Category: 1. Jason Apuzzo

New Anti-Soviet Film Farewell Depicts Spycraft That Won the Cold War

Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan.

By Jason Apuzzo. According to The New York Times today, the Cold War is back.  Have they been reading Libertas?

Not only is the Angelina Jolie Russian spy thriller Salt opening later this month – a film which, incidentally, has already been banned in China; not only is the Red Dawn remake being released later this year (presumably); not only is Mao’s Last Dancer coming out later this summer, but so too on July 23rd is a new French Cold War thriller called Farewell being released starring (among others) Willem Defoe, and Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan.  The film deals with one of the crucial Cold War espionage coups that delivered vital intelligence to America and the West.  The film opens July 23rd in New York and Los Angeles, spreading to other markets all the way through September.  Farewell showed at the Toronto and Telluride film festivals earlier this year, and has already received glowing reviews from Todd McCarthy (formerly of Variety), as well as Stephen Holden of The New York Times and Jeff Stein of The Washington Post.  You can watch the trailer to the film below.

Farewell tells the true story of a disenchanted K.G.B. colonel named ‘Sergei Grigoriev’ (the real colonel was actually named Vladimir Vetrov)  — eventually code-named ‘Farewell’ by Western spy agencies – who decides that he can no longer serve the Soviet state, and consequently chooses 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.

The French angle on this story is twofold: the courier for the secret information was Pierre Froment, an otherwise innocent employee of a French multinational corporation.  And the information itself was eventually transmitted to Ronald Reagan by then-French President François Mitterrand.

The trailer for the film certainly looks compelling.  Here’s some of what Todd McCarthy said about the film while he was with Variety: “A harrowing, richly human and well-acted espionage tale. … It’s juicy, fascinating stuff, well orchestrated, and finely thesped.  [Director Christian] Carion keeps things simmering on medium-high heat throughout.” Continue reading New Anti-Soviet Film Farewell Depicts Spycraft That Won the Cold War

Hollywood Round-up, 7/9

Aaron Eckhart, from "Battle: Los Angeles."

By Jason Apuzzo. The Social Network has a new teaser trailer. It’s pretty good, actually – although it’s still feeling like it’s all about lawsuits and female groupies.  Is this about Facebook, or is this the Phil Spector story?  The film will also be opening The New York Film Festival.

• Someone has posted an early review of Battle: Los Angeles, another big-scale ‘invasion of America’ flick (this time aliens).  The review is a little tepid on this film, which seems to be a kind of Cloverfield take on Independence Day.  Battle: LA apparently features Michelle Rodriguez as … a crusty-yet-benign Latina soldier!  When have we seen that before?  Maybe they should call this Battle: Pandora.

• … which reminds me that Michelle Rodriguez is also featured – wearing an eyepatch – in the new Machete trailer.  It’s a terrible, straight-to-video-quality trailer, and Robert Rodriguez better re-cut it fast if he still wants his tax credits.

• The title of the next Jack Ryan movie will be Moscow. I guess that’s because Kiev wasn’t available.

• Ian McKellen says he’s just “marking time” until production on The Hobbit begins. If that’s the case, then I’d like to invite Sir Ian to review Salt for Libertas because I don’t feel like sitting through that film right now.

• James Cameron apparently made $350 million off Avatar, but don’t worry – he’ll gamble it all on whatever he’s shooting next.

• On the Christopher Nolan front, word comes today that Batman 3 may start shooting in April, Warner Brothers is having trouble marketing Inception, Nolan’s Inception cast members are bad-mouthing Palin and Dick Cheney, Nolan would love to do a Bond film, and Nolan also took a great deal of trouble (including filming certain scenes in 65mm) to properly convert Inception into the IMAX format.  Nolan’s also thinking of joining the Miami Heat on a sign-and-trade deal, once he clears waivers.

• The Mel Gibson situation is growing so out of control (see here and here) that it almost defies belief.  Porn stars, racist rants, death threats, Russian mistresses, child custody lawsuits, secret recordings … why can’t Mel’s films be this entertaining?  Edge of Darkness is looking like such a bore right now.

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

Posted on July 9th, 2010 at 6:46pm.

