By Jason Apuzzo. According to The Hollywood Reporter, 24 creator Joel Surnow’s 8-part miniseries The Kennedys has apparently been cancelled by The History Channel after the show “was not considered historically accurate enough for the network’s rigorous standards.” The series stars Greg Kinnear, Katie Holmes and Tom Wilkinson.
I’m laughing at this, because just the other day while channel surfing I happened to notice that The History Channel is still running its rigorously accurate series Ancient Aliens, featuring theories on extraterrestrial visitations to our planet – theories explained by such noted, credible scholars as Erich von Däniken.
Greg Kinnear & Katie Holmes in "The Kennedys."
What a farce this decision is.
For the record, Govindini and I know Joel and are certain that he and his team have put together a show that more than merits a showing on a network that currently includes on its schedule such scrupulously accurate series as MonsterQuest, The Bible Code: Predicting Armageddon, Nostradamus Effect, The Real Face of Jesus?, Stan Lee’s Superhumans and UFO Hunters.
We’ve embedded the trailer for Joel’s series above, and frankly it looks great. It also appears to be pointed and opinionated on the subject of the Kennedys – but nothing out of bounds, from what I’ve thus far seen.
After all, don’t we already know that image and reality were often quite different with respect to the Kennedys? God forbid that discrepancy would actually be dramatized in a television series.
As a side note, The History Channel has just guaranteed a few more ratings points for this series when it eventually airs on another network (possibly Showtime, according to reports) – which it inevitably will.
[UPDATE: Thanks to Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air for linking to this post. Welcome to our Hot Air readers.]
[UPDATE #2: It now appears that The History Channel pulled the show due to lobbying on behalf of Caroline Kennedy, and also Maria Shriver according to The Hollywood Reporter. As the story goes, the History Channel is co-owned by Disney – and Kennedy herself has a book deal with Disney – and she was planning to appear on (Disney’s) ABC network to do some exclusive promotion of the book. So it seems that Disney received an ‘either/or’ choice from the Kennedys, and ultimately decided to drop the show – and concoct this ludicrous story about the show ‘not being up to network standards.’ And so the farce goes on.]
By Jason Apuzzo. For you Libertas readers who are currently digging ABC’s V, I wanted to mention to you folks that something quite similar (at least in terms of being a futuristic invasion scenario) – namely, John Milius’ video game Homefront – is debuting March 18th and has a new trailer out which you can see above.
Homefront is set in 2027. The idea is that North Korea has by then become a mini-expansionist empire, invigorated by a young new leader, and that this empire grows to consume both South Korea and Japan. Meanwhile, the United States’ economic and military profiles continue to weaken.
It’s at this point that the North Koreans launch some kind of advanced electronic pulse weapon that cripples our defense systems – and subsequently invade the American homeland. A patriotic American ‘insurgency’ ensues.
The video below develops in great detail the thinking behind the game, and I recommend that you give it a look – even if you don’t like video games, or have no plans to buy this one – because it will encourage you to know that what a refuge the video game world has become for Cold Warriors.
Enjoy, and best wishes to John and the Homefront team. If Call of Duty‘s success is any indication, this game may become a major hit.
By Jason Apuzzo. • One of the most intriguing things I’ve seen recently is the promotional trailer (see above) for director Renny Harlin’s new, $20 million Russian-invasion-of-Georgia thriller 5 Days of August, which is set for release in March.
Andy Garcia as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
The film stars Val Kilmer, Andy Garcia (as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili) and Heather Graham among others – and deals with a group of war correspondents caught behind enemy (i.e., Russian) lines when the Russians invaded Georgia back in 2008.
When the journalists videotape a series of horrific Russian war crimes, they have to fight to get the footage out of the country. The film was apparently shot on-location in Tbilisi, with the approval of the Georgian government.
From the look of the promotional trailer (which does not appear to be the final, theatrical trailer), it looks like Harlin is going hard-core in his criticism of the Russians – so this is going to get very interesting come March. Bravo to everyone involved for their courage in doing this, and please do try to avoid assassination.
