Category: LFM in the News

LFM’s Sundance Diary & Final Thoughts on the Festival

LFM's Joe Bendel, Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

By Govindini Murty. Sundance sets the tone for the entire film industry in North America. Its spirit of supporting creativity, talent, and scrappy innovation is one we heartily applaud here at Libertas. We also applaud the fact that in recent years Sundance has become a home to so many pro-freedom films. To name just a few, these have included Mads Brügger’s daring expose of North Korean Communism The Red Chapel (2010), Chris Morris’ brilliant satire of Islamic terrorism Four Lions (2010), and Lee Tamahori’s intense anti-Saddam Hussein thriller The Devil’s Double (2011).

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival continued this tradition. Pro-freedom films screened at the festival included: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s efforts to expose the brutality of the Communist Chinese government; The Other Dream Team, about the Lithuanian basketball team and their struggle to overcome Soviet influence; Putin’s Kiss, about the turn toward authoritarianism amongst the Nashi youth movement in Putin’s Russia; and Mads Brügger’s The Ambassador, a witty and politically-incorrect expose of corruption in central Africa. There were also a host of entertaining and well-made narrative dramas and comedies this year. A few we at Libertas enjoyed included The Raid, Grabbers, and Shadow Dancer.

LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty with Joseph Gordon-Levitt at Sundance 2012.

Jason and I arrived at Sundance on Monday, January 23rd. Libertas super-contributor Joe Bendel had already been at the festival since opening night on January 19th, and had managed to fit in an astounding number of films that first weekend. Because we admire the Zen warrior-monk focus Joe brings to writing movie reviews, the first thing we did when we arrived in Park City was meet up with Joe on Main Street – the central artery through which all things Sundance flow. Snow flakes were falling and the lights were twinkling on the picturesque street as we all met up in front of the famed Egyptian Theatre.

Slipping and sliding through the snow and invigorated by the air of good cheer around us, we headed with Joe down the street through the crush of festival goers and filmmakers to plan our film-going strategy. With approximately 180 films showing at Sundance, many playing simultaneously in multiple venues, careful coordination is integral to having a successful Sundance experience. As we hurried down Main Street, we ran into Paul Giamatti (looking avuncular with a fuzzy beard), and Jason spotted Kate Bosworth (there promoting her thriller Black Rock). Jason wanted to ask her whether she did her own surfing in Blue Crush, then thought better of it.

The first Sundance film we had scheduled for that night was an 11:45pm screening of Grabbers – a campy, sci-fi Irish alien-invasion movie. Sundance’s Park City at Midnight screenings are where the festival shows its genre films, and the raucous crowds that attend these screenings often provide a lively show of their own. The screening of Grabbers was great fun, with the mostly drunken crowd hooting and hollering throughout the screening, and we agreed the film had a good chance at getting distribution. In fact, Jason spotted some distribution execs he recognized walking into the theater. We would have stayed for the Q & A with the filmmakers, but it was 2:00am and we were scheduled to attend the coffee chat with Stan Lee at 9:00 the next morning. This was something we would have to get used to at Sundance: sleep deprivation.

LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty with Stan Lee at the 2012 Slamdance Film Festival.

Tuesday, January 24th’s highlights were most definitely Slamdance’s two-hour coffee chat with Stan Lee in the morning, followed by the screening of his film With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story that afternoon. Slamdance is the fun, ‘alternative’ festival to Sundance, and is really worth a visit.  Jason has already described this wonderful event with Stan Lee in detail, but let me just add how charming, witty, and delightful Stan is in person. He was truly gracious when we met him, with a big smile on his face and a roguish twinkle in his eye. We bonded with him over our mutual love of classic film and all things Errol Flynn, and had fun asking him questions about his work and inspiration during the course of the two-hour master class/coffee chat. We would have loved for Joe to have attended this event with us, but Joe was scheduled to leave Sundance Tuesday morning for New York, so we bid him adieu the night before. Continue reading LFM’s Sundance Diary & Final Thoughts on the Festival

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: The Most Provocative Filmmaker in the World: A Conversation With Mads Brügger on The Ambassador

Filmmaker Mads Brügger, director of "The Ambassador" at the Sundance Film Festival.

[Editor’s Note: The post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone.]

