By Jason Apuzzo. We’ve been pumping you up about The Devil’s Double, the new film about the mobster-like lifestyle of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday as played by Dominic Cooper.
As regular readers will recall, Libertas’ Joe Bendel reviewed The Devil’s Double at Sundance in January and absolutely loved it (see his review here). Lionsgate will be releasing the film here in the States on July 29th.
Today we’ve got another reason to get you pumped: a new poster for the film has just been released for the film (see left), featuring Dominic Cooper looking highly Scarface-like as Uday.
The vulgar splendor of this poster is absolutely beyond belief, epic in scale. Tarantino doesn’t even get posters this good.
By Jason Apuzzo. War photographer and documentarian Tim Hetherington was killed yesterday in Libya, while covering the civil war there. The New York Times reports on the incident here. We extend our condolences to his friends, family and colleagues.
Tim Hetherington.
Hetherington’s extraordinary documentary about the Afghanistan war, Restrepo, was nominated for an Oscar just last year (read Joe Bendel’s Libertas review here). Hetherington was one of the leading photographers and documentarians of his generation, a courageous and poetic soul who studied literature at Oxford and who brought a writer’s sensibility to his work. He will be missed.
I invite Libertas readers to take a few moments and watch what was apparently Hetherington’s last film effort, a short film called Diary which I’ve embedded above. It’s really an astonishing piece of filmmaking – richly suggestive of what a talent Hetherington was, and of the depth of his passion for justice.
By Jason Apuzzo. EA has released a new 12-minute trailer (featuring extensive game play) for Battlefield 3, depicting U.S. Marines involved in intense urban warfare in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq against Iranian-backed insurgents along the Iran/Iraq border (the game is set in 2014). See the full 12-minute trailer above. The trailer is gripping and intense, and astonishingly realistic in its imagery. NOTE: THIS NSFW TRAILER FEATURES VIOLENCE AND STRONG LANGUAGE. The trailer was posted at YouTube on Thursday, and as of the writing of this post already has over 1.3 millions views.
Screen grab from "Battlefield 3."
Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter game, and a follow-up to EA’s popular Battlefield series. The game is set to debut on November 2nd, and will apparently feature battlefields in Sulaymaniyah, Tehran, Paris and New York.
Watching the trailer, I’m left with the usual questions: namely, why can’t Hollywood do something like this? I mean, fighting space aliens in downtown Los Angeles is great, but why must stories about these real world, epochal military conflicts of ours be relegated to the (admittedly large) ghetto of video gaming? The imagery in this trailer is astonishing in its detail and subtlety, and thoroughly ‘cinematic’ in its execution – to the point that I actually felt like I was watching a war documentary for much of it. And yet a full eight years after the invasion of Iraq, we’re still waiting on any sort of large-scale Hollywood effort to depict the war, while the gaming industry proves each year that there is a massive market for this kind of material.
Does EA have a movie division? They might want to consider starting one.
By Jason Apuzzo. • One of the biggest pieces of Cold War news recently is that Ice Station Zebra may be getting a remake! For those of you not familiar with the film (shame on you!), Ice Station Zebra was one of the greatest Cold War thrillers of them all – a Cinerama spectacular starring Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan and Jim Brown about a race to the Arctic Circle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to recover the secret payload of a Russian spy satellite.
Although everyone shines in the picture, Patrick McGoohan – most famous for his work on The Prisoner TV series – really owns the film, and along with John Sturges’ direction (and the exceptional cinematography and production design) really elevates it to an elite level among thrillers. Among the big three movies adapted from Alistair MacLean’s novels – Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone – I probably would have to rate Zebra #3 (due to its somewhat slow pacing), but the film is most certainly a classic, and I’d do anything to see in its original Cinerama format.
What is completely horrifying, however, is that the person writing the screenplay for this remake is apparently writer/director David Gordon Green of Your Highness (?!), the new goofball epic featuring Natalie Portman and James Franco. How does this kind of thing happen?! Why can’t Warner Brothers do something sensible like have John Milius or Vince Flynn or Tom Clancy write it? Bloody hell.
I assume the new film would take place in the present day. Here’s hoping the screenplay goes through a few more hands …
Their rationale? According to the Bureau, “[t]he time-travel drama is becoming a hot theme for TV and films. But its content and the exaggerated performance style are questionable. Many stories are totally made-up and are made to strain for an effect of novelty. The producers and writers are treating the serious history in a frivolous way, which should by no means be encouraged anymore.” Well! Based on this criteria, they should probably ban everything Hollywood sends them.
The folks over at MGM who are currently scuttling around LA post-production houses scrubbing the Chinese from Red Dawn should definitely take note of this and make sure no time travel films are currently in the MGM pipeline – or that any new time travel subplots are being added to Red Dawn! After all, we’ve learned from a recent interview given by one of Red Dawn‘s producers that the greatest minds in the world – geniuses, Bobby Fischer/Ernst Blofeld-types who spend their days working on game theory – have been devising amazing new plot scenarios for that film, even though it’s already in the can. Perhaps the Wolverines are now being sent back to The Battle of the Little Bighorn to fight at General Custer’s side? Who can say?
Milla fetes Gorbo.
On the positive side, hopefully this means Source Code won’t make it to China.
• Behold Milla Jovovich to the right, at a special 80th birthday fete for Mikhail Gorbachev – held, for some bizarre reason, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. (Again I ask, what’s the matter with the Brits? It’s like they’re becoming a more expensive version of Lithuania.) I guess if you’re already Russian you can attend these things in good conscience. Or not. It’s funny, though, because I’m not sure Gorbo would’ve encouraged her to wear that dress back in the old Soviet Union. A little too much Western decadence, there.
By Jason Apuzzo. Scenes from the Sundance hit The Devil’s Double, the new film about the mobster-like lifestyle of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, are slowly starting to trickle out onto the internet. The Devil’s Double just played last month at The Berlin Film Festival, and Lionsgate will be releasing the film here in the States on July 29th. Libertas’ Joe Bendel reviewed the film at Sundance in January and absolutely loved it (see his review here).
The scene above features Dominic Cooper as Uday Hussein’s body double Latif Yahia, as he practices his performance as ‘Uday’ in the mirror in the midst of an aerial bombardment during the first Gulf War. He’s soon joined by Uday’s mistress Sarrab, played by French actress Ludivine Sagnier. [Can anyone play mistresses better than French actresses?] Check out the scene to get a flavor of the film. Afterward, you can catch a bit of the film’s Berlin Film Festival press conference.
Based on what I’ve been seeing, the film looks like a total hoot – saucy, brutal and very entertaining. And also bold as hell. Note Sarrab’s wicked line about the Iraqi people not believe Saddam’s “crap.”
We’ll certainly be keeping an eye on the film in coming days …
Dominic Cooper and Ludivine Sagnier in "The Devil's Double."
By Jason Apuzzo. We’ve been pumping you up about The Devil’s Double, the new film about the mobster-like lifestyle of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday as played by Dominic Cooper.