Space Nazis Invade in Iron Sky + Crowd Funding of Films

By Jason Apuzzo. Recently here at LFM we’ve been showing you some examples (see here and here) of up-from-the-bootstraps indie film productions that are taking advantage of low-cost VFX software to tell large-scale stories.  We’ve also noted how several of these films seem to be picking up on the ‘invasion of America’ theme, a theme that will no doubt be kick-charged in a big way when MGM’s Red Dawn remake is eventually released.

Today we wanted to mention another such production, a science fiction comedy that’s been getting hyped lately (see articles in Wired and in the Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog), called Iron Sky.  Iron Sky is an example not only of what low-budget filmmakers can accomplish using high-end visual FX packages, however, but is also the latest example of how to finance a film through “crowd funding.”

First, the premise.  Let me quote from the film’s website:

Towards the end of World War II the staff of SS officer Hans Kammler made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity.  From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right.  Now it’s 2018, the Nazi invasion is on its way and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom.

So there you have it – goose-stepping Nazis from outer space.  Iron Sky is being co-produced by companies in Finland, Germany and Australia.  Currently they’re in pre-production, with shooting set to begin in October in Germany and Australia, and this will apparently be followed by a year in post-production.  And here’s the kicker: the budget of the film is actually $8.5 million, with at least some of the money being raised from the public.

Nazi invaders from outer space.

So how did the filmmakers pull this off?  Basically, in 2008 they released the slick, cheeky teaser trailer below (at the very bottom of this post) – which by now has had almost 2 million views on YouTube.  They simultaneously began soliciting on-line donations from fans, using the “crowd funding” strategy that is becoming increasingly popular as a way to boostrap indie film productions outside the studio pipeline.  Then, twelve indie financiers got involved to close the funding gap. Continue reading Space Nazis Invade in Iron Sky + Crowd Funding of Films

Libertas in The LA Times + Moore’s Shoddy Legacy in Documentary Film

Endless proliferations of self.

By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday’s LFM post on Michael Moore being voted to the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors was mentioned yesterday in Patrick Goldstein’s LA Times piece on the controversy.  We want to thank Patrick for his regular readership of our site.

I also wanted to respond to one point made in Patrick’s article:

Inside the industry, reaction was more muted, with one screenwriter musing: “If the academy has any brains at all, they’d better frisk Moore before every meeting to make sure he doesn’t try to bring a hidden camera. If you thought Wall Street and General Motors were fat targets for muckraking, that’s nothing compared to the academy.”

This is actually the first thing I thought of when I heard about Moore’s election – not so much that he would bring a camera into board meetings (a droll idea, by the way), but that he would grandstand in public over matters that might otherwise be kept in-house.  The basic métier of people like Moore is to turn everything into a public, political controversy – essentially a circus spectacle, with him as ring master.  It’s all too easy to imagine this sort of thing happening in the case of, say, the awarding of honorary Oscars.  An acquaintance of mine on the Board, for example, was involved some years back in the controversial decision to give Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar.  What would Moore have made of that?  Would he really have kept his mouth shut?

The ironic thing here is that Moore’s career has basically been on the slide since Fahrenheit 9/11, and all this sort of thing does is reanimate him like some shambling vampire from an Ed Wood movie.

Beyond this, it’s come to my attention that certain on-line conservatives are actually praising this election of Moore on the basis of him being a gifted documentarian. What a farce.  Moore has absolutely destroyed documentary filmmaking, turning it into a cheap vehicle for filmmaker narcissism and half-assed propagandizing.  Moore has absolutely reversed all the advances that Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker (Primary, Monterey Pop, The War Room) or Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) brought to documentary filmmaking from the 1960s forward, in terms of letting the documentary camera tell stories without the intrusiveness of narration or editorializing.  This is what American documentary filmmaking represented at the height of its influence on the world cinema stage – when filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard, George Lucas, Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese cited the American documentary school as their chief influence.

D.A. Pennebaker's famous shot of Jimi Hendrix from "Monterey Pop."

As Pennebaker said back in 1971:

“It’s possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide whether it tells them about any of these things. But you don’t have to label them, you don’t have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it’s good for you to learn.” Continue reading Libertas in The LA Times + Moore’s Shoddy Legacy in Documentary Film

Hollywood Round-up, 7/8

He's de-friending David Fincher.

