By Jason Apuzzo. Our recent post about MGM’s forthcoming remake of Red Dawn (see here) has gotten quite a bit of attention around the internet.
First of all, we want to thank Patrick Goldstein of The LA Times who just did an entire piece today on our reaction to Red Dawn. We especially want to thank Patrick for his kind words about LFM:
“… Libertas Film Magazine, a newly revived version of the blog that set the standard for smart conservative film writing and in its first weeks of new life has already easily surpassed Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, if for no other reason than that Apuzzo and his film-loving cohorts (including the always provocative Govindini Murty, who recently weighed in with a stirring defense of “Sex & the City 2″) don’t spend all their waking hours simply bashing all the usual lefty Hollywood suspects.”
That’s very kind of Patrick, and we want to thank him for stating, in just a few words, what we feel makes us unique.
Also, since our initial post, we’ve spoken to an executive at MGM about the new Red Dawn, and he provided us with some exciting details about the film. Additionally, he confirmed a few basic points about the film: 1) the negative cost for the film is actually around $42 million; 2) Red Dawn as yet has no release date due to the complex situation at MGM; 3) Connor Cruise appears in the film, but is not actually the film’s main star. However, the great news is that the film is apparently going to be as hardcore as it seems, and based on what we’ve already been told conservatives will be electrified by this film.
We’ll have a lot more to report about Red Dawn down the line.
“If Sony made Karate Kid with a Chinese partner, it could be a part of that Asian gold rush, but the deal would come with some foreseeable obstacles, including possible government censorship.
[Doug Belgrad, president of Sony’s Columbia Pictures] didn’t think long before giving his answer. “That was enough to say yes,” says Belgrad.”
Thanks for the cave-in, Sony! I’m even more eager now to see Red Dawn – and also Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer, which finally gets its U.S. release this fall. More on all this later.
• Rumors flying (see here and here) that the next Die Hard film will be titled, Die Hard 24/7 – based on a tie-in (now abandoned) with the forthcoming Jack Bauer movie franchise. Weird idea. Also too complicated. The Die Hard series lost all its mojo for me when the last film dropped ‘Live Free’ from its ‘Live Free or Die Hard’ title overseas in order to placate foreign audiences (who are apparently assumed to be tyranny loving?). Maybe they should just call the next film Dead.
• Lady Gaga has a ‘controversial’ new video out, “Alejandro.” Saw it. Yawned. Warmed over Madonna meets Ace of Base. Berlin cabaret chic getting old. Gaga getting WAY too much attention. However, I would endorse a U.S. airdrop of iPods into Iran with this video copied onto it.
• In related news, reviews are coming out of Christina Aguilera’s new album, Bionic. See the LA Times review and also Speakeasy, and you can actually stream the entire album here. This is looking like Christina’s version of HIStory. She looks great, though.
• If a bionic Christina Aguilera isn’t enough for you, then check out this Wall Street Journal review of the new novel Android Karenina from Ben Winters. I might give this one a chance, but only on a very long flight.
• The storyline to Indiana Jones 5 may have been leaked! I’m loving this plotline. BEWARE SPOILERS if you proceed to the link. So tired of hearing how Indy 4 was a ‘failure.’ I loved it, and it made $750 million worldwide. Some of my favorite bits were Cate Blanchett’s deliciously campy turn as a Soviet agent (wearing a Louise Brooks bob!), and the Soviet-alien mind control technology stuff. Who knew George and Steven were such old fashioned Cold Warriors? Can’t wait for Indy 5, no matter how old Harrison is.
• The Muppets are back! There’ll be a new Muppets movie in 2011, set for a Christmas release. Excellent news. Larry King now has competition.
Cast in Mel Gibson sock-puppet movie.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Winter’s Bone star/hottie Jennifer Lawrence will soon co-star with Mel Gibson in a movie in which Gibson plays a man obsessed with a sock puppet. Not kidding here. Wish I were.
ON THE INDIE FRONT: • Bollywood films continue to kick ass at the indie box office. See here.
• The New York times has this nice article on The 48 Hour Film Project, which has produced a lot of nice work over the past several years. Click on over for more.
