Author: Jason Apuzzo

Jason Apuzzo is co-Editor of Libertas Film Magazine.

Weekend Hollywood Round-up, 6/12

More "Twilight" for Kristen Stewart.

By Jason Apuzzo. • BP decides to purchase Kevin Costner oil separator. Costner officially wins MOST HELPFUL CELEBRITY IN THE GULF sweepstakes.  James Cameron goes home sulking to clean his pool using underwater robots.  Costner still hasn’t been paid by BP yet, even though he’s been promised money.  As a Hollywood actor, he should be used to that.

• The Karate Kid leading The A-Team by wide margin at weekend box office. Battle of the 80’s remakes.  Heads may roll over at Fox due to the ongoing A-Team debacle; pic had 11 writers, over 10 years in development.  Sort of like Hillary’s presidential campaign.

• Twilight: Breaking Dawn will be broken into two movies … for the same reason the final ‘Harry Potter’ novel is being broken down into two movies: they’ll make more money, and they’ll fit better into the overhead storage bins on Delta.

• Meg Whitman being outpaced by Jerry Brown in raising Hollywood money, even though Meg was once a senior Disney executive. This is only happening because Jerry used to be such a hot development exec at Marvel.

• Batman 3 may start filming in March 2011, although neither the script nor a cast has been finalized.  Rumors flying that the new villain will be Helen Thomas.

• Clash of the Titans 2 has a new pair of screenwriters. Before they write a word, they should read this post so that the original story isn’t wrecked any further.

Kristina and Karissa Shannon.

• Sam Raimi has been approached to direct a Wizard of Oz prequel for Disney, to compete with two other Oz-related projects developing at Warner Brothers.  Why is the faraway, fantasy land of Oz suddenly so popular in Obama era?

• Celebrity mistresses are really cashing in these days, according to Fox News. Btw, is there an iPhone app for Tiger mistresses?

• Sofia Coppola’s next film, Somewhere, will likely show at the Venice Film Festival, and will feature an eclectic cast that will include Stephen Dorff, Michelle Monaghan, Benicio del Toro and twin Playboy Bunnies Karissa and Kristina Shannon.  I’ll watch anything Sofia does.  Looking forward to this film!  Will there be an accompanying Coppola wine?

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … a group of French psychiatrists have concluded that Darth Vader must’ve suffered from ‘borderline personality disorder.’ That’s part of Darth’s problem, but those Sith robes are also so restrictive around the waist …

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

Posted on June 12, 2010 at 7:26pm.

The Fresh Prince of Beijing: A Guest Review of The Karate Kid

Jaden Smith, the new "Karate Kid."

[Editor’s Note: since the Chinese government exercised editorial control over the new Sony remake of The Karate Kid, LFM has decided to invite an officially sanctioned Chinese film critic, People’s Film Commissar Wo Fat, to do a guest review of the film.  This review has been translated from the original Mandarin by Jason Apuzzo, a long-time friend and golfing-partner of Wo Fat’s.]

By People’s Film Commissar Wo Fat. Greetings, dear readers of Libertas.  It is my pleasure to accept Comrade Apuzzo’s kind invitation to review the new American-Chinese co-production of The Karate Kid. I feel that by reviewing this most extraordinary and historic cinema co-production on the arch-imperialist website Libertas, that we are opening up a new era of cooperation and understanding!

With special assistance from the Sony corporation, we have made several changes to your original Karate Kid, a warmongering, Reagan-era film that was pock-marked – like the blemished faces of your pimply American teenagers – with the backward, revanchist rhetoric of that era.  In our new Karate Kid, we no longer have young New Jersey teenager Daniel and his economically disenfranchised mother seek a new life in the state of California.  Instead, we have young ‘Dre’ – played with scrappy insouciance by Jaden Smith (son of your American movie star, Comrade Will Smith!) – seek his fortune in a more suitable land of opportunity: mainland China.  In the new Karate Kid, a heartless American automotive company in Detroit shifts the job held by Dre’s mother to Beijing.  Since America offers no other possible job opportunities for her, she is forced to make the only economically rational decision: move herself and her son 10,000 kilometers to the (Far) East, even though they don’t speak Chinese!

