By Jason Apuzzo. A very provocative new trailer is out for The Kennedys, the new eight-part miniseries from 24‘s Joel Surnow that will be appearing on the ReelzChannel beginning April 3rd. I would normally wait to put this trailer in a Cold War Update!, but since I just did one of those on Friday I didn’t want you folks to have to wait.
From "The Kennedys."
The series looks like a lot of frothy fun, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m also understanding why the major networks were so aghast by this series; this is most certainly not the sort of depiction of the Kennedy family we’re accustomed to seeing on TV. Besides potentially out-sexing Mad Men, the series also seems to make Joe Kennedy look like Chancellor Palpatine.
Joel did an interview recently with the LA Times in which he talked about the pressures he thinks the series was under from higher-ups at The History Channel, the series’ original home. We all know what those pressure were, don’t we? Thou Shalt Not Offend the Kennedys, liberalism’s Holy Family. Frankly, you’d think the Kennedys would be glad anyone even remembers them, at this point. Decades of Teddy in the Senate took a lot of lustre off that family’s image, and memories of Camelot are growing old, indeed.
My sense is that the ReelzChannel got themselves a bargain with this series – which may end up putting that channel on the map. I would also expect this series to do excellent DVD business, and potentially revive pill box hats.
However, I wanted to follow up today by noting that MGM’s decision to alter the film – and digitally remake the villains into North Koreans – has been received poorly just about everywhere. The reason for this is obvious: there is absolutely no narrative reason to re-cut the film along such lines except to satisfy China’s market gatekeepers. There is certainly no real-world reason to depict such an invasion as being spearheaded by an impoverished prison-state like North Korea, particularly when the basic premise of the film is supposed to be our financial ‘indebtedness’ to the invaders. The last time I checked, we’re not indebted to North Korea.
The current spin we’re hearing behind the scenes is that the film is being re-cut to now depict the invading force as a ‘communist coalition,’ an undefined ‘red menace’ of nations, with the North Koreans featured prominently. What nobody seems to be asking is what such a coalition would be worth without the sponsorship of China. Or are they expecting Transnistria to do the heavy lifting here? Or maybe Vietnam?
By Jason Apuzzo. • The biggest news since our last Cold War Update! was the debut of the trailer (see above) for Apollo 18, produced by Timur Bekmambetov. I can’t say that I was all that impressed with it; the movie looks more or less like Paranormal Activity on the Moon, and otherwise far inferior even to what Michael Bay seems to be doing, re: Apollo missions in Transformers 3. The trailer looks cramped and claustrophobic, and plot-wise a bit too obvious in terms of where it’s going. None of the characters jumped out at me as being interesting – merely as victims in a standard-issue horror scenario.
Also: I don’t mind the ‘found-footage’ motif, but what bothers me here is that the filmmakers don’t seem to have actually nailed what Super 8 film looked like back in the day. Super 8 was generally grainier, but also (as I recall) had slightly deeper-than-usual color saturation. In any case, I’m a bit underwhelmed by what I’m seeing thus far with this film. Perhaps they need to find some piranhas on the Moon …
• Christopher Nolan has announced that after Batman 3, he essentially wants to do a hit-job biopic of Howard Hughes. That, at least, is the strong implication from this piece over at New York Magazine, which states that Nolan’s Hughes-pic “would focus on the freakier decades of Hughes remarkably secretive and OCD-addled life.”
This captures, in essence, what I dislike so much about Nolan. Howard Hughes was an extremely innovative, daring and ultimately tragic individual – and easily one of the most compelling American figures of the twentieth century. (He was also, incidentally, an ardent anti-communist and Cold Warrior.) Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Hughes, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, only lightly scratched the surface of Hughes’ accomplishments and refined allure – but I’m glad Scorsese at least got a crack at the material, because what Nolan is sure to give us is another of one his epics of adolescent derangement (The Dark Night, Inception, Memento, etc.) for which he’s becoming so famous.
Olga Kurylenko as a Russian Spy.
