A rare glimpse into Libertas Global Headquarters (LGH).
By Jason Apuzzo. Just a quick note to our readers that posting will be light here at Libertas until after the New Year. The reason for this is not because we need a break – we never do, as our efforts are tireless, our commitment unwavering – but in order for you, the reader, to recuperate fully in preparation for everything Libertas will be providing you in 2011.
So prepare yourselves, rest up, and ready your mind and senses for the the new round of thrills and excitements we are preparing for you in the coming year … and Happy New Year to everyone.
By Jason Apuzzo. Those of us here at Libertas want to wish everyone in advance a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and the very best for 2011.
I’ve embedded a clip above from a film that really captures the Christmas spirit, John Ford’s 3 Godfathers starring John Wayne. In this touching and poetic film, three outlaws on the run from the law risk their lives and their freedom to preserve the life of a new-born, orphaned baby boy.
In the clip above, Harry Carey, Jr. as The Abilene Kid sings a lullaby out in the desert to the baby. The song is “Streets of Laredo,” as only Harry Carey could sing it.
Too much of a good thing? Tron girls at the "Tron" premiere.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Tron: Legacy opened reasonably well, although well enough to launch a franchise? I have doubts. I can’t escape the feeling that Disney blew a major opportunity here – that a film which could’ve been a major ‘tech noir’ classic slipped away into something frivolous … something that audiences really weren’t pining for to begin with (an over-merchandized sequel to an almost 30 year old film, featuring an extreme overdose of Jeff Bridges). I bought the Daft Punk soundtrack over the weekend, loved it (read interviews with Daft Punk here and here), and was left with the sense that what Disney could’ve had here was the anti-Avatar: i.e., a large-scale, humanistic sci-fi epic with the style and design of Blade Runner, and the heart of the original Star Wars. It’s too bad they settled for so much less.
Sci-fi’s Big Three – Lucas, Spielberg and Cameron – get a lot of criticism, especially in the overheated world of the internet. The reason those three are such indisputable masters of their craft, however, is that they focus attention on their lead characters – who typically are broken or otherwise unfulfilled young people with major challenges in their lives. I never had the sense that the spoiled-rotten billionaire kid in Legacy had really ever had his teeth kicked in; everything in life was just a little too cozy for him – and neither Lucas, Spielberg or Cameron would’ve allowed their lead character to have such an easy time of it.
By the way, the LA Times just ran this interesting piece on whether Tron‘s world reflects the way the schizophrenic mind works. It’s an interesting question, actually, and one that I was ruminating on myself while watching the film; Tron really does present quite a paranoid vision of the digital/virtual world we ‘live’ in nowadays.
• The trailer for the new Transformers movie is out, and it’s actually a good deal better – and more epic in scale – than I would’ve expected a trailer for one of these films to be. The only question I have is how representative the trailer is of the rest of the film, as the trailer feels like something designed to capture the first 5-10 minutes of the movie in which the plot’s set up. I assume the rest of the film will involve watching Shia and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley run around, which I’m not necessarily looking forward to. In any case, the trailer is a nice start so far. Here‘s another new interview with Michael Bay, incidentally.
• A new poster for Battle: Los Angeles is out. I have the feeling this film is going to be the cream of the Alien Invasion crop, so to speak.
• First it was Rose McGowan, and now word has it that Anne Hathaway may be attached to the on-again/off-again remake of Barbarella. I generally have nothing against Ms. Hathaway, but she’s a bit gawky and a poor choice for this role – as I suspect she would ultimately push the film too much in the direction of Austin Powers-style comedy. With that said, she’s certainly fetching, sympathetic, and she meets the ABF Standard (Anybody But Fonda).
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Brazilian model Sasckya Porto adopts the Tron look, which more women should really should adopt in their everyday life – don’t you think?
And that’s what’s happening today on the Alien Invasion Front!
• One of the recently leaked WikiLeaks cables reveals that diplomats from 14 Arab states voted to ban Steven Spielberg’s films in response to his $1 million donation to Israel during Israel’s 2006 confrontation with Lebanon. (As a side note, the Arab League also apparently didn’t like the depiction of Arabs in Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
I’m pressed for time, and would otherwise like to say more about all this, but let me confine my remarks to these: that it is axiomatic, in my opinion, that there will be no peace in certain parts of this world until there is also freedom. In a time of year when thoughts of peace are on everyone’s minds, and justly so, we should never forget that freedom is the vital force that nurtures peace.
Final note: on the Panahi front, here is his Facebook page, and here is an on-line petition demanding the lifting of his sentence.
By Jason Apuzzo. • One of the most intriguing things I’ve seen recently is the promotional trailer (see above) for director Renny Harlin’s new, $20 million Russian-invasion-of-Georgia thriller 5 Days of August, which is set for release in March.
Andy Garcia as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
The film stars Val Kilmer, Andy Garcia (as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili) and Heather Graham among others – and deals with a group of war correspondents caught behind enemy (i.e., Russian) lines when the Russians invaded Georgia back in 2008.
