Category: 1. Jason Apuzzo

Cold War Update!: More on The X-Men, Bond, J. Edgar Hoover, The Iron Lady and Olga Kurylenko as a CIA Agent!

A Soviet warship approaches Cuba in "X-Men: First Class."

By Jason Apuzzo. • A series of new trailers for X-Men: First Class have been released, the key one (for story purposes) being the international trailer. This trailer really sets the tone for this film being situated in the Kennedy-era of the Cold War, right at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. The X-Men mutants are sent on a top-secret mission related to Cuba, and seem to be depicted as expendable pawns of the CIA in an effort to defeat the Russians, with the X-Men brooding over the general ingratitude of humanity – and, one senses, the American military establishment – toward their contributions.

Boo-hoo.

This type of storyline, which would be annoying under any circumstances, is seeming even more irritating to me after the events of this past weekend, when the CIA proved its tremendous value to America and the entire free world by helping to take out bin Laden. You’d think we could now take a breather from soft-pedaling our intelligence services and military operations … but no. Note the conspiratorial tone taken in the trailer toward the X-Men, as our military people refer to them as “collateral damage” and contemplate the extra-legal measures the government will take in controlling them. It’s the usual anti-military stereotype in play here, with distant cinematic relatives of Colonel Jack D. Ripper contemplating ways to eliminate the Soviet threat and mutant threat in one fell swoop. I was expecting to see Dick Cheney show up and water-board Jennifer Lawrence (preferably in a bikini).

The confluence of events here – between this film, and real-life events in the War on Terror – is quite telling. You really get a sense of how backward and behind the times contemporary Hollywood always is, constantly following yesterday’s Baby Boomer narratives, especially when they concern America’s place in the world. Why make a snarky now movie about the last war – which we won – just as we’re finally gaining ground in the new one?

I have to tell you: although the new X-Men trailers have a smooth, stylish look to them – a Cold War retro-chic that’s quite appealing – I’ve never really liked the X-Men films, and I’m approaching this new one skeptically. Basically I’ve never liked the whiny victimology the X-Men films peddle. The characters in these films are always a little too precious and narcissistic, and not especially heroic. And despite the filmmakers’ intentions, these films never strike me as adequate metaphors for the civil rights struggles of the 1960s – which were very much crusades of the powerless rather than of glamorous, power-enabled superheroes. (Incidentally, star Michael Fassbender – who looks compelling in the trailer – recently told The LA Times that the Magneto-Professor X relationship of the film is based in part on the Malcolm X-Martin Luther King relationship, underlining the film’s civil rights-era subtext.)

January Jones in "X-Men: First Class."

We just saw how real military heroes (not the comic book kind) acted in Abbottabad, Pakistan on Sunday: they went in, completed their mission, and moved on to their next task with a maximum of anonymity and a minimum of drama. Had our Navy SEALS completed the bin Laden mission, and then returned to Washington to conduct a rage-filled raid on the Pentagon, followed by a tear-filled recounting of their sad childhood on The View … you’d essentially have this new X-Men trailer. [Sigh.] What a bummer. The people who really fought the Cold War were so much cooler than this.

Btw, in other X-Men: First Class news, Michael Fassbender talks to The New York Times about the film here, and here are some new promo shots of the film.

• Thor is about to open, starring Chris Hemsworth, and based on what I’m hearing the film is likely to make Hemsworth a major star. This is also likely to have major ramifications for MGM’s Red Dawn, which still doesn’t have a distributor.

My sense is that distributors will be very eager to grab Red Dawn post-Thor, and that MGM will have significant leverage at that point … which makes the scrubbing of the Chinese threat from that film seem all the more cowardly now.

• Speaking of MGM and craven market pandering, the studio is apparently raising about $45 million toward the next Bond film – a full third of the film’s budget – by way of product placement. The Bond films have always done a lot of product placement – but that figure is nonetheless raising eyebrows for the epic scale of its cupidity. My personal recommendation is that when Bond is chasing the new villain, he should wear the new Nike Zoom Kobe VI, with its “Black mamba-inspired rubber outsole for excellent traction.” Just a thought. Continue reading Cold War Update!: More on The X-Men, Bond, J. Edgar Hoover, The Iron Lady and Olga Kurylenko as a CIA Agent!