What disgusts me here is that Hughes’ mental and emotional troubles later in life – which were likely genetic in nature, and beyond his control – were also ones that he went to great lengths to conceal, precisely in order to avoid this kind of exploitation. Like a graverobber, though, Nolan apparently can’t resist the temptation to plunder them – his new film project, incidentally, will be based at least partially on handwritten memoranda actually burglarized from Hughes’ office – and so now Nolan will drag us through the garbage pile of Hughes’ later life in order to make whatever trite points he has in mind. It’s ghoulish – but typical for Nolan.
• Olga Kurylenko has a spread in the current issue of the Russian Glamour. It’s pretty good, but I like this picture to the right better.
• According to Kiefer Sutherland, the 24 movie is still very much on – and Tony Scott is still apparently interested in doing it. They’re still waiting on a script, though. Scott, incidentally, has also been attached to the Top Gun sequel.
And speaking of Top Gun, writer Mark Harris in GQ is currently blaming Top Gun for ruining contemporary Hollywood cinema. Harris recycles the oldest cliche in the book: that the nefarious forces of Lucas, Spielberg and Bruckheimer have ruined Hollywood forever, when the industry should rightfully have been left to the likes of Hal Ashby and Mike Nichols. Harris – who reads like a kind of poor man’s Peter Biskind – also doles out more trendy, fanboy love to Christopher Nolan.
Memo to Mr. Harris: had the industry been left to the likes of Hal Ashby and Mike Nichols – admittedly fine filmmakers – Hollywood would’ve gone bankrupt, and we would still be shooting movies in Super 8. Sorry, but that’s how it is. Incidentally, if a genuinely innovative filmmaker like Hal Ashby came up nowadays, people like Harris would probably be the first to attack him.
• The makers of John Milius’ anti-North Korean Homefront video game recently talked to The Wall Street Journal. Here are some choice quotes from the WSJ piece:
Homefront is less about vilifying North Korea than about placing the player within an occupied America. The 1984 film “Red Dawn,” which Milius directed and co-wrote, was a key influence. In “Red Dawn,” a group of high schoolers form a guerrilla resistance against an invading Soviet Union and its allies. The uncanny image in the film of paratroopers landing in a school field, says Votypka, sums up the feeling Kaos has attempted to capture in Homefront—that of a gross violation of boundaries. Invasions are not supposed to happen on American soil, and as such must inspire a certain gut reaction in the player.
This is certainly true of Homefront’s opening minutes. The game begins with a dizzying pastiche of real and simulated news footage about foreign conflicts and the failing economy, blurring the line between fact and fiction. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in a televised broadcast about last year’s North Korean torpedo that sank a South Korean ship, is the very first image. The rest of the video sequence concerns the game’s near-future setting and backstory but is hard to parse. What it does convey is a sense of urgency and imminent danger. When the player is subsequently given control as Robert Jacobs, standing in his home in occupied America, it isn’t long before Korean soldiers drag him out and onto a bus headed presumably for a prison camp.
Like a long establishing shot in a film, the bus ride sets the scene, but lets the player move the camera. Looking out the windows, one can see Korean guards battering young men in front of a playground, spot a large “Store Closing” sign, and watch Koreans gun down a young boy’s parents as he begins to sob. The reaction, of course, is anger on top of helplessness. “When you play most military shooters, you get the sense that there’s a war overseas somewhere, and the military commander has told you to go take these objectives,” says Votypka. “[This game is] less about trying to associate with some military character that you have very little in common with. Homefront is much more personal, because it’s about how you would react in this situation.”
Cool. Not to pick a bone with the WSJ writer, but actually the game rather obviously does seem to be about “vilifying” the North Korean regime – which is fine by me. The game certainly sounds intense, not to mention hard core in its depiction of our current antagonisms with Pyongyang. Homefront debuts March 15th.
Russian model Irina Shayk.
