Jason Apuzzo – Page 59 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

Hollywood Round-up, 6/24

kristen stewart HQ model 1 — Kristen Stewart of "Twilight."

By Jason Apuzzo. • Google/YouTube has won the first round of its legal battle with Viacom over copyright protection. Based on what I’m reading, it’s looking very much like this won’t get decided until the case hits the Supreme Court. Rooting for Viacom here, because Google’s getting far too powerful – for all the wrong reasons.

• Are fanboys already rallying around Christopher Nolan’s Inception, in the wake of a so-so review from Rolling Stone? Fanboy reality check: Nolan’s never done much at the box office outside of the Batman series. I also just read about an iPhone/GPS app designed to help promote Inception, and somewhat like the film it’s almost impossible to tell what the damn thing’s supposed to do. Someone needs to implant in my brain a reason I should care about this film.

• Twilight fans are gearing up for the film’s opening. While insider-chic has Inception the summer’s hottest film (or maybe Toy Story 3?), this film is probably going to blow them all away. And it will still be reported as a ‘surprise’ as Hollywood slowly figures out that females go to the movies, too.

• Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog runs through the Lessons to be Learned from the Jonah Hex Debacle. Here’s just one lesson I can think of: avoid lead characters with melted faces.

• New Hollywood genre: movies billed as ‘the next Avatar.’ The latest is called Ion, a sci-fi spectacle being produced by Tony & Ridley Scott. ‘Next Avatars‘ tend to be big sci-fi spectacles with a romantic subplot. Blue skin and Spock ears optional.

• With Tom Cruise’s Knight and Day tracking poorly, Paramount is apparently re-thinking Mission Impossible 4. MI3 had a nasty anti-American subtext that didn’t help matters, either. Maybe they should have Cruise do something useful in the next film like get Simon Cowell back on American Idol.

• Breck Eisner talks about his remake of Escape From New York today, and also about removing himself from the remake of Creature From the Black Lagoon, which is now being directed by the guy doing the Logan’s Run remake. These guys should save themselves the embarrassment and just retrofit the old films into the new 3D.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … old Libertas favorite Jessica Simpson has given herself ‘the gift of thin’ for her 30th birthday. In Hollywood that’s truly the gift that keeps on giving.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on June 24th, 2010 at 12:28pm.

New Bollywood Film Mocks Osama bin Laden

By Jason Apuzzo. A new Bollywood film called Tere bin Laden (Without You, Laden) that satirizes Osama bin Laden, is apparently set for release next month (on July 16th) according to the AFP.

According to the film’s Wikipedia entry …

Tere Bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek comedy about an ambitious young news reporter from Pakistan who is desperate to migrate to the US in pursuit of the American dream. His repeated attempts to immigrate are shot down as his visa is always rejected. But when things couldn’t look worse he comes across an Osama bin laden look alike. Ali then hatches a scheme to produce a fake Osama video and sell it to news channels as a breakthrough scoop! Unfortunately there are serious ramifications as the White House gets involved and dispatches an overzealous secret agent on Ali Zafar’s trail.

Satire is an extremely potent weapon, and it isn’t really surprising that current Bollywood filmmakers would feel comfortable going into this comedic territory due to the dire, ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism to Indian society (as grimly evidenced by the 2008 Mumbai attacks). As Arun Venugopal wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Bollywood has been cranking out movies of various sorts on the subject of terrorism for the past several years – Kurbaan (2009), Black and White (2008) A Wednesday! (2008), My Name is Khan (2010) and Aamir (2008), just to name a few – while filmmakers in the West have been cowering under dark clouds of political correctness. And as we’ve been covering here at LFM, extremely funny hit indie films like The Infidel (see the LFM review), Four Lions and the award-winning web series Living With the Infidels have recently been ripping away the veil that’s been hovering over this subject … while Hollywood dithers, still trying to figure out what is politically ‘safe’ to say about terrorism.

We wish the filmmakers well with this new project. The film’s trailer is below.

Posted on June 24th, 2010 at 9:38am.

Hollywood Round-up, 6/23

By Jason Apuzzo. • A new poster is out for The Social Network, the new David Fincher movie starring Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake about the co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Can Fincher make this interesting – or will this just be Adventureland meets Wall Street?