Harlin (Die Hard 2) also seems to have squeezed a lot out of his $20 million budget, as the scale of the project seems impressive. We’ll be keeping an eye on this project here at Libertas. Val Kilmer really needs to drop some weight, by the way.
• Angelina Jolie’s The Tourist opened poorly (see the LFM review here), but fortunately there’s always Salt – which just hit Blu-ray and DVD. The new Salt disks apparently contain several different cuts of the film, including an ‘extended’ cut and also a ‘director’s’ cut – the differences between these cuts are explained here – and the cuts actually seem to represent legitimately different visions of the film, particularly with respect to the film’s ending. Without giving anything away about the new scenes, suffice it to say that sequels were definitely on everyone’s mind at the time of the production.
So will there be sequels? It’s too early to say, but director Phillip Noyce – who’s out doing media for the new DVDs – probably won’t be doing them himself (see here) as he seems to have moved on to other ventures.
We liked the retro, commie-hunting vibe of Salt here at Libertas (see our review here), and we’re hoping this film gets its franchise. If it does, it will be noteworthy for having done so without the aid and assistance of the talking heads on either Fox News or talk radio, ironically enough.
• The new Bond film is currently scheduled for a November 2012 release, incidentally.
• Take a few minutes to enjoy this animated short below, called Pigeon: Impossible from Lucas Martell. It’s about a rookie CIA agent who gets into hot water after a pigeon gets trapped inside his nuclear briefcase and sets off an ICBM toward Moscow. It’s a cute little story, and the quality of the animation is quite high.
• … and speaking of Tom Cruise, by the way, some incredible set footage from Mission: Impossible 4emerged recently of Cruise swinging around outside the upper floors of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, where he’s roughly 2,000+ feet up. He even waves and smiles at the tourists watching him. I’ll say this for the guy, he always gives people their money’s worth. One other bit of related news: Ving Rhames may not be back for Mi4 – although, weirdly, he may be returning for the next Piranha film (didn’t he get chewed to pieces?).
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … January Jones – who will be playing Emma Frost in the swingin’ 60s/Cold War-themed X-Men: First Class – just did a series of provocative handbag ads for Versace, which is odd because she herself really doesn’t look like a bag at all.
And that’s what’s happening today in the Cold War!
By Jason Apuzzo. When you’re the biggest female movie star in the world, and your personal man-servant is Brad Pitt, you can order up a film like The Tourist – more or less as you would order up room service at The Ritz.
That’s the ‘truth,’ such as it is, behind the new Angelina Jolie star vehicle that opens today, co-starring – technically, at least – Johnny Depp, and directed (so the advertising claims) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
Because if the phrase ‘vanity project’ has any meaning, then it applies with full force in describing The Tourist.
That’s not necessarily such a bad thing, in so far as Ms. Jolie is a genuine star – albeit, occasionally a star in the same way that Medusa was a ‘star’ of Greek mythology, earning her points by way of force rather than charm. But in the strange world we live in, in which people like Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon are routinely and incorrectly referred to as ‘stars’ (rather than as what they are, which is ‘actresses’) Angelina Jolie is the genuine article, and The Tourist only confirms that. If there ever was a woman the camera loves as she walks into a crowded ballroom, or as she skeptically raises an eyebrow at a would-be suitor, or as she fixes an appraising gaze on a man she intends to possess – and destroy? – then it’s Angelina Jolie.
The problem is, star vehicles don’t always make for good films – and at a certain point, they also corrode the star’s image. (Ask John Travolta about that.) The Tourist is almost – if not quite – a disaster, a woeful and expensive attempt to mimic charming romantic espionage capers of the past like North by Northwest, Charade or Arabesque; and in the generally misogynistic calculus of today’s Hollywood, Jolie likely can’t afford many more films like it.
Angelina Jolie, with some guy.
There’s more to The Tourist than that, though. There’s also a kind of snarky, dismissive tone taken by the film toward America and Americans that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. More on that below. The bottom line is that whereas I was ready to pass this film off as a harmless failure, an expensive lark – now I’m actively rooting for it to fail.
Frankly, I hope The Tourist tanks.