Once in Beijing, young Dre begins to learn salient facts about our glorious People’s Republic!  For example, in his first encounter with Wise Mentor Jackie Chan, young Dre learns that unreliable electricity in Beijing has the side benefit of ‘saving the planet’ – unlike in America, where a consistent power supply in suburban homes causes excess fuel consumption.  True!  [Jason Apuzzo asks: didn’t this scene omit the fact that China is actually the world’s largest polluter, and that millions of Chinese citizens have been forcefully moved from their homes to make way for the enormous, electricity-generating Three Gorges Dam? [Comments edited by Wo Fat.]

A forbidden romance at The Forbidden City.

Young Comrade Dre also develops a schoolboy crush on a cute Chinese girl named Meiying (played by Wenwen Han).  Meiying is an aspiring violinist, trying to rise in China’s glorious and edifying music world.  Dre’s vitality  and rough American charm (son of Will Smith!) warms her heart, and brings added zest to her music playing … and isn’t this a marvelous metaphor for Chinese-American cooperation?  Young Dre even lets Meiying listen to hip-hop music off his Sony music player, a product that neatly matches the Sony computer screens and Sony TV monitors placed conspicuously throughout the film.  The Karate Kid is part of the Sony product line, after all!

Anyway, young Dre’s growing affection for Meiying gets him in trouble with some local bullies who are friends of her family’s.  And here I want to point out: the bullies depicted in this film are not normal figures in the New China.  They are counter-revolutionaries, and enemies of the people!  The People’s Republic has graciously consented to allow this depiction of anti-social behavior in order to further the plotline of Sony’s film, but the actors depicting these bullies have since been reprimanded and are currently serving 70 years’ hard labor in a coal mine in Shanxi. Continue reading The Fresh Prince of Beijing: A Guest Review of The Karate Kid

“The Young Marines”

By Jason Apuzzo. Later today we’ll be posting a review of Sony’s Karate Kid remake. The Karate Kid, as everybody knows, is about a young kid who trains himself in the martial arts in order to protect himself from bullying and to rebuild his self-esteem.

The Karate Kid reminded me of a nice little short that I caught recently called, “The Young Marines.” “The Young Marines” is about the Young Marine program, that serves a similar function for young people – and also puts them on a path to serving their country.  Enjoy.

Footnote: unlike with The Karate Kid, the Chinese government did not have editorial oversight of this short.

Posted on June 11th, 2010 at 9:11am.

Hollywood Round-up, 6/10

Would you want this woman as your queen?

By Jason Apuzzo. • More celebrities are starting to weigh-in on the BP oil spill. Consensus is: Kevin Costner coming out on top right now over James Cameron in the race to be the MOST HELPFUL CELEBRITY IN THE GULF.  Costner apparently spent $20 million of his own money to invent a technology to separate oil from water.  [I have that problem all the time whenever I’m eating a salad.]  On a related note, I’ve just started work on special glasses that can separate Alec Baldwin’s image from my Turner Classic Movies cable signal.

• Rumors flying (see here and here) about Angelina Jolie being approached to play Cleopatra, in a forthcoming adaptation of Stacy Schiff’s book, Cleopatra: A Life. Word to the wise, Jolie-Cleopatra rumors have actually been around so long I covered them on the old version of Libertas.  So we’ll see.  One thing’s for sure: Jolie’s juggled enough men that playing Cleopatra shouldn’t be much trouble.

• Green Lantern 2 is apparently already a ‘go,’ even before the first film is out. In other superhero news, Flash also looks like it’s going forward, and now there’s word coming about a Fantastic Four ‘reboot‘.  A ‘reboot’?  Coming so soon off the last Fantastic Four film, what they really need is a ‘mind-wipe.’

Rosie arrives.

• John McCain tweeted Jersey Shore‘s Snooki the other day, assuring her that in a McCain Administration she wouldn’t be taxed for her tanning sessions. As I write that last sentence, it occurs to me that our civilization must be reaching a terminal stage.

