Category: 1. Jason Apuzzo

Michael Moore Voted to Academy Board of Governors

By Jason Apuzzo. As reported at Deadline Hollywood, Michael Moore (along with Kathryn Bigelow, and Lawrence of Arabia editor Anne Coates) has been elected to the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors.

Forgive me, but the election of this Riefenstahl-in-a-fat-suit is repulsive.  Utterly contemptible, divisive – and richly evocative of the climate of fear that currently pervades an industry in which dissent from the left-liberal line is not tolerated.  I could not be more disgusted by this.

What most people don’t know is that at least one of the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors is a conservative.  But I can’t say who it is – because of course, I don’t want this person getting in trouble.  That’s the way this town really works.

I don’t even know where to begin on this one, folks.  The ongoing ruination of what was once a special institution continues unabated, apparently with no adults around to stop it.

[Update: The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein links to this post today (7/7) in his own piece on Moore’s election.  I’d like to respond to one point 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?]

Posted on July 7th, 2010 at 12:55pm.

The Mercury Men Invade America

By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday we posted about a forthcoming web series called Red Storm that looks exciting.  Today we wanted to introduce LFM readers to another forthcoming web series that’s gotten a fair bit of pre-release hype, called The Mercury Men.

The Mercury Men is a 1940s-style adventure serial about a lowly government office drone who finds himself trapped, when deadly alien visitors from the planet Mercury seize his office building and use it as a staging ground for a nefarious plot. Aided by a daring aerospace engineer from a mysterious organization known as “The League,” the office drone must stop the invaders and their doomsday device, the Gravity Engine.

The Mercury Men was recently featured in Sci Fi Magazine (right next to another feature about Libertas Contributor Steve Greaves), and just today the Mercury Man blog announced that director Chris Preksta and star Curt Wootton will be at the forthcoming San Diego Comic Con speaking on a sci-fi panel on Saturday, July 24th at 4:15 PM.  They’ll also be screening a few minutes of footage from the series. Continue reading The Mercury Men Invade America

Hollywood Round-up, 7/6

The lovely Gloria Stuart turns 100.

By Jason Apuzzo. • Twilight: Eclipse has taken in $175 mil domestically so far, and $280 mil worldwide – and it’s not even through its first week.  So it’s a hit, and a big one, and now I’m going to stop talking about Twilight for a while because I’ve hit the saturation point.

• DC Comics is already doing a second print run after more than 60,000 copies of the Wonder Woman issue #600 (the re-boot we’ve been discussing here at LFM) got gobbled up. A DC source tells Nikki Finke that downloads of the free issue preview have been “phenomenal.”  No surprises here – she’s a popular character, despite what some may say.  And is the new costume really ‘anti-American’?  I still think that’s debatable, unless you’re looking to be offended by everything.

• You get the sense James Cameron’s been let out of a cage, or something. Now he’s going to be directing Black Eyed Peas videos in 3D. This must be driving the studio brass at Fox nuts as they tap their fingers waiting for the Avatar 2 launch date.

• Kevin Smith begins shooting his ‘political horror movie,’ Red State, this August with a cast of no-names. Or since it’s a Kevin Smith film, is it a cast of no-brains?

• The fix is in.  You’re going to like Christopher Nolan’s Inception (see here and here) … or else!  Wake me when someone writes a review of this film that doesn’t look like it came out of the Warner Brothers press packet …

The French poster for "Piranha 3D."

• … and in any case the summer’s most anticipated film (by me) is not Inception, but Piranha 3D.  The French poster for the film has been released … and frankly it looks better than the American one.  Why?  The French one focuses on the sex.  The American one focuses on the fish.  [The French really understand these things.]  And otherwise here are some great screen grabs from the film’s fantastic trailer.

• News comes today that George Miller’s Mad Max reboot will actually involve two films that will be released back-to-back: Mad Max: Fury Road and Mad Max: Furiosa. Miller is an uber-lefty, but this is a great franchise – and I love the new titles.  Hopefully this will work, and not be like the limp reboot of Death Race 2000.

• The Wrap has just figured out that Hollywood isn’t producing any new stars these days. Um, yeah!  We want to congratulate them on this striking new insight.

• With a Russian spy ring being caught recently, a lot of people are drawing comparisons to Angelina Jolie’s new film, Salt. It’s true – the timing couldn’t be better for the release of that film … provided you’re going to Salt to see a realistic depiction of contemporary Russian spycraft, and not Jolie’s legs.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … somehow I missed that actress Gloria Stuart turned 100 on the Fourth of July! Happy Birthday!  Govindini and I met Gloria a few years ago at an Academy event, and I actually ran into her at a Beverly Hills post office a few years ago, as well.  What a charmer.  She looks phenomenal, and has that old-school Hollywood graciousness in person that is so rare nowadays.  We wish her the very best.