I’ll go through the motions and describe the film’s ‘plot,’ although ‘plot’ in this film is strictly an afterthought. We start with Jolie, who’s in Paris being surveilled by Scotland Yard for reasons as yet unknown. The Scotland Yard team is led by Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton (highly underrated as James Bond, I might add) – just two members of this film’s expensive supporting cast, which also includes Steven Berkoff and Rufus Sewell. Jolie gives Scotland Yard the slip, and finds herself on a train bound for Venice where she picks up Depp as a decoy to keep her pursuers guessing. Complicating matters is that a crime lord (Berkoff) who’s also pursuing Jolie mistakes Depp for a criminal who recently made off with about a billion dollars’ worth of his dirty money. Double-crosses, pseudo-adventure, predictable revelations and passing glances at romance ensue.
What non-chemistry looks like.
A few other things ensue, as well. One of the film’s motifs is that of Depp acting out as a bumbling, graceless and naive American in one of Europe’s most exotic and resplendent cities: Venice. (It’s simultaneously one of Europe’s grimiest and crassly commercialized cities; even Goethe was complaining about it back in the 1790s, long before there were Americans around to ruffle anybody’s feathers.) Depp plays the 2010 version of the ‘ugly American’ overseas, although in this case he’s more like the bumbling, gauche American – and The Tourist tries to play his ‘fish-out-of-water’ status for as many cheap laughs as possible.
It’s pathetic, and none of it works. It also happens to be obnoxious – a ‘look at the dancing American monkey’ routine – and immediately reawakened my dormant contempt for all-things-Depp.
By why restrict my venom to Depp? How about the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck? You can stick a fork in him. His 2007 film The Lives of Others was a breath of fresh air on a challenging, politically incorrect subject (i.e., the legacy of communism in Europe). Whatever good-will he established with that film has now been swiftly squandered – and for what? To play personal valet to big-dollar American movie stars on a European holiday? To indulge in cheap anti-Americanism, so he can fit in better with the Malibu gentry?
A fairy-tale Venice, with no tale to tell.
Donnersmarck does not appear to have ‘directed’ his stars here at all, actually. Perhaps he was over-awed by the talent suddenly put at his disposal. Jolie swans through the film doing her usual routine – which is fine, it’s a good routine, except that she lacks the vulnerability here that she shows in her better roles. As for Depp, he really needed to be directed because – conventional wisdom to the contrary – he is neither Cary Grant nor Laurence Olivier, and needed to bring more discipline to his performance (beginning with cutting his hair, and getting a shave) in order to be convincing as a math teacher from Wisconsin.
The deeper problem here, though, is that Hollywood is long out of practice making films like this – and it shows. The Tourist feels like a tourist ride through other, better films – films with higher stakes (as during the ideological struggle of the Cold War; one thinks here of Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews), or with more style (say, Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik). Donnersmarck doesn’t want to take too many chances here, though, and potentially risk his shiny new Hollywood career; ironically, his career may now get scuttled by this film.
The temptation to ‘go Hollywood’ is a strong one, one that only the most willful and stubborn can withstand. It’s probably very tempting even for an Oscar-winner like Donnersmarck, with serious things on his mind, to become – in effect – little more than another member of Angelina Jolie’s livery.
There are no doubt worse fates, but some of us were hoping for more from him.
By Jason Apuzzo. To complement our new Invasion Alert! series, today we are introducing a new series here at Libertas called Cold War Updates!
Have you noticed that the Cold War is back? At the movies at least, the Cold War seems to be returning in a big way. As LFM’s own Govindini Murty reported in her recent Human Events article on “The Cinema’s Surprising New Anti-Communist Films,” both Hollywood and the indie film scene have been producing films large and small about the communist threat in the past year – whether of the Chinese, North Korean, ex-Soviet or even homegrown-American variety. And these trends are not only continuing – they’re actually accelerating.
Angelina Jolie in "The Tourist."
It seems that each week new films, TV shows, documentaries and even video games are being green-lit featuring sexy spies, villainous Russians, jaded CIA operatives, the space race, unguarded uranium stockpiles, communist oppression … all that good stuff we remember from that nobler and altogether sexier period – the Cold War era – with its Bond girls, martinis, microfilm, Whittaker Chambers, Dean Martin, JFK … and Ronald Reagan.