• In other Cold War News & Notes: some footage has leaked of Leonardo DiCaprio filming Clint Eastwood’s Hoover biopic; January Jones is talking more about X-Men: First Class (see here and here); more images have leaked of Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher; word comes that Kevin Spacey was almost set to play the villain in the new Bond film (nooo!); THR has a review up of the new documentary just premiered in Berlin about the Mikhail Khodorkovsky trial; THR also talks to the German director of the new Red Army Faction movie; the creators of Atlas Shrugged have released a clip from the film that looks like something out of Dallas; and Tyrese Gibson is saying that Transformers: Dark of the Moon is going to be the best movie of the series. I certainly hope so. Special Note: As I’ve previously reported in our Invasion Alerts!, producer James Cameron and director Shawn Levy are apparently going to be remaking Fantastic Voyage in 3D. I’ll be reporting on this periodically here in our Cold War Updates!, since the original Fantastic Voyage was, in fact, a Cold War thriller about America and the Soviet Union racing to create technologies that could miniaturize their militaries for transportation purposes (an odd idea, when you think about it). What Cameron will be doing with this premise, God only knows.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Photos leaked this week of Leonardo DiCaprio playing Hoover (see here and here). In all the chatter I’m seeing about this film, I still haven’t heard a peep about how this film intends to depict Hoover’s confrontation with actual – i.e., non-imaginary – Soviet infiltration of the American government from the 1930s-1950s. This is an enormous issue that has rarely been covered adequately in film, beyond the usual treatment as being a phenomenon of ‘paranoia.’ I’m hoping that Clint breaks from that clichéd and misleading template – although, for a multitude of reasons, I’m doubting he will.
You know who would’ve made a great film out of this subject matter? Kazan. (I’m actually reading his autobiography right now.) There are no Kazans today, however, because they’ve been weeded out of the system by the same people so enamored with Eastwood right now.
• Die Hard 5 suddenly has a director, and the latest rumors on that film involve Bruce Willis/John McClane fighting a relative of his old nemesis, German ‘Red Army Faction’-style terrorist Hans Gruber, wonderfully played by Alan Rickman in the original film. (Jeremy Irons played a relative of Rickman’s in Die Hard 3; I actually thought Irons was even better than Rickman.) What do people still think of this franchise? Personally, I’m long past caring about Willis or what he does; I didn’t even bother to watch Die Hard 4 – a film which, I might add, dropped its American title of Live Free or Die Hard in certain foreign territories in order not to ‘offend’ certain sensibilities. Opinions on the film and on Willis are welcome.
• Sony will apparently be releasing James Bond 23. Also: no word yet on whether or how this may also affect MGM’s Red Dawn.
• According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Russians are building a huge new studio complex, ‘Lenfilm XXI,’ which apparently could become Europe’s largest film studio. Question: isn’t it ironic that the Russians are actually building studios, while we’re shipping our film production overseas?
• The big news this week was the release of the new X-Men: First Class trailer, in which the young X-Men and X-Babes appear to play a role in … resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not exactly what I was expecting, but I’m rolling with it. Check out the trailer above, and see how the Cold War continues to be fought and re-fought on our screens these days. (Also: Bryan Singer talks about the new film here.) By the way, where are all the juicy production stills we’re expecting of January Jones and Jennifer Lawrence? (January Jones talks more about her sexed-up costumes here.) The latest production photo they released was of the back of Magneto’s head. Weird marketing, guys.
• Speaking of publicity stills, the first such still of Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher has just been released. I’m not sure what the point of that was – to prove that Streep can transform herself? I think we all know that by now. The photo doesn’t make me feel any better about the ugly rumors over this film being a hit job – or about the Thatcher family’s ardent opposition to the film. Here’s what Streep herself is saying about playing the role:
“The prospect of exploring the swathe cut through history by this remarkable woman is a daunting and exciting challenge. I am trying to approach the role with as much zeal, fervour and attention to detail as the real Lady Thatcher possesses—I can only hope my stamina will begin to approach her own!”
Sounds wonderful. Why am I not believing a word of it?