• A new trailer is out for Predators, the reboot for that faltering series. The new film stars Laurence Fishburne and … Adrien Brody? Adrien Brody?

• Are excuses already being prepared for Inception faltering at the box office? Some interesting speculation at the NY Post today. [The classic ‘it’s too smart for middle America’ excuse.] You heard it here first: no way Inception rescues summer.

• Raquel Welch does another colorful Fox News interview, this time with Mike Huckabee. Somebody at TLC please give Raquel her own show, right now.

• Speaking of interviews, here’s Jean-Luc Godard’s sit-down interview at the Paris premiere of his latest (and last?) film, Film Socialism. He’s looking pretty ragged, frankly. May be time to hang it up.

p3dmore — Endangered beachgoers in "Piranha 3D."

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … forget Inception – this summer’s most anticipated film (by me) is clearly Piranha 3D … and that film also has a new poster out today. Think of this film as a Pixar movie for adults. Piranha 3D has a great cast featuring Jessica Szohr, Steven R. McQueen (grandson of Steve McQueen!), Elisabeth Shue, Jerry O’Connell, Ving Rhames, Richard Dreyfuss (quasi-reprising his role from Jaws), Christopher Lloyd … and a bevy of lovely, endangered female beachgoers such as the ones shown on your right.

Freedom isn’t free. Everyone should be concerned about beach safety, without which American men – and especially women – are unable to enjoy weekend recreational swimming and sunbathing. We’d like to thank the makers of Piranha 3D for highlighting the sacrifices that sometimes need to be made in order to keep America’s beaches safe and secure.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on June 23rd, 2010 at 2:30pm.

Controversial Anti-Chinese Government Films Released

2009818102055557 — "Buried," from director Wang Libo.

By Jason Apuzzo. LFM contributor Joe Bendel recently reviewed the controversial and award-winning documentary 1428, which is currently showing at The Los Angeles Film Festival. 1428 depicts the botched and inhumane handling of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake by the Chinese communist regime.

Now comes word that another recent documentary about the Chinese government’s appalling mismanagement of a deadly earthquake – in this case, the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake that killed over 200,000 people – has been made available for free (in 12 parts) on YouTube. The title of this documentary from director Wang Libo is Buried (2009), and amazingly the film was one of the prizewinners of the 2009 Beijing Documentary Film Festival.

Joe Bendel writes in his review of Buried that the film “methodically assembles a damning indictment of the Chinese government … Unless Wang fabricated Buried out of whole cloth, he presents an airtight case of government negligence and craven bureaucratic cya-ing.”

We encourage LFM readers to check out this extraordinarily courageous film from Wang Libo.

IN ADDITION … we wanted LFM readers to get a chance to see the Oscar nominated short China’s Unnatural Disaster, that was shown earlier this year on HBO. This utterly heartbreaking documentary film gives you a sense of what life is like under China’s brutal regime. You will see, for example, a parent’s official letter of ‘compensation’ after the Sichuan earthquake from the Chinese government: $317 for each dead child. It turns out, however, that even this ‘compensation’ is tied to a pledge to “obey the law and maintain social order.” Those willing to cooperate with the government (i.e., keep their mouths shut and stop complaining) have their ‘compensation’ packages upped to $8,800 per dead child.

Btw, I’m so glad Obama bowed to Chinese President Hu Jintao, aren’t you?

Posted on June 23rd, 2010 at 11:09am.

Hollywood Round-up, 6/22

By Jason Apuzzo. • The new trailer for The Green Hornet is out, and I agree with The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick that it is so transcendently awful, so smugly idiotic, as to be almost indescribable. Why was Seth Rogen allowed within 3,000 miles of this project?

• Fans are already lining up, waiting for the next installment of the Twilight series … and some are now asking whether Twilight has a pro-life, pro-Mormon subtext to it. I’m not going to even pretend to know the answer to that, but if I was 18 and female I’ll bet I would.

• Disney’s first Marvel superhero franchise picture will apparently be Dr. Strange, probably because that’s the only available character left.