• Hot new documentary genre: docs blasting teacher’s unions. It’s about time, because our educational system is currently a disaster. Click on over for more details.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood (and independent filmmaking) …
By Jason Apuzzo. A $75 million movie from MGM about a Chinese communist invasion of the United States. A brazenly patriotic smack-down of Obama-era socialism. Centering around an Afghanistan war vet. Starring Tom Cruise’s son. Featuring music by Toby Keith. With a plot devised with help from the RAND Corporation.
A hard-core remake of Red Dawn.
I know what you’re thinking – because it’s what I’ve been thinking since I first heard details about all this several days ago. This is all some sort of gag, right? Hollywood doesn’t do this sort of thing. This isn’t the 1980’s anymore. Wake up! This is the era of Avatar, of Fahrenheit 9/11, of Sean Penn hanging with the mullahs in Iran. The communist Chinese aren’t our enemy – they’re our friends! They make our TVs and T-shirts and disposable ink cartridges. Our real enemies are American corporations, environmental polluters, and all those blonde chicks on Fox News. Get your head in the game, Apuzzo. You’re daydreaming again!
Apparently not. Difficult as this is to believe, MGM is indeed now in post-production on what appears to be an extravagantly hardcore remake of John Milius’ 1984 film, Red Dawn. Details of the project are starting to emerge from people who’ve read the script (see Latino Review’s synopsis of the plot here, or The Awl’s account here), and to say that the new film’s creators are ‘pulling no punches’ would be an understatement. The new Red Dawn looks to be one of the most intensely anti-communist films since My Son John from 1952. Yet it’s set in the world of today.
First, let’s back up a bit. If you’re not familiar with the original Red Dawn – a minor film in its day that’s become something of a cult classic – the film depicted an all-out invasion of the United States at the height of the Cold War by the combined forces of the Soviet Union and communist Cuba. We never really see much of the invasion, however, or learn a great deal about its immediate provocation. Almost the entirety of the film is spent following a spirited resistance group made up of high school kids played by then up-and-coming stars Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey. Basically, the kids get hold of some weapons, fight the Russkies in the Colorado hills, kick a lot of commie-Spetsnaz ass, and otherwise shout “Wolverines!” (their high school mascot) about every 5 minutes when they aren’t speeding away in a pickup truck.
Meet your liberator.
The film came out while I was in high school, and I thought it was a hoot – although one sensed at the time that the filmmakers were struggling somewhat against their modest budget. Like a lot of high school guys at the time, I had the hots for Lea Thompson – I was a lot more interested in her than in the AK-47s and RPGs, frankly – but still I liked the concept of fighting commies on American soil, and Red Dawn delivered on that score like few films I’d ever seen. [Chuck Norris’ Invasion U.S.A. raised the ante on that scenario the following year – the 80’s were really something.]
In the new Red Dawn, the invading Chinese army apparently uses the pretext of America’s current economic decline to invade. Here’s how AOL’s Daily Finance site summarizes the plot:
Set against the backdrop of contemporary politics, the film begins with an American withdrawal from Iraq. The President decides to redeploy troops to Taiwan, where escalating Chinese militarism is threatening America’s ally. At the same time, he also welcomes the former Soviet republic of Georgia into NATO, unleashing Russian worries that America is spreading its sphere of influence deep into Eastern Europe. Having destabilized relations with two of the world’s largest powers, the President then claims that the U.S. is only partly to blame for a global economic meltdown, further escalating tensions with China and ultimately leading to the invasion of the Pacific Northwest.
The RAND Corporation apparently had some input on this scenario. And as invasion scenarios go, this is a reasonably plausible one – for a Hollywood thriller, at least. What’s more interesting to me are the actual details of the Chinese-communist occupation. While details are still a bit sketchy, a lot is given away from behind-the-scenes photographs from the set. I’ve put together a little collage below of what are apparently propaganda posters spread by the film’s Chinese invaders:
Are we getting the picture here? Is it just me, or is there something distinctly Obama-esque about these posters? What these posters reveal is that the Red Dawn remake may actually go where the original film did not go (largely due to the fact that the original was made during the Reagan Administration), which is in equating certain tendencies in contemporary American liberalism with Chinese-style communism (!). That would be an extraordinary thing for a Hollywood studio to do nowadays. The UK’s Guardian reports, for example, that the Chinese have American ‘collaborators’ who help them in their occupation. [Shades of V here.] I wonder who those ‘collaborators’ would be?
