Author: Jason Apuzzo

Jason Apuzzo is co-Editor of Libertas Film Magazine.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post & AOL-Moviefone: Skyfall & How James Bond Stays Current at 50

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone. I had the opportunity to see Skyfall at a screening of the recent AFI Festival in Hollywood, and wish to thank the AFI Festival for making that possible.]

By Jason Apuzzo. How does James Bond do it? He barely seems to have aged a day. The famously overworked British Secret Service agent, drinker of vodka martinis, and seducer of dangerous women (why are Bond’s girlfriends always pointing guns at him?) is now 50 years old in the movies — yet it hardly shows.

With Skyfall, the latest 007 thriller opening this weekend, it’s now been five decades since the Bond character debuted on screen in 1962’s Dr. No. Since that memorable first film, in which Sean Connery saved the world from a megalomaniac with metal hands — while rescuing Ursula Andress from the confines of a white bikini — James Bond has saved the world from nuclear bombs and space lasers, cheated death using jet packs and exploding cigarettes — and even found time to romance women with names like ‘Plenty O’Toole’ and ‘Xenia Onatopp.’

It’s been a busy, full life for the world’s most famous secret agent — which begs the question of why, as currently embodied by Daniel Craig in the latest film, the character suddenly seems so fresh and relevant to the world of today.

2012-11-09-skyfall0103.jpg
Daniel Craig in "Skyfall."

The question arises because the James Bond of Skyfall no longer seems like an exhausted relic from another era, as he often did during the ’90s and early 2000s. Instead, he now feels like a character who has been fully and (for the most part) successfully reinvented as a merciless, sardonic and lethal warrior for our age of terror.

And although Skyfall isn’t quite the classic some critics are making it out to be, it’s easily one of the best Bond films since the 1970s.

On this point, I must confess to having given up on Bond long ago. Until recently 007 was looking like a tired hero — a guy in a middle-age crisis, a character to put in the next Expendables. M needed to send Bond into retirement — maybe ship him off with a fifth of vodka and a Russian mistress (I recommend Anya Amasova, aka Agent XXX from The Spy Who Loved Me) to James Bond Island off the coast of Thailand. Even SPECTRE would probably leave him alone.

After all, with the Cold War long over (despite Vladimir Putin’s best efforts), Great Britain no longer the force it once was, and with women less eager to play characters named ‘Kissy Suzuki’ or ‘Dr. Molly Warmflash,’ you’d think 007 would be quietly boxed away in the attic by now along with vinyl records and your parents’ fondue pot.

Casino Royale in 2006 seemed to change all that, but director Sam Mendes’ Skyfall really confirms it; Bond now absolutely works as a hero for the 21st century. The question is: why?

There are three reasons, in my opinion:

2012-11-09-skyfall0114.jpg
Reinvented to fight the War on Terror.

1) Bond has been fully reinvented for the War on Terror era.

This process began in Casino Royale, but Skyfall digs much deeper into the purpose and mentality of our intelligence agencies in the post-9/11 world — and strongly reaffirms their value. Without giving away too much of Skyfall‘s plot, suffice it to say that the entire purpose of the film is to re-invent the James Bond mythology to fit the current war, which as Judi Dench’s M memorably states is fought primarily “in the shadows” — with our enemies less likely to be nation states with massed armies than shadowy, sociopathic operators working within hidden networks.

And it’s precisely in this environment that Bond thrives.

As Skyfall opens, information pertaining to NATO penetration of worldwide Islamic terror cells has been stolen in Istanbul, and Bond has to get the data back before Western agents are exposed and killed. As the story unfolds, Bond’s value as an experienced field agent — able to make human judgments in murky situations and act, where technology alone is inadequate — is constantly reinforced, even when his physical and emotional resources are depleted.

Bond and his colleagues are also depicted as patriotic and reflexively selfless, to the point of being subtly associated with Winston Churchill and his legacy. (Look for references to Churchill’s wartime bunker along with visual cues of a vintage British bulldog.) In the midst of this, the tone of the film is more sober — and befitting of wartime — than what we’ve seen from the Bond series in a long time. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post & AOL-Moviefone: Skyfall & How James Bond Stays Current at 50

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: Basketball Diplomacy: An American Point Guard Becomes a Symbol of Freedom in The Iran Job

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post and at AOL-Moviefone.]