• More 3D digital screens are being made available all the time, but fewer audiences are flocking to them due to higher ticket prices. This is a completely predictable development, mimicking certain tendencies from the short-lived 1950s 3D craze. I believe it was Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times who recently warned the industry that it was, in effect, killing the goose that lays the golden egg by prematurely raising 3D ticket prices. Well, the goose has now left the building. With Elvis. Or something.

• Disney is debuting its Tron products/swag line, including toys, video games and apparel. Seth Rogen’s not in this film, right? Just checking.

OliviaWilde-TronLEgacy — The new "Tron" couch. Babe not included.

• Oliver Stone is now saying that neither Castro nor Hugo Chavez are really dictators, as his South of the Border documentary gets ready for its (not so) big U.S. release. We may go on a hiatus from commenting on Oliver for a while, as his remarks become increasingly calibrated to: 1) court cheap publicity; 2) land him a detox booking at Passages Malibu.

7-reasons-olga-kurylenko-should-be-black-widow-03-420-75 — Olga Kurylenko.

• Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe is attached to star in All Quiet on the Western Front, an adaptation of a classic war novel that has little relevance to the current war we’re fighting – yet will be ceaselessly promoted as ‘relevant’ once it’s released.

• The remake of Footloose has a new star, as well as an April 1st release date for next year and no, I’m not kidding about that.

• Jon Voight criticizes President Obama today for selling out both Israel … and Arizona. Btw, is Deliverance on Blu-ray yet? That would be awesome.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Rotten Tomatoes is featuring a behind-the-scenes early first look at Centurion, the new sword-and-sandles film starring former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko. Ancient Rome gets such a bad name these days – it’s nice to see the Romans finally get a little love thrown their way on the big screen.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.

Posted on June 22nd, 2010 at 6:35pm.

New Film Please Remove Your Shoes Asks: Are We Really Safe From Terrorists?

By Jason Apuzzo. The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog reports today on a new documentary called Please Remove Your Shoes, about the troubled state of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA).

Please Remove Your Shoes follows the efforts of six whistleblower employees trying to fix what has obviously become – particularly in the wake of the Christmas bomber episode – an increasingly porous security situation at our nation’s airports.

According to the film’s website, the documentary “examines the period before 911 and the current situation nine years later and asks the questions that makes Washington squirm: ‘Are we really any better for all our money spent? Or is it safe to say that nothing has changed?'”

The driving force behind the project is retired pilot Fred Gevalt, who was himself flying a plane into New York on the morning of 9/11 – and was apparently 20 miles out of LaGuardia airport when the attack took place.

According to Speakeasy:

The final production, which Gevalt is self distributing July 1, asks viewers to evaluate if the TSA has truly made flying the friendly skies any safer post 9/11, and features interviews with Congressmen James Oberstar and John Mica (both of whom are on the Committee of Transportation and Infrastructure), as well as a number of former TSA and FAA employees. Gevalt adds that it wasn’t easy finding enough subjects to speak about their relationship with the TSA on the record, but as one interview beget another, “the business of access became less difficult.”

In a review of the film by Manhattan Movie Magazine, Lita Robinson writes: “Through extensive interviews with ex-Air Marshals, government officials and reporters, this documentary examines the advent of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) in the wake of 9/11, painting a disturbing picture of waste, inefficiency, and abuse of power. The former Marshals, several of whom have specific expertise in aviation-based terrorism, describe a ‘nonexistent’ security system before 9/11, and a bureaucratic nightmare after.”

We’ve all become accustomed to the bizarre situation at our nation’s airports – a situation in which passengers are asked to perform something akin to a highly ritualized Japanese tea ceremony of removing our shoes, bowing respectfully before our superiors, and speaking in low, formalized tones professing our innocence (“No, I’m not carrying plastic explosives in my contact lens case”) … all the while never feeling that we’re any safer. If Mr. Gevalt’s film can in any way improve this situation – and improve our security – then we wish him the very best with it. It’s a pity to me that this documentary is being self-distributed, due to the extremely important subject matter – and the fact that the film appears to have good production values and feature credible experts on the situation. But such is typically the fate of whistleblowers who buck the system. Feel free to visit the film’s official website for more information.

Posted on June 22nd, 2010 at 3:25pm.