Pakistani pop singer Ali Zafar at the film's premiere.
According to the BBC, the film’s Indian distributor will be appealing the decision by Pakistan’s film censor board.
Tere Bin Laden is a comedy/satire about a struggling Pakistani journalist who tries to pawn off a fake interview with Osama bin Laden in order to fulfill his dream of becoming an American TV news star.
As regular LFM readers know, we’ve been covering very closely the new wave of satires aimed at terrorists: Four Lions, The Infidel, and the Living with the Infidels web series. [I myself directed such a satire, entitled Kalifornistan.]
We’ll be keeping an eye on how this story develops. It’s worth noting that the film will likely still be seen by a lot of Pakistanis, in so far as DVDs – many of which are pirated – remain the preferred way of seeing films there.
[UPDATE: The New York Times covers this story today here.]
• Captain America will be getting a 3D conversion once it’s done. Is that actually good or bad for buzz? What does it say about the filmmakers’ confidence in what they’re doing? One smart thing Nolan did with Inception was avoid this increasingly tacky conversion trend. [The Iron Man 2 team avoided it, as well.] Real filmmakers don’t need it. LFM recommends: shoot 3D-native or don’t bother with 3D at all.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem just got married, and have our congratulations – so long as they abstain from Woody Allen films going forward. Btw, could Spain be any hotter right now?
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …
P.S. from Govindini – Happy Bastille Day to all our French readers!
By Jason Apuzzo. As I mentioned several days ago, critical tongues are starting to loosen on Inception, as at least a few sensible critics are starting to call the film what it actually is … which I will be telling you more about later this week.
The latest evisceration of Inception (coming right on the heels of David Edelstein’s much-discussed attack on the film) comes from the marvelous Rex Reed today, writing in The New York Observer. Reed’s review is a delightful, witty take-down that more or less encapsulates my own view of Nolan’s work – which is essentially that his films are always less than they seem, not more.
So what’s going on here? Why has it taken so long for serious film writers to begin evincing skepticism toward Christopher Nolan’s work? The reason is fairly simple: many critics were taken aback a few years ago when Nolan’s The Dark Knight did as well as it did, and are now trying to be ahead of the curve. Or another way of putting it: a lot of critics don’t want to be on the wrong side of fanboys. We have no such fears here.
At the movies, incomprehensible gibberish has become a way of life, but it usually takes time before it’s clear that a movie really stinks. Inception, Christopher Nolan’s latest assault on rational coherence, wastes no time. It cuts straight to the chase that leads to the junkpile without passing go, although before it drags its sorry butt to a merciful finale, you’ll be desperately in need of a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.
Writer-director Nolan is an elegant Hollywood hack from London whose movies are a colossal waste of time, money and I.Q. points. “Elegant” because his work always has a crisp use of color, shading and shadows, and “hack” because he always takes an expensive germ of an idea, reduces it to a series of cheap gimmicks and shreds it through a Cuisinart until it looks and sounds like every other incoherent empty B-movie made by people who haven’t got a clue about plot, character development or narrative trajectory.
Like other Christopher Nolan head scratchers-the brainless Memento, the perilously inert Insomnia, the contrived illusionist thriller The Prestige, the idiotic Batman Begins and the mechanical, maniacally baffling and laughably overrated The Dark Knight – this latest deadly exercise in smart-aleck filmmaking without purpose from Mr. Nolan’s scrambled eggs for brains makes no sense whatsoever. Is it clear that I have consistently hated his movies without exception, and I have yet to see one of them that makes one lick of sense. It’s difficult to believe he didn’t also write, direct and produce the unthinkable Synecdoche, New York. But as usual, like bottom feeder Charlie Kaufman, Mr. Nolan’s reputation as an arrogant maverick draws a first-rate cast of players, none of whom have an inkling of what they’re doing or what this movie is about in the first place, and all of whom have been seen to better advantage elsewhere.
I’d like to tell you just how bad Inception really is, but since it is barely even remotely lucid, no sane description is possible … Through the use of computer-generated effects, buildings fold like cardboard containers, cars drive upside down and the only way you can wake up within the dream is death. None of this prattling drivel adds up to one iota of cogent or convincing logic. You never know who anyone is, what their goals are, who they work for or what they’re doing. Since there’s nothing to act, the cast doesn’t even bother. It’s the easiest kind of movie to make, because all you have to do is strike poses and change expressions. …
Inception is the kind of pretentious perplexity in which one or two reels could be mischievously transposed, or even projected backward, and nobody would know the difference. It’s pretty much what we’ve come to expect from summer movies in general and Christopher Nolan movies in particular, but I keep wondering: Can he do anything of more lasting value? He’s got vision, but creating jigsaw puzzles nobody can figure out and using actors as puppets who say idiotic things, dwarfed by sets like sliding Tinker Toys, doesn’t seem like much of an accomplishment to me.
I’ll be weighing-in on Inception myself later in the week, but this will do for now.
By Jason Apuzzo. Lately we’ve been showing you some exciting new indie sci-fi films (see here, here and here), several of which were crowd-funded, that show how new advances in visual FX are drastically expanding the imaginative possibilities of independent filmmaking. We’ve also discussed how these films can not only dazzle us visually, but engage contemporary social anxieties associated with war and invasion.