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. NBA fans know that two-time MVP point guard Steve Nash recently joined the Los Angeles Lakers. Fans are buzzing, because the addition of Nash could soon result in a return to championship glory for the league’s most glamorous franchise. As big as Nash’s impact on the Lakers might be, however, it can’t possibly match the impact that flashy point guard Kevin Sheppard — the former Jacksonville University star and Virgin Islands native — had in 2008 on A.S. Shiraz, a professional basketball team in Iran’s Super League.

The reasons for this go beyond sports, however, because over the course of one gripping and emotional season — a season documented by director Till Schauder and producer Sara Nodjoumi in their extraordinary new documentary, The Iran Job — Sheppard becomes one of Iran’s most popular athletes, and brings a ray of hope into an increasingly repressive and isolated society.

The Iran Job screened last week in Washington, D.C., and had its world premiere recently at the Los Angeles Film Festival, where we had the chance to talk to the film’s creators.

American basketball player Kevin Sheppard in Iran.

As depicted in the film, Kevin Sheppard’s Iranian odyssey begins in the fall of 2008, when he’s offered a spot on A.S. Shiraz’s roster. Having already played professional basketball in South America, Europe, China and Israel, the voluble Sheppard is unfazed by the prospect of playing overseas — but is understandably nervous as an American traveling to Iran. Coming in the midst of a 2008 election in which Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain all had sharp words for Iran and its nuclear program, Sheppard nonetheless decides to take the plunge out of a spirit of professionalism.

It was a decision that would change his life, as well as the lives of everyday Iranians — and in particular, those of three young Iranian women.

One of the most compelling aspects of The Iran Job is the way it captures the casual details of life in today’s Iran — a closed society that clearly harbors some unusual stereotypes about the outside world. So for example, the moment Sheppard arrives in Iran and meets up with his Serbian roommate (the team’s 7-foot center, and the only other non-Iranian allowed on the squad), Sheppard learns that his cable TV has been custom-provided with hundreds of pornographic channels — the assumption being that because he is an American, he must be sex-obsessed. The irony that such programming is even available in a “strict” Islamic society, of course, is not lost on Sheppard — who can’t help but laugh at Iranian officialdom’s awkward notions of diplomatic courtesy.

Such ticklish moments aside, however, Sheppard immediately begins bonding with average Iranians. A natural show-off with a wicked sense of humor, Sheppard dazzles everyone around him — even when they barely speak English, and are only able to respond to his warm smile and playfulness. The camera follows him early on as he goes out to grab dinner, and we see regular Iranians high-fiving him and snapping pictures with him before he’s even picked up a basketball. His enthusiasm and dynamic personality ignite smiles everywhere.

We asked Sheppard about the rock-star treatment he received from average Iranians:

“The funny thing about it is, once I got over there — people really love America. The government would say, ‘Down with America.’ They have all kinds of signs — ‘America is the Devil,’ ‘Down with the U.S.A.’ — but once you get to the people, they love American culture, they know everything about America, they love all the American sports. So it was a little bit ironic and crazy for me at first. I was like, how can you have all these signs around? But yet, when you speak to the people it’s totally different. So I know it [hostility toward America] was not coming from the mass of the people in general. This was all pushed upon them by the government.”

As The Iran Job proceeds, however, Sheppard’s innate enthusiasm is challenged by his lackluster basketball team, A.S. Shiraz a new and untested squad in Iran’s Super League, and a team sorely lacking in the kind of talent or winning attitude to which Sheppard is accustomed. Viewers basically get the sense that Sheppard has just joined The Bad News Bears of Iranian basketball, and his first task will be to shake up the underwhelming squad.