• The Atlas Shrugged trailer arrived this week, and to some extent it raised more questions than it answered. Certainly the main question it raised was: who is John Galt? OK, bad joke, I haven’t my coffee yet. But seriously, reader Vince noticed that Dagny Taggart is driving a Toyota in the trailer – quite the irony given Toyota’s recent acquittal in court over their supposedly bad brakes. My question is: wouldn’t Dagny be driving something like a Jaguar? Or a Mercedes? She strikes me as being an expensive kind of gal.
• A word of note: Mao’s Last Dancer will be arriving on DVD/Blu-ray on March 29th (we loved the film, see our review here), and Farewell – a great Cold War thriller, featuring Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan (see our review here) – will be arriving on DVD/Blu-ray April 12th.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT COLD WAR NEWS … Russian former Bond babe Olga Kurylenko’s The Assassin Next Door hits DVD this week, and her new film There Will Dragons just got picked up for distribution for Samuel Goldwyn Films. Olga’s proving that old homespun adage about what Russian immigrants should do to make it in America: play Bond girls and assassins.
And that’s what’s happening today in The Cold War!
By Jason Apuzzo. •Today is Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, and those of us here at LFM want to pay our respects today to our 40th President, a man who remains an icon to so many of us – a vibrant symbol of American optimism, and of our better selves.
Since many others today will be talking about Reagan’s legacy as a political figure – a legacy that only seems to grow with time – I wanted to talk a little about Reagan’s career as a movie star. In this context one of the more positive developments in recent years has been the belated recognition by critics and historians that Ronald Reagan was, indeed, a very fine movie star – a versatile and charismatic actor whose only ‘crime,’ so to speak, was that his career never quite reached the levels of other great Warner Brothers contract stars like Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn or James Cagney. Reagan was nonetheless a sparkling and compelling presence on-screen, who radiated a boyish charm as a young man in films like Santa Fe Trail (1940; co-starring Errol Flynn), Desperate Journey (1942; again co-starring Flynn) and the ‘Brass’ Bancroft serials; he was also an actor of brooding intensity and lightning wit in films like King’s Row (1942) and Knute Rockne, All American (1940) – who later made a convincing transition to playing craggy, weather-beaten heroes in films like Law & Order (1953) and Hellcats of the Navy (1957). I also happen to think Reagan’s credentials as a noir actor have been overlooked over the years; more on that subject below.
Reagan in Hollywood.
Two factors recently were vital in my own re-evaluation of Reagan as a star. First of all, Turner Classic Movies several years ago devoted an entire month to Reagan’s films – several of which only recently became available on DVD – and so I finally got the chance to record and watch a lot of them in an organized, sustained fashion. Also: in 2008 author Marc Eliot released a superb account of Reagan’s life and career in Hollywood, called Reagan: The Hollywood Years. Put together, the picture that Eliot’s book and Reagan’s own films create is one of an engaging, sympathetic star whose career – ironically enough – might have reached much greater heights had he not been ‘distracted’ by politics, particularly in the form of Reagan’s involvement in Hollywood’s complex labor disputes in the 1940s. Indeed, one of the many ironies of Reagan’s career in Hollywood is that as an eight-term SAG president Reagan spent an inordinate amount fighting other people’s battles, when he perhaps should’ve instead been fighting Jack Warner in order to get better roles for himself – roles which Reagan manifestly deserved, in my opinion.
Nonetheless, Reagan was a major Hollywood player during his heyday of the early 1940s. How big was he? In 1942, right after the release of King’s Row, Reagan’s agent – the powerful Lew Wasserman – signed him to Hollywood’s first $1 million contract of the 1940s, and Reagan was soon under consideration for the lead in Casablanca. What happened afterward, however, was that America’s ongoing war effort created a cascading series of changes in Reagan’s career that led him, ultimately, to lose professional momentum – right as people like Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Gary Cooper were gaining it. Reagan nevertheless forged ahead, and still banged out some fine pictures all throughout the 1940s and early 1950s – even as political battles of the era increasingly consumed his time.
One of Reagan's best.
I’d like to point out a personal favorite of mine from this period: a brooding little noir romance called Night Unto Night (1949), directed by Don Siegel. The film stars Reagan as a terminally ill doctor suffering from epileptic seizures. He travels to the Florida coast to try to find some solace as his condition deteriorates, and there he falls in love with Viveca Lindfors (who was actually married to Siegel at the time) – who’s dealing with her own problems, having just lost her husband during the War, and yet still occasionally hearing her husband’s ghostly voice at night. Complicating matters further his Lindfors’ saucy, vixen sister, played by the strikingly attractive Osa Massen (sci-fi buffs will remember her from Rocketship X-M) who spends most of the film coming-on to Reagan like a cat in heat.
The film takes place mostly in a dark mansion along a storm-swept stretch of Florida’s coast, and has a kind of hypnotic quality to it – a dark romanticism of chiaroscuro lighting, subjective camera angles and sound design – with Reagan bringing a psychological intensity to his role that reminds one of his friend and contemporary William Holden, when Holden was at his peak in the 1950s. Reagan as the doctor is alternately stoic and terrified at his own fate, and deeply ambivalent about dragging Lindfors into his own personal tragedy so soon after she’d suffered one of her own. At the same time, he recognizes his own role in reviving her otherwise moribund spirits, and this makes his predicament all the more poignant.
Reagan’s performance in Night Unto Night is one of the better film noir performances of that period, fully of a piece with work by other noir stars like Glenn Ford or Dennis O’Keefe, and he should get more credit for it. Reagan and Lindfors (and, for that matter, Reagan and Osa Massen) make a genuinely smoldering couple – and I highly recommend this film to anyone still in doubt as to Reagan’s merits as a star.
Reagan in Don Siegel's "The Killers."
And, while we’re at it, I should mention the other film Reagan made with Don Siegel, which would actually be Reagan’s final acting performance – as gangster Jack Browning in 1964’s The Killers, based on the Hemingway short story. The Killers is the film that makes one speculate as to what an incredible career Reagan might’ve had if he’d turned to playing villains, because even in a film featuring stand-out performances by Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and Clu Gulager, Reagan absolutely steals the show as a ruthless and sardonic mobster out to pull off a major truck heist. In The Killers Reagan shows the side of himself that I liked most as a teenager when he was President: his toughness, his merciless wit, and a certain old-fashioned professionalism. Plus, Reagan somehow became more handsome as he grew older – craggier, his age-lines giving his face a sharper, more pleasing definition. (Someone should’ve thought to cast Reagan as Dick Tracy during this period.) Reagan in The Killers is what a lot of villains in Tarantino movies are trying to be, but never fully are: cool, in command, and macho as hell. It’s another stand-out noir performance from Reagan which, in my opinion, deserves more credit than it’s gotten over the years.
I could go on, but you get the point: Reagan was a fine star, by no means a ‘failed actor’ as some would have it, and the best testimony to his abilities are his films. And, on this point, LFM readers should be aware that Warner Brothers recently released some rare Reagan classics on DVD, and you can read the estimable Lou Lumenick’s reviews of that new set and other Reagan rarities now available from the Warner Archive Collection (such as Night Unto Night) here.
Also, news arrived this week that Robert Forster will soon be playing Reagan in a new one-man stage show and film (see here), and new Reagan documentaries are also popping up everywhere. Make sure, however, not to watch Eugene Jarecki’s documentary on HBO; Jarecki should not be trusted with this material, after the hack job he did on America’s Cold War effort in Why We Fight (a shameless pilfering of the title from Capra’s far better, more honest film). Instead, take some time today if you can to simply watch Reagan in one of his own films – my personal favorites are the ones he made with Errol Flynn. The films are great fun, and are a wonderful testimony to Reagan’s talent – and to what might have been, had his career not turned in a very different direction …
• And now to Clint Eastwood. Clint gave an interesting interview last week to the Wall Street Journal on his forthcoming J. Edgar Hoover biopic, which will star Leonardo DiCaprio – and also, as of recently, Naomi Watts and Ken Howard. In this interview, Clint gives what is arguably the most complete statement of his political worldview in years. I found him to be sober and restrained – but also a bit all-over-the-map, difficult to pin down.