When the journalists videotape a series of horrific Russian war crimes, they have to fight to get the footage out of the country. The film was apparently shot on-location in Tbilisi, with the approval of the Georgian government.
From the look of the promotional trailer (which does not appear to be the final, theatrical trailer), it looks like Harlin is going hard-core in his criticism of the Russians – so this is going to get very interesting come March. Bravo to everyone involved for their courage in doing this, and please do try to avoid assassination.
Harlin (Die Hard 2) also seems to have squeezed a lot out of his $20 million budget, as the scale of the project seems impressive. We’ll be keeping an eye on this project here at Libertas. Val Kilmer really needs to drop some weight, by the way.
• Angelina Jolie’s The Tourist opened poorly (see the LFM review here), but fortunately there’s always Salt – which just hit Blu-ray and DVD. The new Salt disks apparently contain several different cuts of the film, including an ‘extended’ cut and also a ‘director’s’ cut – the differences between these cuts are explained here – and the cuts actually seem to represent legitimately different visions of the film, particularly with respect to the film’s ending. Without giving anything away about the new scenes, suffice it to say that sequels were definitely on everyone’s mind at the time of the production.
So will there be sequels? It’s too early to say, but director Phillip Noyce – who’s out doing media for the new DVDs – probably won’t be doing them himself (see here) as he seems to have moved on to other ventures.
We liked the retro, commie-hunting vibe of Salt here at Libertas (see our review here), and we’re hoping this film gets its franchise. If it does, it will be noteworthy for having done so without the aid and assistance of the talking heads on either Fox News or talk radio, ironically enough.
• The new Bond film is currently scheduled for a November 2012 release, incidentally.
• Take a few minutes to enjoy this animated short below, called Pigeon: Impossible from Lucas Martell. It’s about a rookie CIA agent who gets into hot water after a pigeon gets trapped inside his nuclear briefcase and sets off an ICBM toward Moscow. It’s a cute little story, and the quality of the animation is quite high.
• … and speaking of Tom Cruise, by the way, some incredible set footage from Mission: Impossible 4emerged recently of Cruise swinging around outside the upper floors of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, where he’s roughly 2,000+ feet up. He even waves and smiles at the tourists watching him. I’ll say this for the guy, he always gives people their money’s worth. One other bit of related news: Ving Rhames may not be back for Mi4 – although, weirdly, he may be returning for the next Piranha film (didn’t he get chewed to pieces?).
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … January Jones – who will be playing Emma Frost in the swingin’ 60s/Cold War-themed X-Men: First Class – just did a series of provocative handbag ads for Versace, which is odd because she herself really doesn’t look like a bag at all.
And that’s what’s happening today in the Cold War!
The young/CGI Jeff Bridges as 'Clu,' dictator of The Grid in "Tron: Legacy."
By Jason Apuzzo. There’s a moment late in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer, playing the doomed replicant ‘Roy Batty,’ turns to Harrison Ford just before dying, and with a mad gleam in his eye ruminates:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time … like tears in rain.”
It’s a wonderful, sad, poetic, insane moment – the soul of the film, actually, as this fantastic and vaguely Nietzschean character expires with unexpected grace, and in so doing teaches his pursuer (Ford, the titular ‘blade runner’) something about the true nature of ‘humanity.’
In trying to summarize what director Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy lacks, it’s precisely such moments – or even one such moment. And it’s a shame, because I think that somewhere out there – perhaps still lurking in the interstices of the director’s imagination, or somewhere on his hard drive – there might actually have been a great science fiction film here, something perhaps south of Star Wars but certainly north of The Matrix. But as things stand, greatness was definitely left waiting on the table with respect to Tron: Legacy – this very big, very stylish and ambitious production that unfortunately never really takes flight as it should.
On the face of it, the idea of rebooting Tron was a decent idea, in so far as the cinema technology (CGI, 3D, etc.) currently exists today to flesh-out the basic Tron story in a more visually satisfying manner than was possible back in 1982. And, of course, since the early 80s we’ve obviously developed a much more precise feeling for what ‘cyberspace’ and the internet mean to us, on both a practical and symbolic level. Even just this week we learned, for example, that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is going to be Time’s Man of the Year – and the movie made about him (the weirdly uninvolving The Social Network) is very likely to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards in a few months.
Baby Boomer Jeff Bridges reflects ad ad nauseum on his legacy in "Tron: Legacy."
So on paper, the timing for this project should have been perfect. And yet I’m wondering if maybe it’s the exact opposite: that the timing for this film, in a sense, couldn’t be worse. Worse not because of the subject matter, nor because ‘computing’ has lost some of its romance and speculative luster since the early 80s – Steve Jobs notwithstanding. Continue reading Totalitarianism, Narcissism & Boomer Anxiety; LFM Reviews Tron: Legacy