Today we want to tell you about another exciting project called The 3rd Letter (see the film’s trailer above) from acclaimed filmmaker and ILM visual FX artist Grzegorz Jonkajtys. [Jonkajtys’ recent ILM credits include Pan’s Labyrinth, The Mist and Terminator: Salvation.] Jonkajtys had an extraordinary short film called “Ark” shown at Cannes at few years ago. The film turned a lot of heads, and now he’s hooked up with producer/co-writer Philip Bastiaan Koch on The 3rd Letter (originally titled “36 Stairs”), an extravagant-looking, 15 minute short film that’s apparently about to hit the festival circuit hard.
The 3rd Letter takes place in a dystopian future in which human beings depend on bio-mechanical alterations in order to withstand the detriorating climate. [Shades of BP?] Set against a polluted, megalopolis world, the tragic tale of Jeffrey Brief (Rodrigo Lopresti) unfolds. When faced with the imminent loss of his health insurance, Brief unwittingly unravels a dark truth (involving population control – shades of Soylent Green?) that apparently pushes him to extreme measures …
Here’s some of what Jonkajtys says about his film in a recent interview:
Tell us how you designed this distinctive dystopian world. It looks like a bureaucratic nightmare – like something out of 1984 or THE TRIAL.
I wanted to bring certain aspects of what’s happening in the contemporary society and push it a bit further. The world Jeffrey, the main character, lives in is not set in any particular time or place. We will see a lot of stylistically and periodically mismatched designs, equipments and architecture. With this approach, on an extremely limited budget, it’s easier to find the props and sets rather than build everything from scratch. Plus, it serves the story, creating a kind of conglomerate of periodical and modern elements. Jeffrey’s haircut and clothing (designed by Gus Harput) is very much inspired by Winston’s character from the film 1984.
Of course, the movie is also very relevant. It deals with things like the health insurance industry. How do you avoid becoming too preachy?
The movie is all about Jeffery’s case. The most important aspect of the story is how he will react in the situation he has found himself in – what his choice will be. The insurance situation is only a setting that serves this story. I think it’s good that it is so relevant. More people can relate to it.
It’s not clear to me precisely what the nature of the film’s social critique is regarding the health industry and/or government controls. Basically the film looks like classic sci-fi dystopia stuff. Suffice it to say that since government and the private insurance industry are slowly merging into one, creating what is almost sure to be a ‘dystopian’ situation – with freedom and individual consumer choice evaporating into thin air – this film certainly appears grounded in what we’re going through today.
Our future health care bureaucracies?
Visually The 3rd Letter looks completely fabulous, very much in keeping with Jonkajtys’ prior work (I’m also a fan of his short “Legacy”). The film was shot on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, and the VFX shots really expand out the film’s world, considering that it was apparently just shot around Jonkajtys’ basement and a few practical locations. I’d also like to note, again, that this ambitious-looking project was at least in part crowd-funded (see the film’s Kickstarter page, with a reported 47 backers providing the film’s modest $7K budget).
I’ve been up to ILM a few times to visit, but never had the pleasure of meeting Grzegorz. From what I read about him, his family – he originally comes from Poland – seems to have had some terrible encounters with communism and fascism. His father was apparently deported to Kazakhstan in 1940 with his family after the Nazi invasion. His grandfather was also apparently arrested by the Soviet military police, and never heard from again. I can only imagine that these sorts of emotional, family experiences would sharpen Jonkajtys’ perspective on the benefits of freedom.
We wish him the very best with this project. You can follow the film’s progress on its Facebook page.
• It looks like Despicable Me will be getting a sequel (Even More Despicable? Utterly Deplorable Me?), after that film’s big opening weekend. Just ask Pixar or Dreamworks – children’s animation represents the ultimate gold mine right now for any studio. And now, if perhaps a few more movies could be made for we adults in the audience …
Helena Mattsson.
• More lukewarm reviews coming out now about Inception. Here’s one from influential blogger Eric Kohn. Money quote: “Inception bucks any sort of lasting emotional impact in favor of brainteasers. It’s awesome, sure, but also a bit cold.” No surprises here. This has been Nolan’s problem all along – among others. I’ll be weighing-in more about all this soon.
• Industry watchers are asking (see here and here) whether Mel Gibson can survive his latest scandal. This is becoming an increasingly practical problem because of all the projects Gibson is tied in to. Most people don’t know, for example, that Gibson currently owns the film adaptation rights to the great Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. See here what Ray has to say about that …
By Jason Apuzzo. • Despicable Me won the weekend box office race, and it looks like Pixar may have some new competition – in the form of Universal’s family unit Illumination, combined with the French animation outfit Mac Guff. Glad to see some new players emerging on the animation front.
• New York Magazine’s David Edelstein and The LA Times’ Steven Zeitchik have posted tepid reviews of Inception. Money quote from Zeitchik about the film: “more headache-inducing than pleasure-producing.” From Edelstein: “clunky and confusing … I truly have no idea what so many people are raving about.” Expect more of this to come as critical tongues slowly loosen prior to the film’s release.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … According to Variety, Amanda Seyfried will be starring in the forthcoming Andrew Niccol science fiction film I’m.mortal, about a future dystopia in which no one has to age … although to keep the population in check, people can only stay alive as long as they can pay their way. Hey – why set this in the future? All of this sounds like West Los Angeles right now!
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …