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. His documentaries have been among the most provocative films featured in the Sundance Film Festival over the past several years. Bolder even than Sacha Baron Cohen, he’s punk’d both the North Korean communist government and now, in his new film The Ambassador, the Central African Republic and the corrupt diplomatic culture that supports it.

He’s one of Europe’s funniest and most controversial filmmakers, although most Americans haven’t heard of him — yet.

The name of this lanky, cerebral enfant terrible is Mads Brügger.

In Brügger’s previous film The Red Chapel (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), winner of Sundance’s 2010 World Cinema jury prize for documentaries, the filmmaker pulled off one of the most dangerous and politically provocative stunts in cinema history by infiltrating North Korea as part of a fake socialist comedy group. Operating under the watchful (and vaguely confused) gaze of the North Korean government, Brügger’s cameras proceeded to document the bizarre, Orwellian nether-world of today’s Pyongyang and its frightening cult of the ‘Dear Leader.’

In his new film The Ambassador (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), which recently screened at Sundance, Brügger now attempts an even more complex and daring stunt by purchasing a Liberian diplomatic title and infiltrating one of the most dangerous places on Earth — the Central African Republic (CAR) — as an ersatz Ambassador. His purpose? To expose the illegal blood diamond trade — and the corrupt world of CAR officials, bogus businessmen and shady European and Asian diplomats that it benefits.

Like a tragicomic version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, The Ambassador takes viewers into a rarely-seen world of European influence-peddlers who exploit the African continent — and the amoral retinue of African officials, petty businessmen and hangers-on who are complicit in the exploitation.

Along the way Brügger and his hidden cameras have close encounters with everything from an obese ex-French Legionnaire heading the CAR’s state security (who is assassinated shortly after talking to Brügger), to armed militias in the middle of Africa’s ‘Triangle of Death,’ to a diamond smuggler with a secret child bride and potential terrorist ties, to a tribe of inebriated pygmies organized by Brügger to staff a match factory.

Mads Brügger talks with Jason Apuzzo at Sundance.

It all makes for a potent, carnivalesque and politically incorrect experience — and one that exposes the mutual racism (of Europeans toward Africans, and Africans toward Europeans) that makes central Africa such a hotbed of corruption and violence.

In the midst of all this is Brügger himself — a tall, soft-spoken Danish journalist (and son of two Danish newspaper editors) with an ironic sense of humor and an uncanny ability to transform himself into the kind of diffident European grandee that African officials are accustomed to exploiting — and being exploited by — well into the 21st century.

Along with my Libertas Film Magazine co-editor Govindini Murty, I sat down with Brügger at the Sundance Film Festival to talk about his funny, horrifying and highly controversial new film. With a shaved head, and wearing a skull ring from DC Comics’ The Phantom, Brügger arrived looking very much the part of an experimental European director.

Apuzzo: What got you interested in [corruption in the Central African Republic] as subject matter for a film?

Brügger: I like doing films that divert from their own genre. I wanted to do an Africa documentary without all the usual semiotics and codes of the generic Africa documentary. You know — NGO people, child soldiers, HIV patients, and so on. But also I wanted a film where you would meet all the people you usually don’t get to see – you know, the kingpins, the players, the ministers who live a very secure and comfortable life away from the scrutiny of the media. So I thought that if I could purchase a diplomatic title, I could gain access to this very closed realm of African state affairs and politics. It’s pretty much a ‘let’s-see-what-happens’ project. Once we set off to do this, who will we meet? What kind of people will I run into?

Mads Brügger talks with Govindini Murty at Sundance.

Apuzzo: How did you prepare to become a corrupt European diplomat?

Brügger: [Laughs.] I prepared for almost three years, because I wanted to really go into detail with my persona. I would go to receptions, embassies in Copenhagen, especially the Belgian embassy because they have a lot of African diplomats coming there. I noticed all the telltale signs, the do’s and don’ts of how diplomats behave and carry themselves. For instance, when they’re having cocktails they like to fold their napkin into a triangle and then wrap it around the glass. I think it’s because they don’t want to leave fingerprints, but I don’t know for sure. [Laughs.]