To reiterate, I’m still stunned by all this. I’m expecting to wake up and find it’s all a dream – that I’ve been floating in one of those alternate-reality tanks from Avatar, believing that I’m still living in 1985 and reading a Tom Clancy novel after football practice. I have a million questions, all of which boil down to: how did this movie get greenlit? How did this one slip by?
All the right people are getting angry about this film: specifically, the state-controlled Chinese press, and The New Yorker. The Awl is absolutely furious over the film, and you can sense the familiar rhetorical patterns forming: that the film is ‘racist,’ ‘paranoid,’ ‘Sinophobic,’ ‘provocative,’ etc. Of course, it might be interesting for someone to ask the Tibetans or the Taiwanese what they think of all this.
For more details about this film, visit the MGM website or this Red Dawn fansite, and we’ll otherwise keep you updated on all this as more information becomes available. Here is some behind-the-scenes footage of the film’s shoot in Michigan. The film will be released November 24th, 2010. It’s being directed by Dan Bradley, a stunt coordinator and second unit director who’s worked on some of Hollywood’s biggest productions (Independence Day, the Bourne films, the Bond films, the Spider-Man films, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, etc.) The film will star Connor Cruise (son of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman); Chris Hemsworth of Star Trek, and Isabel Lucas of Transformers.
Final footnote: the one time I met John Milius a few years back, we spent about three hours talking about the White Rajah of Sarawak … and about Mao. Although John wasn’t involved in writing this new film, I’m wondering what he thinks of all this.
[UPDATE #2: I just spoke to an executive at MGM, and he provided us with some exciting details about the film. Additionally, he confirmed a few basic points about the film: 1) the negative cost for the film is actually around $42 million; 2) Red Dawn as yet has no release date due to the complex situation at MGM; 3) Connor Cruise appears in the film, but is not actually the film’s main star. We’ll have a lot more to report about Red Dawn down the line.]
[UPDATE #3: Special thanks to the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein for linking to this post, and for his very kind words about our site.]
Moviegoers obviously not digging this summer’s offerings. Also: a new report suggests just how much Avatar is saving Hollywood this year. Subtract Avatar, and movie attendance would be down a whopping 12.9 percent this year, and revenue would be off 7.1 percent. If that isn’t alarming enough, James Cameron is still too busy cleaning up the BP oil spill to hunker down to his next Avatar sequel – which is not due out for 3-4 years, and other major franchises are currently in shaky condition. Hollywood has the reverse problem of BP: not enough money gushing anywhere.
• … which is why eyes are currently turned to Christopher Nolan, whose Inception is hoped by many to rescue Hollywood’s summer. In a new interview Nolan is calling Inception his On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which is apparently his favorite Bond film.
This is a problem. Why? Because On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is easily one of the worst films of the Bond series.
The new George Lazenby?
Let me be the first – apparently anywhere on the internet – to express some doubts as to whether Inception is going to be the success everyone thinks it will be, either artistically or financially. There are reasons to doubt this film will play well beyond the fanboys; suffice it to say for now that Inception is looking a lot like The Matrix: Reloaded … long on hype, but probably with short legs. Outside the Batman franchise (i.e., someone else’s storyline), Nolan hasn’t shown he can really connect with large audiences yet, chiefly because his themes are too obscure and off-putting, and because he apparently has no sense of humor. [Can DiCaprio implant that, too?]
• Tired of celebrity ‘placement’ at Lakers games? You’re not the only one: see here. Can we go back to real celebrity fans at Laker games, instead of fake ones?
By Jason Apuzzo. • The original King Kong is coming to Blu-ray. The ‘Heat Vision’ blog at Hollywood Reporter says that Kong will make its Blu-ray debut Sept. 28th. Warner Brothers is releasing the disk, and it will essentially be a re-issue of the two-disc DVD special edition put out in 2005 that coincided with Peter Jackson’s remake. This new Blu-ray edition will come with a 32-page booklet written by film historian Rudy Behlmer that will also feature rare photographs. Behlmer himself actually interviewed Kong‘s director, the great Merian C. Cooper, back in the day. I thought that two-disc edition from 2005 was extraordinary – especially the very detailed documentaries done on the making of this landmark film. Kong was an entirely revolutionary film that changed not only motion picture visual effects, but also the development of motion picture sound. I’m very much looking forward to this disk. You can buy King Kong on DVD in the LFM Store below, and you can also pre-order the Blu-ray.
• Capone over at Aint It Cool News as seen the new, restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (currently billed as ‘The Complete Metropolis’). You can see what he has to say about it here. The film will be embarking on a nationwide tour before hitting DVD in November. Some years back I wrote an article about Metropolis for the journal Neurosurgery, which you can read here. Metropolis is easily one of the most important films in the history of cinema, and its influence can be felt all the way down to the cinema of today. [Even projects like the recent indie feature Metropia – about a near-future urban dystopia – are impossible to imagine without Lang’s earlier film.] Of all the forthcoming DVDs for this year, Metropolis ranks right at the top of my ‘to buy’ list …
• Turner Classic Movies will be showing several Dennis Hopper films this Tuesday June 8th, in honor of the late actor-director. The selections will include: The Sons of Katie Elder, True Grit, Rebel Without a Cause, Easy Rider and Night Tide. Visit the TCM website for further details. If you miss the screenings, we’ve got these films available in the LFM Store above.
From "Easy Rider."
• In related news, there’s a rumor circulating (see here at The Criterion Cast) that Criterion may be putting out a special ‘New Hollywood’ DVD box set, to include Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, among other classics from that period. Follow the link for more about that rumor. Antonioni’s Red Desert also just came out on Blu-ray from Criterion this week. It’s available in the LFM Store above.
• Kimberly Lindbergs over at TCM’s Movie Morlocks blog has a great review up right now of the Ishiro Honda classic, Dogora (1964) – a film which features a giant jellyfish from space with an appetite for diamonds, a giant tentacle attack on Tokyo, and a sexy Japanese femme fatale. How could you ask for more? Dagora is available (in ‘Tohoscope’!) in the LFM Store above.
• Excerpts from the forthcoming book on the Liz Taylor/Richard Burton romance, Furious Love, will soon be appearing in the July issue of Vanity Fair. For more details, click on the link. Liz and Dick probably are the all-time screen couple, and were personal favorites of mine growing up. As a side note, I’ve grown tired over the years of hearing what a ‘disaster’ Cleopatra was – their work on that film being, of course, the catalyst for their relationship. Cleopatra is actually a magnificent and literate film, arguably the last large-scale epic (other than perhaps Titanic) Hollywood has ever done centered around a woman. If Liz is a bit strident in the film, one never gets the sense that the role is to big for her – arguably it was too small. In any case, rumors of Cleopatra being a ‘financial disaster’ are as ridiculous now as they were back in 1963. In today’s dollars, Cleopatra would’ve grossed $534 million at the domestic box office (i.e., roughly what The Dark Knight made), making it a strong hit for Fox – even when factoring in costs. In any case, if you’re a fan of Liz Taylor or Richard Burton, feel free to pre-order Furious Love in the LFM Store above.
From "Double Take."
• Finally, one classic film related project to avoid is a new pseudo-documentary on Alfred Hitchcock called Double Take. Double Take, directed by Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, essentially treats Alfred Hitchcock and his films as hieroglyphs of the Cold War era, an era ostensibly marked by paranoia and an existential uncanniness echoed in Hitchcock’s thematics of ‘doubling’ (one thinks here of Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, Vertigo, etc.). The film intersperses clips of Hitchcock from his television series with archival Cold War footage and staged interviews with Hitchcock impersonator Ron Burrage.
But as film critic and LFM contributor Joe Bendel writes in his review of the film, “[w]hile there is an ostensible storyline involving Hitchcock’s encounter with his doppelganger, the film is more concerned with scoring revisionist points against easy targets from American Cold War history, like Richard Nixon.” Apparently the film glibly ‘samples’ or ‘remixes’ footage of a body falling from a building in a manner highly evocative of the 9-11 attacks. Do we really need this sort of thing, just to understand Hitchcock? You can read more about this film in The New York Times, but even more recommended is LFM contributor Joe Bendel’s review.