Clint is someone who has traditionally been pegged as a ‘Hollywood conservative,’ a Cold Warrior and lone Republican holdout in a liberal-dominated industry. Actually, though, there’s always been a good deal of what I could call Steinbeck-style, Depression-era liberalism to Clint that seems to have become more pronounced as the years go on.
Eastwood talks politics.
In this recent interview he comes across as relatively cool toward conflicts like the Iraq War and the Korean War, for example, particularly with respect to the burdens these wars put on the average fighting man. I understand that perspective, and it’s one that he brought to Flags of Our Fathers (although very different from what he did in Heartbreak Ridge), but it creates problems when it comes to America’s ongoing need to project force in dangerous parts of the world. Even Obama has come to recognize the necessity of fighting in Afghanistan, for example – an environment that puts extraordinary burdens on our fighting men. Clint seems to have forgotten that our current military is a volunteer force, not the conscripted force he was in while stationed up at Ford Ord in the Army back in the early 50s. And based on re-enlistment rates in the armed forces over the past decade, it seems that our fighting men believe in their current mission.
In any case, you might ask why any of this matters – Clint’s a filmmaker, after all, not (any longer, at least) a politician. Well, it very much does matter because he’s about to make a big-budget biopic of J. Edgar Hoover, a film spanning Hoover’s entire 40+ year career – a career that helped define the domestic profile of the entire Cold War era. And he’s making this film with arguably the biggest male star in the world, and a lot of people who are never going to read about Hoover or the Soviet-era threats he confronted are instead going to watch this movie and assume that what’s being depicted is at least semi-accurate.
So people need to keep a careful eye on this film, and on what its director is saying – even when it’s Eastwood saying it. I unfortunately don’t always have the sense lately that Clint’s minding the store in terms of what his films are saying – or perhaps maybe I’m worrying that he is the minding the store, and is in the process of shifting his worldview quite dramatically from what it was back during the 70s and 80s, before he was the darling of the Hollywood establishment – and people like Sean Penn and Paul Haggis and Tim Robbins became eager to work with him. In any case, I recommend that you read the interview and judge for yourself.
John Barry's album for "Thunderball."
• A lot is suddenly happening on the James Bond front. Rumors are now swirling that Javier Bardem may be signed as the new film’s villain, and Ralph Fiennes may get involved with the film, as well. Everyone is speculating that director Sam Mendes may be pushing the series in a more dramatic direction – which is fine, but I’m also hoping that Mendes understands that Bond movies should also be light on their feet and amusing, something Mendes’ films have never been (being, instead, ponderous and dull-witted). We’ll see. Oh, and Judi Dench has signed back on.
In classic 007 news, the wonderful Bond composer John Barry has passed away, and we wish his family our condolences. Barry was an essential ingredient in the Bond formula for decades, and leaves behind him a rich musical legacy; he will certainly be missed. Also: if you’re in the mood for classic Bond, watch this interesting recent interview with production designer Ken Adam, who did so many of the great sets from the Connery films, as well as the War Room set from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
• This is so incredibly pathetic: Captain America: The First Avenger will apparently only be called The First Avenger in Russia and the Ukraine, as Marvel and Paramount have apparently caved. Way to go, Hollywood! Champions of free speech, as always. If the title Captain America: The First Avenger isn’t mellow enough for the Russians, maybe Paramount could re-title it Captain Redondo Beach: First in the Water. Just sayin’.
Vlad Putin: big movie fan.
Meanwhile, Putin apparently had copies of a new documentary critical of his regime (re: the Khordorkovsky case) actually stolen in Berlin – while he’s simultaneously demanding that the number of movie theaters in Russia be doubled. I guess you can never have enough empty theaters for Burnt by the Sun 2.