The most popular cigarette amongst African diplomats are red Dunhills. The most popular liquor is Johnny Walker Black Label. You know, things of that order. At the same time, I also wanted my ‘character’ to be packed with various archetypes, and characters from comic books: Dr. Müller in Tintin, Bernard Prince (a Belgian comic book hero), even the Man with The Yellow Hat from Curious George. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: The Most Provocative Filmmaker in the World: A Conversation With Mads Brügger on The Ambassador

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: As Egypt Fights for Democracy, New Documentary 1/2 Revolution Goes to the Front Lines

[Editor’s Note: This post appears today at The Huffington Post and at AOL-Moviefone.]

By Govindini Murty. As the Egyptian military government prepares to put nineteen American employees of pro-democracy NGOs on trial, and thousands of Egyptians continue to demonstrate over the stalling of democratic reforms, the new documentary 1/2 Revolution offers a striking look back at the Egyptian revolution of one year ago.

Premiering recently at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, 1/2 Revolution depicts the revolution through the eyes of a group of Egyptian activists directly involved in it. Using cell phone cameras and hand-held camcorders, the filmmaker-activists capture dramatic footage of clashes between average Egyptians calling for freedom and the repressive government forces attempting to stop them.

As co-director Karim El Hakim said after the film’s recent Sundance screening, “You can’t get any more cinema verité than this.”

Danish-Palestinian director Omar Shargawi and Egyptian-American director Karim El Hakim live with their families just a few blocks from Tahrir Square in Cairo. When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians take to the streets on January 25th, 2011 to demand the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak, Omar and Karim head down from their apartments to record the events. Viewers are immediately thrown into the visceral experience of the revolution. Crowds of protesters run through the streets shouting “Egypt! Egypt! “Join us! Join us!” “Freedom! Freedom!” When gangs of government-paid thugs and police start beating and shooting the protesters, the protesters shout “No violence! No violence!” This call to non-violence is one of the early strong points of the documentary. To emphasize the theme, Shargawi points out a crowd of demonstrators who surround a group of police yet refrain from assaulting them.

Over time, though, these commendable calls to non-violence are drowned out by the tide of chaos and bloodshed that overtakes the demonstrations when the government attacks. Police fire into the roiling crowds of protesters with live ammunition, loud booms announce the launching of tear gas canisters through the air, and demonstrators and counter-demonstrators fight back and forth with truncheons, rocks, and knives. Demanding to see their passports, secret police harass Karim and Omar as they attempt to film the events, and Omar pulls a scarf around his face to disguise his identity.

Later, Karim is gassed in the face and stumbles home partially blinded, while Omar is severally beaten in a dark alley, barely emerging alive. Government snipers start shooting people through the windows of their apartments in the blocks around Tahrir Square – making viewers fear for the safety of the filmmakers in their own homes, particularly as one of them has a baby who keeps wandering close to the windows. Late in the film, government thugs even take over the street below the apartment building and start harassing the residents, which is what finally forces the filmmakers to question staying in the country.

Omar Shargawi filming "1/2 Revolution."

In capturing the tumult of the Cairo protests, 1/2 Revolution depicts more violence than most Hollywood action movies – but tragically, the mayhem here is all too real.

The seemingly intractable rage captured in the film – both from democratic protesters righteously angry over the suppression of their human rights, and from entrenched government elites determined to hold on to power at any cost – highlights the central challenge facing the Egyptian people today. How will they overcome this bitterness and anger – these scars from decades of violence, repression, and authoritarian rule – in order to build a peaceful democracy?

In his seminal 1947 study of German film, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer pointed out that the details of life captured in a film often reveal a country’s unconscious predilections. The details captured in 1/2 Revolution are ominous: activists repeatedly declare their willingness to die and become martyrs, the camera dwells on shattered heads and limbs, bodies on stretchers being rushed away, a man lifting up his shirt to show a bullet wound in his back, a pool of blood on the pavement with the word ‘Egypt’ traced in Arabic. Even more ominous are the anti-American and anti-Jewish symbols scrawled onto anti-Mubarak protest signs. One particularly ugly sign depicts Mubarak as the devil with pointy ears and a Star of David stamped on his forehead.

The filmmakers at the Sundance screening.