It’s worth noting here that The Iran Job follows the usual parameters of sports documentaries in depicting how one inspirational player can turn the fortunes of a franchise around by getting his teammates to believe they can win. That’s precisely what Sheppard does, due in part to his on-court heroics (we watch him win several games with buzzer-beating shots), but mostly due to his cocky swagger and high standards. The intense, demanding point guard simply hates to lose — and refuses to let his teammates ever be comfortable accepting defeat. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: Basketball Diplomacy: An American Point Guard Becomes a Symbol of Freedom in The Iran Job

Jaycee (Son of Jackie) Chan Takes Over the Family Business: LFM Reviews Double Trouble

By Joe Bendel. Some were skeptical when fifty-eight year old Jackie Chan announced his retirement from the action movie genre at Cannes. Whether this is one of those Depardieu retirements or he actually really means it, only time will tell. Regardless, the scheduling is fortuitous for the release of an old-fashioned action-comedy starring Chan’s son. Jaycee Chan steps into some big shoes as half of a pair of mismatched security guards trying to foil an art heist in David Hsun-wei Chang’s Double Trouble, which opens this Friday in New York.

Jay is a take-charge loose cannon, which earns him plenty of demerits for poor team-building skills. However, his reckless disregard for procedure is rooted in a tragic episode from an earlier period of his life. He is the one Taipei Palace museum guard an elite gang of art thieves would not want to tangle with, but he is the perfect candidate for a frame-up. Frankly, that was not part of the plan for two slinky Cat Woman-attired robbers, but the result of the bumbling interference of Ocean, the comic relief security guard-tourist visiting from Beijing. Dragging along Ocean is a lot like taking the proverbial accordion into battle, but Jay is forced to, for the sake of clearing his name.

As the earnest Jay, Jaycee Chan exhibits something of the rubber face and rubber bones that made his father an international movie-star. He also has a similarly likable on-screen demeanor. Unfortunately, Double Trouble is a bit too much like late Hollywood period Jackie Chan than his early cult favorites for fans to pronounce the baton has been fully passed. However, it is safe to say HK model Jessica C. (a.k.a. Jessica Cambensy) has arrived as an action femme fatale. After all, there is a reason she is on the poster with Chan, even though they are bitter foes in the film. As for his reluctant crime-fighting partner, a little of Xia Yu’s Ocean goes a long way.

Indeed, the bickering bromance is laid on rather thick and the humor is almost entirely of the slapstick variety. Nonetheless, the depiction of border-crossing friendship (and maybe even romance with another member of Ocean’s tour group, appealingly played by Deng Jiajia) is rather pleasant, because it never feels overly soapboxey or clumsily forced.

There are some nice stunts in Double and it also has Jessica C. going for it. It sincerely aims to please, but it is hardly has the grit or heft of a Police Story or even the relatively recent Shinjuku Incident. A harmless distraction, Double Trouble may indeed be remembered as a stepping stone for its promising young cast. It opens this Friday (6/8) in New York at the AMC Empire and Village 7, as well as in San Francisco at the AMC Cupertino and Metreon, courtesy of China Lion Entertainment.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on June 6th, 2012 at 10:01pm.

Jason Apuzzo’s LFM Summer Micro-Reviews of Snow White and the Huntsman, Piranha 3DD

Charlize Theron as the wicked queen.

By Jason Apuzzo. This week I’m supplementing Joe Bendel’s Snow White review with my own brief dispatches from your local cineplex:

Snow White and the Huntsman

Some movies look better on paper than they do in theaters, but Snow White and the Huntsman is the rare summer blockbuster that lives up to most of its potential – although one senses that an even better film might’ve been possible with a better script. Elevated by Charlize Theron’s juicy performance as the wicked Queen Ravenna, Chris Hemsworth’s rugged charm (he’s more soulful here than in The Avengers), and some fabulous art design, Snow White basically delivers the goods in revising the Grimm Brothers’ dark fairy tale to the more slick sensibilities of today.

And since girls’ stories are now finally getting the summer blockbuster treatment they deserve, it’s also worth noting that Snow White and the Huntsman is a helluva lot better than much of what the boys have been dishing out of late. (The Avengers was fine, but does anybody remember Green Lantern? Or Green Hornet?) If Snow White and the Huntsman is any indication of what it would be like if gals got equal time during summer blockbuster season, I’ll gladly take it.

Chris Hemsworth as the huntsman.

