt, so that’s Hollywood for you. Using the Yankees as a symbol of large market imperialism is also getting to be a tired cliché, especially considering many of the players on their late 1990’s championship teams were farm system products. Continue reading Small Market Blues: LFM Reviews Moneyball

Sword & Sandal Report: Andy Whitfield, Immortals, Spartans, Vikings + Mel Gibson Goes Old Testament

By Jason Apuzzo. • We had some very sad news lately in the Sword & Sandal world with the passing of Spartacus’ Andy Whitfield, who recently succombed to non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The intense Whitfield was only 39 years old, and after his first – and only – season as the star of the hit cable series Spartacus on Starz his career really seemed to be on the rise. We extend our condolences to his family and friends and to his colleagues at Starz – and the network will be holding an Andy Whitfield-Spartacus marathon in his honor. Whitfield will be missed; the arena won’t be the same without him.

• Otherwise, the biggest news of late on the Sword & Sandal front is the long-rumored return of Mel Gibson to the genre with a new film project on the Maccabees story, the freedom-fighting tale of Jewish revolt against Syrian and Hellenic rule in second century B.C. Judea – essentially the story that inspired Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. Almost as striking as the fact that Gibson is taking on this material is that the gruff and colorful Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Showgirls) will apparently be returning from self-exiled Hollywood purgatory to write the screenplay – returning to material with which he is familiar, having previously written about the Holocaust in Hungary.

How do I react to all this? Twenty years ago this project would’ve sounded great. Today it sounds like two middle-aged guys who want to bond over bottles of Cazadores while auditioning dancing girls. In the wake of Gibson’s distasteful anti-Semitic tirades, this film is feeling like his belated mea culpa, like D.W. Griffith making Intolerance as penance for Birth of a Nation – which is not to imply, incidentally, that Gibson has a fraction of Griffith’s talent or determination.

Look, Gibson can do whatever he wants to do with his career as far as I’m concerned. Personally, however, I can’t watch his films anymore – even the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies I enjoyed so much years ago. His behavior has ruined those films for me; the magic is gone, Gibson’s ‘charm’ eroded away after too many boozy encounters with police, racist and/or paranoid rants, and Russian mistresses. I get very tired of people these days talking about how ‘George Lucas spoiled their childhood’ just because he re-edited a few scenes from Star Wars, or dropped some new digital creatures into the back of Jabba’s palace. You know who’s really spoiled a lot of fond memories from my teenage years? Mel Gibson. I look forward to the day when Gibson’s personal psychodramas are no longer routinely inflicted on us as industry news.

FireIce — Concept art for "Fire and Ice."

• A lot of new Sword & Sandal projects are suddenly in the works: a new Spartacus movie is on the way; Warner Brothers has acquired a Viking-related project for Alexander Skarsgard, a project said to be in the Gladiator-Braveheart vein; there’s yet another new Viking project floating around that deals with the Viking slave trade in Irishmen (centuries before the Irish were owned by the USC Trojans); The Rock is in talks to play Goliath in Goliath; Jonathan Liebesman (Battle: Los Angeles, Wrath of the Titans) is attached to a big new Julius Caesar movie that would apparently cover “Caesar’s Spanish campaign, his formation of the 10th Legion, and the battles that would eventually establish Caesar as ruler of the Roman republic” (this is great history to cover in a film); Justin Lin will now only be producing the Highlander reboot, because a new director has come on board; 300: Battle of Artemisia (which now has a director) will have small roles for Gerard Butler and Lena Headey, meaning that Butler will have to train for 6 months to get his abs in shape for 30 seconds of screen time; and some sweet new concept art (see to the right) is out for the Frank Frazetta-inspired Fire and Ice that Robert Rodriguez wants to do, a film that will hopefully prevent Rodriguez from doing any Machete sequels.

• The Immortals continues to roll down the tracks with a new marketing push, although the film still isn’t looking any better than it did before. Is it the bad dialogue? The trite storyline? Mickey Rourke wearing bunny ears? Hard to say. A lot of eyes will be on the film in November because it stars the new Superman (Henry Cavill), and because Freida Pinto will likely be getting her last chance to make an impression in a major film. Director Tarsem Singh will probably survive, of course, because he can always be hired to do Christian Dior ads.

In any case, The Immortals has a new trailer, a new TV spot, poster, and some new pics.

RourkeEars — Mickey Rourke wearing bunny ears in "Immortals."

Continue reading Sword & Sandal Report: Andy Whitfield, Immortals, Spartans, Vikings + Mel Gibson Goes Old Testament