Sadly, the filmmakers and their friends engage in implicitly anti-Israeli rhetoric themselves. Co-director Omar Shargawi, whose father is Palestinian, says with pride of the demonstrations, “It was like being part of the intifada or something.” One of his friends, a woman also of Palestinian origin, expresses fears that “the Israeli army is massing at the border” and worries that the U.S. might invade. Given that Israel’s population of only 7.8 million is vastly outnumbered by Egypt’s population of 81 million, and given that the American government was generally supportive of the Egyptian revolution, these kind of fears come across as over the top. But this is the dark side of the revolution: the urge to look for blame in outside bogey-men – in this case, America and Israel – rather than look internally to ask why so many Arab states have failed to achieve lasting democracy. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: As Egypt Fights for Democracy, New Documentary 1/2 Revolution Goes to the Front Lines

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: With Great Power: A Conversation with Stan Lee at Slamdance 2012

[Editor’s Note: This post appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post and also at AOL-Moviefone.]

By Jason Apuzzo. He’s 89 years old, and his career is hotter than ever.

With hits like Thor, Captain America and X-Men: First Class dominating the box office in 2011, and upcoming films like The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man looking to light up the summer in 2012, you’d think that a man whose career in comic books began just prior to World War II might want to slow down.

Think again – because this 89 year-old dynamo is named Stan Lee.

This year’s Sundance Film Festival offered a smorgasbord of art-house delights, but its competitor across the street – the scrappy Slamdance Film Festival – presented one of Park City’s best events last week when it hosted comic book legend Stan Lee for a 2-hour master class associated with Slamdance’s screening of the new documentary, With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story. Just two days after receiving the Vanguard Award from the Producers Guild of America, Lee breezed into Park City to spend a special two hours with filmmakers and journalists prior to the With Great Power screening, discussing his extraordinary career as the creator of iconic characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

And if anything was clear at the end of the master class and screening, it was this: the keys to Stan Lee’s ongoing success are his earthy humor, humanity, and incredible vitality. The man simply doesn’t know how to slow down. As Lee says in With Great Power about being the impresario of today’s comic book cinema: “I’m having fun! Don’t punish me by making me retire.”

Stan Lee at the Slamdance Film Festival.

A flinty and funny raconteur with a baritone New York accent, Lee spent much of his time at the Slamdance master class describing his colorful early days in which he was alternately a rebellious office boy for a trouser manufacturer (he made a mess of his store after being fired two days before Christmas), an obituary writer (he found the job morbid), and even a Broadway theater usher (he once tripped and fell flat on his face while escorting Eleanor Roosevelt to her seat at the Rivoli Theater in New York).

Lee finally got his big break in late 1941 when he became interim editor at Timely Comics, which would eventually evolve under his leadership into Marvel Comics. Then known as ‘Stanley Lieber’ (his name at birth, as the son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants), Lee was first given the chance to provide text filler for a May 1941 edition of Captain America Comics – and he hasn’t looked back since.

The language of "Thor" inspired by Shakespeare.

A passionate reader, Lee described in detail how literature fueled his imagination as a young person. “I read everybody when I was young – Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, [Edgar Rice] Burroughs’ Tarzan. I read everything I could get my hands on.” Lee also cited Shakespeare as an influence on the style of language for Thor, drily noting that Thor “was supposed to be a Norse god – I couldn’t have him talk like a guy who was born in Brooklyn. I loved Shakespeare, and I read Shakespeare when I was young. I probably didn’t understand most of it, but I loved the sound of it.” Lee’s fascination with Shakespeare continues to this day, with Lee and 1821 Comics collaborating on the new graphic novel Romeo and Juliet: The War, a sci-fi retelling of Shakespeare’s classic love story which debuted last week.

Lee also developed an early love of the movies. When I asked Lee what movies had influenced him, he was quick to cite Errol Flynn’s adventure films of the 1930s and ’40s. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: With Great Power: A Conversation with Stan Lee at Slamdance 2012

LFM’s Joe Bendel Covers The 2012 Sundance, Slamdance Film Festivals + LFM Reviews The Debutante Hunters

[Editor’s Note: LFM’s Joe Bendel will be covering the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and also select films from the 2012 Slamdance Film Festival.]