I personally, for example, am currently working on a 7-hour, 3D IMAX film adaptation of the epic Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky World Chess Championship match of 1972!
(Just kidding.)
Anyway, what do all these new films portend? I’ll leave that for readers to decide (although in days to come I will be advancing certain theories), but I’ve decided to put together this regular Cold War feature to cover these new developments – or as many of them as we can. So grab a martini, plug in your Fender Telecaster and enjoy!
Two brief notes: there will likely be some occasional crossover of this series with Invasion Alerts!, as some of the new sci-fi films coming down the pike appear to have Cold War themes in them.
And of course, it goes without saying that Cold War Updates! will always feature the sexiest women around. Would you expect anything less from Libertas?
“It’s a really interesting challenge and Chris is an amazing actor” explained di Bonaventura. “So I’m confident we found the right guy.”
However, the producer claims the bigger challenge will be attracting a young audience to the film… “Tapping into Ryan’s was always a sophisticated world – it’s slightly adult. How do you bring those adults who expect that kind of sophistication and yet how do you also bring a young audience to it? That’s an interesting business challenge and a creative challenge – how do you weigh what’s in front of you and put it all together”
My take on this, for what it’s worth, is that the younger audience will come – provided you don’t gratuitously pander to them. (The folks doing Tron, incidentally, may be discovering that too late – if we’re to believe how poorly that film is tracking.) In any case, I’m looking forward to what Bonaventura’s cooking up for this reboot – this being one of the few series that actually deserves being brought back. Incidentally, Chris Pine will soon be starring (with Angela Bassett and Reese Witherspoon) as yet another CIA spy in Fox’s McG-directed This Means War.
Poster for the Joel Surnow minseries.
• A poster is already out for producer Joel Surnow’s quasi-controversial new miniseries, The Kennedys. What do you think? It seems to play it straight. The series stars Greg Kinnear is JFK, Katie Holmes as Jackie, Barry Pepper as Bobby Kennedy, and Tom Wilkinson as Joe Kennedy. Chris Diamantopoulos apparently plays Frank Sinatra. I don’t know if anybody plays Dean Martin, but somebody should. In any event, our best wishes to Joel on this 8-part series that airs on the History Channel next year.
• There are new interviews out today with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Tourist. (There are also new photos from the film here and here.) I’m liking everything I’m seeing about this film right now, although I’m alarmed that the film is apparently tracking poorly (much like Tron). I do think there’s an audience for an old-school, Hitchcockian thriller like this, but they’ll need to market the film to people who are above the age of 16. Do the studios know how to do that anymore?
• I’m annoyed to report that the obnoxious Eugene Jarecki, director of Why We Fight (definitely not the Capra version), has a documentary about Ronald Reagan in this upcoming Sundance Film Festival. Personal note here: I have three acquaintances who are working on no less than three different Reagan movies right now, and I implore all of you dudes to hurry up! before people like Jarecki are allowed to define The Gipper in perpetuity. They’d love to do it if they could.
• On the DVD front, the famous (and infamous) Red Scare thriller My Son John is finally getting a release, courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection. (It will also be available via Netflix streaming.) I have mixed feelings about that film, largely because its gifted star, Robert Walker, died before he could complete his performance – which seemed to be an interesting expansion on what he’d just done in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (and footage from Strangers was ultimately used to complete My Son John). Had Walker been able to finish the film, I think it might’ve been a lot better than it currently is, even if the film nonetheless has its moments (particularly those between Walker and his mother, played by Helen Hayes).
• AND FINALLY … it somehow seemed fitting that our first Cold War Update! pinup would be an actual Russian spy – the increasingly cheeky (so to speak) Anna Chapman – who’s currently paying her bills by posing for Russian Maxim … which should, incidentally, tell you everything you need to know about how very different the new Cold War is going to be from the old. (There’s a lot of money to be made this time!)
And that’s what’s happening today in the Cold War!