• Sony will soon be releasing a huge range of 3D products for the home theater market. I wasn’t aware that I was going to need a special 3D Blu-ray player, to go along with the new 3D flat screen.  This is getting expensive, guys.  I’m starting to re-think my Blu-ray pre-order of Piranha.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Rosie Huntington-Whiteley has shown up on the Transformers 3 set to start filming.  See photos of that here.

In more Transformers news, Michael Bay confirms that Transformers 3 will, indeed, be shot in 3-D … but he’s apparently having some difficulty getting city officials in Washington, D.C. to let him blow half the city up.  It’s OK to blow up the budget in D.C., just not the city parks.

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

Posted on June 10, 2010 at 8:16pm.

Sony Agrees to Chinese Censorship of Karate Kid

From Sony's new "Karate Kid" remake.

By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday LFM was the first site (so far as we’re aware) to make a fuss over the fact that Sony agreed to let the Chinese government have some editorial oversight over the new Karate Kid remake.

I wrote about this issue in the context of the forthcoming Red Dawn remake from MGM, which certain Western critics are already deriding (see here and here) as being unduly harsh on the Chinese government.

Again, here’s the money quote from the LA Times article about the decision:

“If Sony made Karate Kid with a Chinese partner, it could be a part of that Asian gold rush, but the deal would come with some foreseeable obstacles, including possible government censorship.

[Doug Belgrad, president of Sony’s Columbia Pictures] didn’t think long before giving his answer. “That was enough to say yes,” says Belgrad.”

The LA Times article goes further and reports the following:

The “Karate Kid” decision not only launched the biggest modern movie co-production between an American studio and China, but also opened up the film to government-mandated creative controls that ultimately yielded two slightly different movies, as Chinese censors asked that several scenes, including sequences of bullying and a kiss between two young characters, be trimmed.

Now, based on my reading of the full LA Times article, my sense is that the changes required by the Chinese censors were relatively minor.  Additionally, it’s not as if this is the first time American filmmakers have bowed to Chinese censors (some recent cases include Mission Impossible 3 and The Painted Veil).

With that said, what strikes me about this decision by Sony are two things:

  1. If the editorial demands from the Chinese were indeed minor, why give in to them – since the film otherwise seems to depict Chinese society so favorably?
  2. Why did a simple Karate Kid remake have to pass through the hands of Chinese government censors in the first place?  Wasn’t there some other way to do this film? Continue reading Sony Agrees to Chinese Censorship of Karate Kid

Red Dawn Update + LA Times’ Goldstein Praises Libertas

"We all read Libertas ... so should you!"

By Jason Apuzzo. Our recent post about MGM’s forthcoming remake of Red Dawn (see here) has gotten quite a bit of attention around the internet.

First of all, we want to thank Patrick Goldstein of The LA Times who just did an entire piece today on our reaction to Red Dawn.  We especially want to thank Patrick for his kind words about LFM:

“… Libertas Film Magazine, a newly revived version of the blog that set the standard for smart conservative film writing and in its first weeks of new life has already easily surpassed Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, if for no other reason than that Apuzzo and his film-loving cohorts (including the always provocative Govindini Murty, who recently weighed in with a stirring defense of “Sex & the City 2″) don’t spend all their waking hours simply bashing all the usual lefty Hollywood suspects.”

That’s very kind of Patrick, and we want to thank him for stating, in just a few words, what we feel makes us unique.

Also, since our initial post, we’ve spoken to an executive at MGM about the new Red Dawn, and he provided us with some exciting details about the film.  Additionally, he confirmed a few basic points about the film: 1) the negative cost for the film is actually around $42 million; 2) Red Dawn as yet has no release date due to the complex situation at MGM; 3) Connor Cruise appears in the film, but is not actually the film’s main star.  However, the great news is that the film is apparently going to be as hardcore as it seems, and based on what we’ve already been told conservatives will be electrified by this film.

We’ll have a lot more to report about Red Dawn down the line.

Posted on June 10, 2010 at 11:32am.