By Joe Bendel. They are no Scarlett O’Haras. As long as these Southern ladies have ammunition, they will never go hungry. Challenging Southern Belle stereotypes, Maria White follows five South Carolinian women as their pursue their game in the short documentary Debutante Hunters, which screens ahead of We’re Not Broke during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Lest there be any confusion, they do not hunt debutantes. They are debutantes who hunt, quite well in fact. The term “debutante” might be overstating the matter for some of the hunters, but regardless of whether they are in the social register, they shoot straight and can acquit themselves with grace in the wild. Indeed, most learned to track and shoot from their fathers, or in the case of Sara Frampton, from her mother Susan.

Unlike many current reality shows, Debutante never plays into cultural stereotypes. Although never asked directly, it seems a pretty safe assumption these hunters are firm advocates of gun owners’ rights to some extent. However, they are all very family-oriented and deeply attuned to the environment. In fact, Susan Frampton is rather eloquent comparing hunters and gardeners as fellow conservators. Never wasteful, the women also always cook what they kill, often feeding their families for weeks with delicious looking venison burgers.

At just a whisker over twelve minutes, the respectful Debutante delivers a fair amount of hunting action along with a measure of psychological insight into its subjects, but it seems to cry out for a longer treatment. Frankly, this would make a perfect series for the History Channel, perhaps following Top Shot. It boasts a telegenic, well-spoken cast shooting guns. There is a certain undeniable appeal to that. They could even do cooking segments. Highly recommended (though the same does not necessarily apply to the film it is paired with), Debutante screens this coming Sunday (1/22), Tuesday (1/24), Thursday (1/26), Friday (1/27), and Saturday (1/28) in Park City and Wednesday (1/25) in Salt Lake as part of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Posted on January 19th, 2012 at 9:07am.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: “Why The Cold War is Back at the Movies”

[Editor’s Note: The post below appears today at The Huffington Post and the newly relaunched AOL-Moviefone site, where LFM’s Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty will also now be blogging.]

By Jason Apuzzo. The Cold War is back – at least at the movies.

This weekend moviegoers can watch Meryl Streep portray ardent Cold Warrior Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Gary Oldman root out a dangerous Soviet mole from the British intelligence service in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Tom Cruise race to prevent a Cold War-style nuclear exchange between America and Russia in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

These films form part of a major Hollywood trend toward reawakening memories of the Cold War – an era that is suddenly returning with a vengeance on the big screen, with long-term implications for our popular culture.

Currently in the midst of an awards-season run, for example, Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar tells the story of legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s decades’-long confrontation with Soviet infiltration of America. Also in the midst of an awards-season run is the ominous new documentary Khodorkovsky, which depicts how little Russia’s authoritarian governing style has changed since the dark days of the old Soviet Union.

Michael Fassbender in "X-Men: First Class."

And the trend doesn’t stop there. If Santa slipped new Blu-rays of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, X-Men: First Class, Apollo 18 or The Kennedys into your Christmas stocking, you just got another healthy dose of Cold War nostalgia from those films – because 2011 was a watershed year in Hollywood for reviving America’s long-standing rivalry with all things Russian and/or communist.

So, what’s going on here? Why is Hollywood suddenly reviving Russian communists, spies and autocrats as the go-to villains of choice?

The simplest answer may be that the old Soviet Union is gradually replacing Nazi Germany, Imperial Rome and space aliens as Hollywood’s favorite antagonists. In an industry still hesitant to make films about today’s War on Terror, and with memories of World War II fading, Russian authoritarians – including those of the present day variety – are on their way to becoming Hollywood’s safe, consensus villains of the moment.

This trend began in 2008, with of all things an Indiana Jones film. Set in 1957 at the height of the Cold War, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull featured Soviet communists as the villains, and despite grumbling from critics and internet fanboys the film played well in middle America – taking in over $317 million domestically (a figure even Ghost Protocol seems unlikely to match) and $786 worldwide. Perhaps just as significantly, the fact that the film had been made by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas seemingly gave the green light to other left-of-center filmmakers that depicting Reds as the villains was OK again.

Angelina Jolie in "Salt."

Soon Angelina Jolie was hunting sleeper Soviet agents in Salt (2010), Ed Harris and Colin Farrell were escaping a brutal Soviet gulag in Peter Weir’s extraordinary The Way Back (2010), and even Richard Gere and Martin Sheen were getting in on the act – smoking out a Russian mole in The Double (2011). Released here in the U.S. in 2010, Fred Ward played Ronald Reagan in the French Cold War spy thriller Farewell, and Renny Harlin’s action-drama 5 Days of War (2011) depicted the brutality of Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia.