By Jason Apuzzo. • Delicious irony: David Fincher’s new Facebook movie The Social Network (about Mark Zuckerberg) won’t be able to advertise on Facebook. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg isn’t too thrilled about the project, and so this film will just have to resort to … My Space?

• The new Mad Max reboot is looking more interesting all the time.  Shooting on the 2 new films has apparently been delayed until February, but today word comes that George Miller will be lensing the films in some new, exotic form of 3D – and that Weta will be involved in creating the film’s FX.  Of course, the original films got a lot of their energy from the fact that the dangerous action sequences were real, rather than a digital construct.  As a side note, Miller has been tilling in the 3D fields for as long as James Cameron, and it’s exciting to consider what action sequences in the wide open Australian deserts will look like in this new film series.  It’s probably also a good thing that Mel Gibson isn’t involved anymore.

• MGM’s debt restructuring has meant that the James Bond franchise is on hold, but not gone.  In related Brit superhero news, Sherlock Holmes 2 may shoot as soon as early fall.

• Avatar: Special Edition will be released in theaters on August 27th, with 8 new minutes of footage. There were apparently a few more American soldiers Cameron thought he could kill.

Bar Refaeili.

• Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio may team up for The Wolf of Wall Street, about (need we ask?) Wall Street Corruption. (Did these guys miss Wall Street 2?)  Probably this won’t happen, though, because they’re both booked up with other projects.  Still, it’s interesting to imagine how dull this film might have been.

• The Emmy Nominations have been announced, and if you care here’s the list.

• Fanboy obsessiveness with Inception continues apace (“Nolan joins the company of Coppola … Lean”), and has spread to critics, and really at this point there seems to be no point in even watching the film since the fix is in.  I’m not trying to be cutely contrarian here, it’s just that the decibel level is so high among Mr. Nolan’s admirers that I’m wondering whether anyone will even listen to a contrasting opinion?

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Bar Refaeli’s back!  After we reported on this extraordinary story yesterday (in which Ms. Refaeli waxes philosophical, as it were, on her own beauty), we learn that the Gilad Shalit march she’s participating in in Israel (estimated at 15,000 strong) just entered Jerusalem on the last leg of its two-week journey.  This cross-country march is designed to keep the case of kidnapped soldier Sergeant Gilad Schalit in the public eye.  This 23-year-old Israeli sergeant has not been seen since he was captured by Hamas during one of their raids in 2006, and Refaeli has joined thousands of supporters and other Israeli celebrities on the walk.  Good for her.

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

Posted on July 8th, 2010 at 12:26pm.

Hollywood Round-up, 7/7

From "Tron: Legacy."

By Jason Apuzzo. • The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein talks today about Inception hysteria among critics, and the potential of a backlash.  I think Patrick basically nails this one on the head, but the real issue is not so much Inception as Christopher Nolan.  Not everyone is sold on him yet as a ‘visionary.’  He may simply be overindulged at this point in his career, riding the long wave of the Batman franchise.  There are too many iffy projects in Nolan’s recent past (The Prestige, Insomnia, Following) to uncritically accept the hype about one of his offerings right now.  And nothing I’ve seen in the Inception reviews suggests that Nolan has suddenly developed a sense of humor in his writing, to counterbalance his compulsive and somewhat amateurish philosophizing.  We’ll see.

Bar Refaeli.

• Matt Damon is apparently gearing up to play Liberace’s love interest in a new Liberace biopic. Provide your own punchline for this. I believe this is what was once quaintly referred to as a ‘career risk.’ For this role Damon may need to stretch and add a second facial expression to his repertoire.

• Tron will be featured in the forthcoming edition of Empire magazine. I’m beginning to develop a soupçon of enthusiasm for this project. Perhaps. Am I committing myself too much?

• Some new photos from the set of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides now appearing on-line. They’re filming these movies in Hawaii now instead of LA.  Whatever happened to those California tax incentives?

• Actor Chris Evans talks about his snappy new Captain America duds today. I wasn’t aware that they were actually setting this film in the 1940s-50s.  This project is looking better by the day.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Model and Leonardo DiCaprio girlfriend Bar Refaeli, posing in the latest edition of V Magazine, speculates thoughtfully on the nature of her sex appeal today. Her theory is, I think, not lacking in insight – although surely limiting, in its own way.  Click on over for her full, detailed explication.

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

Posted on July 7th, 2010 at 3:17pm.