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

Posted on July 6th, 2010 at 3:03pm.

Red Storm: The Return of The Red Menace?

By Jason Apuzzo. There are a lot of independent film projects we’re hearing about all the time here at LFM.  Something we wanted to show you today, during this extended Fourth of July weekend, is a trailer for the forthcoming web series Red Storm.  We’ve embedded the trailer for this series above.

The filmmakers keep things mysterious, but the series appears to have as its premise a scenario that seems straight out of the new Red Dawn film, coming this fall from MGM.  Some sort of massive occupying force – Chinese communist? Russian fascist? – invades and occupies America, and a hearty band of freedom fighter-rebels fight back.

It’s interesting, of course, that this sort of invasion anxiety is reappearing in American filmmaking, as we’ve discussed previously.

The imagery used in the trailer is effective, ominous and compelling.  Marching armies (Chinese? North Korean?) … nuclear testing … the protestor stopping the tank in Tiananmen Square … the 9/11-style imagery of a crumbing building, shattered by explosions, raining debris on cars below … with those cars being passed by what look to be Chinese tanks. Continue reading Red Storm: The Return of The Red Menace?

Flag Bikinis + The Fourth of July Weekend Continues

That's V for Victory, by the way.

By Jason Apuzzo. The Fourth of July weekend continues, at least here at LFM – the Fourth of July being, after all, far too important a holiday to celebrate merely over a single day …

America the beautiful.

Today LFM favorite Jessica Simpson (above) and Gisele Bundchen (right) are showing us their patriotic spirit.  I trust everyone’s patriotic zeal is suitably roused.

[Btw, do they have flag bikinis in Saudi Arabia?]

Ms. Bundchen has done a little better in her selection of all American quarterbacks (3-time champ Tom Brady, as opposed to Ms. Simpson’s perennially underperforming Tony Romo), but long-time Libertas readers know that every broken heart in Jessica Simpson’s life is just another pretext for a comeback as her colorful and uniquely American saga unfolds!

Happy Fourth of July weekend, everybody!

Posted on July 5th, 2010 at 11:26am.

George Lucas & Steven Spielberg Present New Norman Rockwell Exhibit

An early draft of Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" is in Steven Spielberg's collection.

By Jason Apuzzo. I thought it would be appropriate on this day, the Fourth of July, to mention a new exhibit that just opened of Norman Rockwell’s paintings being put on in Washington D.C. at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, entitled “Telling Stories.”  The exhibition features 57 major Rockwell works held by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who are among the most significant collectors of Rockwell’s work.  The exhibit explores Rockwell’s connections to the movies, and also his thematic legacy by way of Lucas and Spielberg’s films.  You can read Ted Johnson’s nice article on this exhibit in Variety.

Something that we talk about a great deal here at Libertas is the portrayal of America and what is perhaps its defining attribute – the freedom of its citizens – in film and popular media.  Occasionally this is something that is expressed in film in a literal way, in terms of a film’s overt political agenda.  More often, however, it’s something that is communicated in a general feeling one gets about whether a filmmaker harbors affectionate feelings toward America and its people.

I happen to think this basic sort of affection or warmth toward America and its people is something that radiates from Lucas and Spielberg’s work when they’re at their best.  One thinks here in particular of Lucas’ American Graffiti, with its Capra-esque portrayal of small town California – or of Luke Skywalker, the paradigmatic American farm boy-hero from the original Star Wars.  And has there ever been a more stirring invocation of small-town American entrepreneurialism and innovation than Lucas’ film, Tucker: The Man and His Dream?  I doubt it.  The film, which Lucas made with his friend and fellow innovator Francis Coppola, is a personal favorite of mine.

In Spielberg’s case, almost his entire career has been an exercise in portraying the American Everyman (for which Spielberg endured an enormous amount of criticism early in his career) – from Duel through to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Saving Private Ryan and beyond.  Even in their most recent collaboration, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you feel this same sort of affection for America and Americana … particularly in Crystal Skull‘s fun, romanticized approach toward the 1950s, rock-and-roll, Marlon Brando-style motorcycle culture, and Cold War anti-communism. Continue reading George Lucas & Steven Spielberg Present New Norman Rockwell Exhibit