• … and speaking of Russia, scribe Steve Zallian (Mission: Impossible, Clear and Present Danger, Schindler’s List, The Falcon and the Snowman) has apparently been tapped to re-draft the Jack Ryan reboot (starring Star Trek‘s Chris Pine), titled Moscow. Good choice. Maybe the young Jack Ryan can steal back the Khordorkovsky documentary.
• Not to miss a publicity opportunity, the ReelzChannel is now marketing the new Kennedys miniseries as featuring the Kennedy family’s “mob associations, the drugs and the women.” Hey! And here I thought this series was just going to show 8 hours of shaky home movies of beach football on Cape Cod! You mean the Kennedys actually had mob ties, and lots of sexy dames with beehive hairdos hanging around? I’m scandalized! How dare they show this on our public airwaves?!
January Jones of "X-Men: First Class."
• I wasn’t aware of exactly how 60s-Cold War inflected the new X-Men: First Class film was going to be. Here’s how the film’s director, Matthew Vaughn, describes it:
Calling it “X-Men meets Bond, with a little bit of Thirteen Days thrown in for good measure”, the film will follow the burgeoning relationship between a young Charles (Professor X) and Erik (Magneto) from 1942-1962, and it will all be done without flashbacks.
“In the beginning of the film, no one knows that mutants exist, and all the mutants don’t know that each other exist. They’re all in hiding. Kevin Bacon plays a very megalomaniac mutant [Sebastian Shaw] who decides that he can take over the world and that mutants are the future. Erik and Charles then meet each other and hook up with the CIA to try and prevent World War III. You find out everything about what went on between Erik and Charles” says Vaughn. So it appears the CIA are the ones who develop the X-Men’s technology.
Vaughn calls Michael Fassbender’s turn as Magneto very reminiscent of old school James Bond – “I basically molded a young Magneto on a young Sean Connery. He’s the ultimate spy — imagine Bond, but with superpowers. For me, Magneto is the good guy in the film, but he’s a sort of a good bad guy. He literally kicks off the movie, and Xavier goes along on the ride trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and trying to persuade Erik that you don’t have to kill everyone.”
So in the spirit of such retro-Cold War/60s nostalgia, X-Men: First Class‘ January Jones will be today’s pin-up. Isn’t this a great picture? Here’s the key to this picture, aside from the nicely plunging neckline: she’s not smiling, and she looks like a hard-case, sort of like what I imagine Dagny Taggart would look like. Women smile too much nowadays, and it makes them less sexy. Toughen up, ladies.
And that’s how we close out this Extended Cold War Update! in honor of America’s Greatest Cold Warrior, and a very fine movie star: Ronald Reagan.
By Jason Apuzzo. • The Kennedys miniseries controversy goes on and on, with no end in sight. The Hollywood Reporter recently watched the first hour of the series and – surprise, surprise – found it “brisk, entertaining” and “compelling.” Why anyone would’ve expected less from series producer Joel Surnow (24) is beyond me, but there it is. The series still has no distribution deal, however, although the latest scuttlebutt has The Kennedys potentially landing on DirecTV – which, frankly, would be sad if that winds up being its only distribution venue. Meanwhile, new behind-the-scenes accounts of the controversy are emerging (see The New York Times), with fingers being pointed in many new directions.
Although I probably shouldn’t be surprised by all this, I still am. I’d always thought my colleague Joel had the magic touch, the ability to rise above Hollywood’s ongoing ideological blockade of projects veering even slightly from the Maoist line; alas, not even Joel seems able to pull off such a levitating act at the moment, due to the industry’s apparently fanatical devotion to the Kennedy clan.
And so I’d like to officially welcome Joel to the world of independent filmmaking and distribution – a world he has now joined like the rest of us, albeit unwillingly.