What Snow White and the Huntsman does not do, however, is make sense of Kristen Stewart’s Snow White character as being some sort of Joan of Arc-style warrior or mystic visionary. Stewart simply doesn’t have the depth for it, even if she and Hemsworth do make for a wholesome and handsome on-screen couple. Also: the film feels like it’s trying a little too hard to be ‘literary’ in the vein of Lord of the Rings, when it should’ve been campier and fun like Willow. After all, do we really need to take the Seven Dwarves so seriously? The Christopher Nolan template doesn’t work for everything. Snow White needed much more humor and a lighter touch to balance its otherwise dreary Germanic material.

Still, if lavish, old-fashioned costume spectaculars are to your taste, or if you want a good look at either Charlize Theron or Chris Hemsworth in their prime, this is the film for you. Charlize in particular is in a major career groove; she’s suddenly Angelina Jolie, minus the National Enquirer lifestyle. Like Theron’s recent Young Adult, Snow White fetishizes her blonde good looks, turning her into a colorful, raving, age-obsessed narcissist. It’s great fun to watch her strutting around having jealous fits – like a watered-down version of Bette Davis, only taller.

Russian model Irina Voronina, with fish.

Jason’s LFM GRADE: B+

•

Piranha 3DD

A travesty! As regular LFM readers know, French director Alexandre Aja’s 2010 horror-comedy Piranha 3D is a favorite of mine – easily one of the best cult/B-movies in recent years. Yet even with cameos from David Hasselhoff and Gary Busey, and with the return of Christopher Lloyd and Ving Rhames (packing prosthetic shotgun legs) from the original, Piranha 3DD is a total disaster – nothing more than an embarrassing, quickie cash-in on the original film that pleased critics and grossed $83 million worldwide.

The basic rule with Roger Corman-style films of this sort is that they have to at least try to take themselves seriously in order to work. Piranha 3DD doesn’t even make the effort. A lame, slapped-together pastiche of inflated breasts, chewed limbs and only intermittently funny jokes, Piranha 3DD is basically just an extended gag reel about a semi-nude waterpark savaged by the same devious, snapping piranhas from the first film … with the noticeably aging Hasselhoff consigned to playing himself, and otherwise winking at the camera every 2 minutes. It doesn’t work.

Endangered swimmer.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, not only are Piranha 3DD’s breasts fake, but so is its running time: the movie is barely over an hour long, artificially padded-out to 83 minutes with footage from the original film, plus an extra-long credit sequence featuring goofball outtakes. You’d think they’d throw in some extra skin there, but pretty much all we get is Hasselhoff singing a new tune of his called, “The Love Hunter.” And believe me, in this case “Love” hurts.

Recommended only for Hasselhoff obsessives, Piranha completists, or maybe just fans of Russian swimsuit model Irina Voronina. Anybody else is out of luck.

LFM GRADE: DD

Posted on June 5th, 2012 at 4:26pm.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty in The Atlantic: ‘Black Lagoon’: The First, Great Pretty-Girl-Attacked-By-Aquatic-Beast Film?

[Editor’s Note: the article below appears today on the front page of The Atlantic.]

Chatting with Julie Adams, the star who helped set the formula followed by the new Piranha 3DD.

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. From piranhas and sharks to brain-eating crabs and giant leeches, Hollywood has provided some frightening and improbable reasons over the years for why pretty girls in bikinis should stay out of the water. Long before this week’s Piranha 3DD or even classics like Jaws, however, it was the lustful Gill Man from 1954’s Creature From the Black Lagoon who first made young women think twice about going swimming.

A beauty-and-the-beast tale of an aquatic humanoid who falls for a female scientist during a research expedition to the Amazon, Creature helped inspire the 3D science fiction craze of the 1950s. It also made its young star, Julie Adams, sci-fi’s first pin-up girl—and launched her distinguished career in film, TV, and on stage.

Still vibrant and active at age 85, Adams remains a popular draw at sci-fi and classic film conventions, where she’s currently promoting her lively new autobiography, The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections From the Black Lagoon, which she cowrote with her son, Emmy Award winning editor Mitch Danton.

From "Creature" to "Piranha": why pretty women should stay out of the water.

Over her lengthy and colorful career, Ms. Adams has seduced Elvis Presley and Dennis Hopper on screen, played John Wayne’s wife, tussled in a burning basement with Barbara Stanwyck, and played the love interest to James Stewart, Rock Hudson, and Charlton Heston. She’s been directed by Anthony Mann and Raoul Walsh—and more recently has appeared in projects like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center and TV shows like CSI and Lost.