To be fair, Russians haven’t been the only villains in this trend. MGM’s forthcoming remake of Red Dawn (read a review of an early cut of the film here) depicts a communist invasion of America by the North Koreans and Chinese, similar to the invasion of Australia depicted in Stuart Beattie’s recent thriller Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010). Bruce Beresford’s touching Mao’s Last Dancer (2009) recreated in heartbreaking detail the restrictions in Chinese communist society on artists. And perhaps no recent film captured communist tyranny more vividly than Mads Brügger’s gonzo documentary from 2009 on North Korea, The Red Chapel.

Sterling Hayden as Col. Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove."

This movie revival of the Cold War – in its many Russian, Chinese and North Korean variations – has intriguing implications. For the past generation, many left-of-center filmmakers have been deeply invested in the notion that the Cold War was a kind of paranoid mirage, a tragicomic figment of Ronald Reagan and Whittaker Chambers’ imaginations. With few exceptions, the basic image created by these filmmakers of the Cold War – codified in films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), or more recently in Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) – has been one of an artificial conflict fueled by American militarism and bourgeois small-mindedness. The sardonic The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) serves as perhaps the sine qua non of this genre.

This vision of the Cold War appears to be changing, however, among younger, less ideologically driven filmmakers. These filmmakers view the Cold War simply as a fertile field of storytelling possibilities about the struggle for freedom, in much the same way an older generation viewed World War II. Filmmakers today seem more eager to tell such stories about the Cold War, unearthing the past and depicting the sharp political divisions between East and West, perhaps because these filmmakers detect a continuity between communist tyrannies of the 20th century and similarly repressive regimes today.

After all, Brezhnev and Mao may be gone – but an ex-KGB man still runs Russia, and communists still run repressive regimes in China and North Korea. And America’s relationship with these nations sometimes seems no better than it was before.

After a 3D re-release, "Top Gun" is slated for a sequel.

Today’s Hollywood seems alive to these realities as never before, as reflected in a slate of new projects in the development pipeline that channel Cold War themes. Along with sequels to Salt, X-Men: First Class, Die Hard (with Die Hard 5 set to take place in Russia), and even Top Gun, work is also underway to re-boot the Jack Ryan franchise with Chris Pine in a new thriller called Moscow. Remakes of famous Cold War properties like Ice Station Zebra, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and even Colossus: The Forbin Project are also in development – along with adaptations of the books Londongrad, The Reluctant Communist, and the Red Star comic book.

On TV, HBO and FX are working on competing series about ’80s-era Soviet spies in the U.S., and HBO reportedly has another series in development about Cold War spies in Berlin.

As if that were not enough, Gerard Butler and Ed Harris will soon be trying to stop rogue Russian generals and KGB agents from starting World War III in Hunter Killer and Phantom, respectively. Or if your sensibilities run toward the art house, Andrzej Wajda is currently directing a biopic of Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

Granted, it shouldn’t be assumed that these films will express a uniformity of opinion about the Cold War, or about current international tensions. Indeed, several recent films like The Iron Lady, J. Edgar, and X-Men: First Class express a pronounced ambivalence about the Cold Warriors they depict.

Watching The Iron Lady, for example, you would hardly know why the Soviet Red Army newspaper labelled Margaret Thatcher “the Iron Lady” in the first place. The film is weirdly evasive of Thatcher’s vital role in ending the Cold War – barely alluding to it except in brief moments of Thatcher with Reagan and Gorbachev, or attending an event commemorating the end of the Cold War. The Iron Lady seems more concerned with Thatcher’s current state of physical fragility than in her momentous alliances with Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa in hastening the collapse of the Soviet state.

Still, the fascination that films like The Iron Lady or J. Edgar have with Cold Warriors of the past is obvious. And certainly none of these recent films bothers to romanticize the communist cause. Indeed, the days in Hollywood of dueling Che Guevara biopics (Che, The Motorcycle Diaries) – or of Katherine Hepburn wearing a frayed Mao jacket to the Oscars – seem long gone.

The Cold War is back in Hollywood, but this time the idea seems to be to support the winning side.

Posted on January 13th, 2012 at 5:24pm.