Victory



By Jason Apuzzo. I wanted to put up a movie clip today that would capture my feelings about what happened yesterday in Pakistan. The selection of the clip turned out to be an easy one.

Well done, Mr. President, and bravo to the many American heroes who made this historic victory possible.

Posted on May 2nd, 2011 at 1:23pm.

Mega-Invasion Alert!: Transformers, Ender’s Game, The Martian Chronicles, Oblivion, Archangel & 3D Fish Join the Invasion!

Meet your master: "Shockwave," the new villain from "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."

By Jason Apuzzo. • It’s been a long time since our last Invasion Alert!, but I wanted to wait until the new Transformers: Dark of the Moon trailer was out before doing another installment … and that’s where we’ll start today, with Michael Bay’s spectacular trailer to what will likely be the summer’s biggest hit. I haven’t given Michael Bay enough credit in previous Invasion Alerts! for crafting what has obviously become a highly entertaining, epic-in-scale and surprisingly emotional series in the Transformers films – the cream of the recent ‘alien invasion’ genre. How much do I like Bay’s stuff? I’ll say what most critics won’t admit to but probably are thinking – which is that the Transformers movies are likely going to be remembered as among the best ‘alien invasion’ flicks since the 1950s … whether they have their innocuous origins in Hasbro toys or not.

The great thing about the Transformers films, in my opinion, is that they’re not only enormous in scale, but they get all the human touches right – with their warm, earthy characters, realistic family dynamics, and lively sense of humor. You’ve got to be a major stick-in-the-mud to not find these movies a lot of fun. The films also have a pro-American, pro-military, middle class vibe to them – and it’s hard not to like all the campy fetishism associated with the cars, motorcycles, gadgets, military hardware, hot chicks, etc. These films indulge every high school male fantasy imaginable, but do so with stye and humor.

The other aspect of these films that stands out, of course, is their War on Terror subtext – and there is a quite palpable 9/11-quality to the new Transformers trailer, with alien invaders arriving in downtown Chicago and toppling a gigantic building, with major characters scrambling to get out of it. Am I the only one who was thinking of the World Trade Center watching that sequence?

I like that Bay isn’t flinching in depicting this type of thing on-screen. We’re almost ten years past the original attacks, and I sense that people have forgotten what a horrific day that was – and what its larger implications were for our culture. This is exactly what sci-fi does at its best: in the midst of indulging our fantasies, it reminds us of the real world we’re living in and all of its challenges.

And speaking of indulging our fantasies … what are we thinking of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley? She’s looking a little plain-vanilla/girl-next-door to me in comparison to the edgier, minx-like Megan Fox.  I also preferred Ms. Fox’s blasé, cheeky attitude toward the robot mayhem; Rosie seems a little too scared in the clips I’ve seen. Just a thought.

In any case, I’m very much looking forward to Dark of the Moon – especially this cool-looking new villain (see the top of this post), ‘Shockwave,’ who reminds me of Gort. I don’t think this new Dark of the Moon trailer was quite as strong as the initial teaser trailer, and I would’ve preferred more emphasis on story than on CGI chaos, but I know the movie will be good – and probably jaw-dropping in 3D. Looking forward to it. On the news front, here’s the plot synopsis to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, here Rosie Huntington-Whiteley talks about Michael Bay’s work ethic, here she talks about wanting a wedding scene in the next film, and Bay himself talks to MTV about the film here and here.

American military studs fight alien invaders in "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."

• All of a sudden Tron: Legacy director Joe Kosinski is becoming Hollywood’s go-to alien invasion guy. His new project Oblivion – about a soldier in a post-apocalyptic future who battles savage alien life forms – just picked up Tom Cruise as its star, and Kosinski’s project  Archangel (about “a secret unit of the military that tracks and hunts down aliens among us”) just picked up a screenwriter. Plus, Kosinski is apparently shepherding Disney’s reboot of The Black Hole, not to mention the Tron sequels (see here and here). Continue reading Mega-Invasion Alert!: Transformers, Ender’s Game, The Martian Chronicles, Oblivion, Archangel & 3D Fish Join the Invasion!

UPDATED: Atlas Shrugged Producer Throws in The Towel, Blames ‘Critics’ for the Demise of the Franchise

"Sorry, Dagny, I'm quitting."