Yet Adams still remains best known for her role as Kay Lawrence, the sultry brunette in a plunging one-piece pined over by the Gill Man in Creature.

•

What was your initial reaction upon getting offered Creature?

[Laughs.] Well, I wasn’t thrilled, you know, and I thought I could turn it down, but then I would go on suspension [from Universal Pictures] and wouldn’t get paid … and so I thought, well, the studio wants me to do it, what the hey, it might be fun. And it was!

What was director Jack Arnold like, and how did you two get along?

I got along great with Jack Arnold, and he was a wonderful director. He was very low key, he seemed almost casual—but it was very easy to work with him. Any suggestion he made always made sense.

Did you interact much with William Alland, the producer?

Not that much, because he was not on the set that much—but I liked him. He was always very nice to all of us.

Actress Julie Adams.

Alland played the reporter in Citizen Kane, and he apparently attended a dinner party hosted by Orson Welles while they were shooting Kane. Welles’s lover Dolores Del Rio was also there, and she brought along Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Figueroa had heard a legend as a child about an Amazon water creature, half-man and half-lizard. And the story went that there was an Amazon village that would bring a virgin to the creature once a year in order for the creature not to terrorize the village.

Poor virgin!

Right. So Alland went home later and wrote Figueroa’s story down. And then about 12 years later the whole 3D craze started, and at that point he pulled out the story and started to make a movie of it.

That’s a very interesting story—it fits in, in a wonderful, cuckoo way.

>>>FOR THE REMAINDER OF THIS ARTICLE, PLEASE VISIT The Atlantic.

Special Note to LFM Readers:

Julie Adams’ autobiography The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections From the Black Lagoon is available exclusively at her website . Featuring 300 photos of the gorgeous Adams and her famous co-stars, the book provides a charming look at Adams’ experiences working with movie greats like James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Ida Lupino, and many others. While supplies last, the book also comes with a bonus CD of the iconic score for Creature From the Black Lagoon, re-recorded by Monstrous Movie Music and featuring music by Henry Mancini, among others.

Posted on May 29th, 2012 at 10:13am.

LFM Summer Micro-Reviews: Men in Black 3, Chernobyl Diaries

Josh Brolin and Will Smith are about to light up a party at Andy Warhol's Factory in "Men in Black 3."

By Jason Apuzzo. Here are more of my summer dispatches:

Men in Black 3

After a three year absence from the movies, superstar Will Smith returns to save planet Earth from alien invasion again by traveling back to 1969 to help his straight-laced partner, K – here played by Josh Brolin, in a spot-on, dry-comic imitation of a young Tommy Lee Jones (who also appears in the film). The equivalent of a live action Warner Brothers cartoon, MIB3 showcases director Barry Sonnenfeld’s trademark visual humor, gooey aliens, some light satire at the expense of the loopy 1960s, a nice supporting performance by Emma Thompson, and a great recreation of the Apollo 11 moon launch. Don’t expect any undue brain strain watching this film, however; MIB3 is basically just an expensive platform for Will Smith’s goofy humor – which hasn’t yet grown old, even if this retro-style series probably has.

LFM GRADE: B

Stay out of Russia.

Chernobyl Diaries

The basic message of this generally predictable, by-the-book scream fest from writer-producer Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity) is: stay out of Russia. When a group of not-very-bright American 20-somethings indulge in some ‘extreme tourism’ by visiting Pripyat (former home to the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor) with a shifty tour guide named ‘Yuri,’ they get a lot more than they bargained for when something creepy begins attacking them after dark. Peli & Co. keep things tense by never really showing you very much – but the characters are too bland and stupid to care about, like they just wandered in from a Final Destination 12 audition. Still, Russian officialdom comes across pretty badly in Chernobyl Diaries; don’t expect any gala Kremlin screenings of this film, with its hints of dark doings on the part of Russia’s military-scientific complex.

LFM GRADE: B-

[Editor’s note: for thoughts on the whole Russia vs. Ukraine issue, please see the comments section below.]

Posted on May 26th, 2012 at 12:37pm.