• Speaking of Joel, the big news today is that Kiefer Sutherland told Extra that the 24 movie will be “shooting hopefully by next December or January.” That’s big news, because there had been some concern over the length of time it was taking to complete the script on that one (and it’s apparently still being re-written). So for you 24 fans, Jack Bauer will indeed be back.
• There’s been a lot of casting news for the Clint Eastwood-J. Edgar Hoover pic. It looks like Charlize Theron is out, but Judi Dench, Josh Lucas, Arnie Hammer (late of The Social Network) and some other folks are likely in. ‘Arnie’ is such an old-school name, isn’t it? [CORRECTION: a reader points out that his name is actually ‘Armie,’ which is even more old-school.]
"Red Dawn" cast photo.
• A Red Dawn cast photo has leaked, which you can check out to the right. I want to urge Libertas readers NOT to forward this photo to Hu Jintao, however, because we’re all trying to ‘tone down our rhetoric’ these days. Right?
• Speaking of MGM releases, James Bond 23 finally has a release date – November 9th, 2012 – and Daniel Craig will be returning as Bond, with Sam Mendes directing. Directing a Bond film is no doubt great for Mendes, but is it good for the Bond series? Only time will tell. The current word is that Fox may distribute the film.
• Star Trek‘s Chris Pine talked recently about Moscow, the forthcoming Jack Ryan reboot he’s doing. I like Pine; he seems like a decent, regular guy – and his dad (Robert Pine), incidentally, is a fine character actor. I assume it’s no small challenge for the younger Pine to step into Shatner’s shoes and now Harrison Ford’s, but so far so good.
• It occurs to me that I never posted the Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon trailer. It’s actually quite good, and deserves to be part of a Cold War update. (Aside from the stuff you see in the trailer covering the ’69 moon landing, there’s also apparently a retro-U.S. vs. Russia space race element to the film’s storyline.) Check the trailer out below if you haven’t already – it’s fun.
• Peter Weir’s anti-Soviet epic The Way Back opens today, and you can read the LFM review of it here. Also, the film’s post-theatrical distribution rights just got bought up (a good sign) and both Weir and star Ed Harris have been doing a lot of media lately. (See Weir here, here, here and here and Ed Harris here).
January Jones in "X-Men: First Class."
• The forthcoming X-Men: First Class is set in the swinging, Cold War 60s, and a bunch of new cast photos just got leaked of that film – including of Mad Men‘s January Jones as Emma Frost. Yowza! Ms. Jones has been out doing interviews about her insanely sexed-up costumes for that film (see here and here) … but at least she had costumes in the film, as opposed to Jennifer Lawrence. Ms. Lawrence, formerly of the indie hit Winter’s Bone, recently described to Hollywood Reporter the process of having her nude body painted blue each day by seven female make-up artists, all in preparation for playing Mystique. Welcome to Hollywood, Jennifer! We’re all looking forward to seeing how that worked out. (Memo to James Cameron: have you looked into trademarking blue women?) Also: check out some new First Class interviews here and here.
Russian spy Anna Chapman.
• In other Cold War News & Notes: buzz is building for John Milius’ Homefront video game; new photos are out of Atlas Shrugged; Timur Bekmambetov’s Apollo 18 will now be released on April 22nd; and one of my favorite classic movie sites, Greenbriar Pictures Shows, did this great post recently on John Wayne’s Cold War anti-communist classic, Big Jim McLain (one of the inspirations for Hawaii Five-O, incidentally). The Duke wears some strikingly snazzy suits in that film while he’s fighting the Reds on The Big Island.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … our old friend Anna Chapman is back! Fox News is reporting today that the comely ex-Russian spy has landed a new Russian TV gig for herself, a series in which she unlocks the ‘hidden mysteries of the world’ – such as stigmata, and other bizarre skin phenomena! Maybe The History Channel can slip this show into the slot previously reserved for The Kennedys, as I’m sure Ms. Chapman’s series must certainly meet History’s ‘rigorous’ broadcast standards!
And that’s what’s happening today in The Cold War!