By Jason Apuzzo. After my one-line review of Atlas Shrugged, Part I I’d intended to stop talking about the film, but events keep making that impossible. Today, a mere week after bragging to The Hollywood Reporter about his great marketing plan, Atlas Shrugged, Part I producer John Aglialoro essentially tells the LA Times that he’s throwing in the towel on making Parts II and III. He’s also backing-off plans to expand Part I to 1000 screens.

Here are the LA Times money quotes, in which Aglialoro blames the demise of his incipient franchise on “critics,” rather than on his film:

“Critics, you won … I’m having deep second thoughts on why I should do Part 2. … Why should I put up all of that money if the critics are coming in like lemmings?” Aglialoro said. “I’ll make my money back and I’ll make a profit, but do I wanna go and do two? Maybe I just wanna see my grandkids and go on strike.”

So the critics who disliked his film are “lemmings.” I’m laughing at this because these “lemmings” would apparently include Kurt Loder of Reason Magazine, and a host of other like-minded critics I could name. But why bother? I’m sure we’re all just part of the vast leftist/Looter conspiracy out to get Mr. Aglialoro and his film.

Taylor Schilling with John Aglialoro.

What’s particularly galling here is that in his LA Times interview, Mr. Aglialoro indicated no plans to release the rights to Atlas Shrugged from the purgatory they currently inhabit while in his hands. As Libertas reported recently in our exclusive review of the Randall Wallace-Angelina Jolie Atlas Shrugged screenplay, so much more could’ve been made of this project – but Aglialoro’s intransigence in holding onto the rights is keeping better versions from being made.

What this currently means, of course, is that Atlas Shrugged, Part I will now join Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I among other unfinished film franchises – the difference being that Brooks’ was actually intended to be a joke.

[UPDATE 4/28: Now Mr. Aglialoro is telling The Hollywood Reporter that he in fact will make Parts II and III, “even though critics hate the movie and business at movie theaters has fallen off a cliff.” He also continues to claim political persecution on the part of critics. “It was a nihilistic craze,” Aglialoro said. “Not in the history of Hollywood has 16 reviewers said the same low things about a movie. … They’re lemmings,” he said. “What’s their fear of Ayn Rand? They hate this woman. They hate individualism.” Apparently these ‘nihilistic lemmings’ who ‘hate individualism’ would also include Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media, who referred to the film as a “fiasco.”

What a farce this is. It’s quite obvious that Mr. Aglialoro felt the need to make a public pronouncement as to whether he intends to passively squat on the rights to Atlas Shrugged, now that his first film has tanked. Possibly this was a result of our pressing him on the rights matter here at Libertas, since no one else in the media has brought this up. Who knows? There is a phrase for how Mr. Aglialoro is handling all this, however: amateur hour. Expect that Part II and Part III will not be made, and the rights quietly sold away in months ahead.]

Posted on April 27th, 2011 at 10:49am.

New Cold War Thriller Farewell Now on Blu-ray/DVD

David Soul (left) with Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan in "Farewell."

By Jason Apuzzo. We wanted Libertas readers to know that a movie we were very excited about last year, the new Cold War thriller Farewell, just recently came to Blu-ray/DVD – and is available now here through the LFM Store. Special thanks to reader Vince for tipping me off about Farewell‘s release.

Farewell tells the true story of a disenchanted K.G.B. colonel  — code-named ‘Farewell’ by Western spy agencies – who decided that he could no longer serve the Soviet state, and consequently chose to funnel classified information to French intelligence agents. This intelligence apparently included information on what the Soviets knew about our air defenses, how much the Soviets were spending on defense, what defense technologies they were stealing from the United States, and also a list of highly placed K.G.B. agents who’d infiltrated government and industry in the West.

The leaking of this information, when later combined with President Reagan’s public commitment to create the ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system, were crucial elements in the winning of the Cold War. In fact, President Ronald Reagan himself called L’Affaire Farewell “one of the most important espionage cases of the 20th century.”

Farewell stars Willem Defoe, David Soul and Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan, and you can read Joe Bendel’s glowing Libertas review of the film here. The film is available on Blu-ray/DVD, and through Amazon streaming. Give it a look!

Posted on April 22nd, 2011 at 12:04pm.