By Jason Apuzzo. MPower Pictures, the people behind Bella, The Stoning of Soraya M and American Carol, are apparently joining Beloved Pictures in an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ Christian allegorical novel, The Great Divorce. MPower’s Steve McEveety, one of the producers of The Passion of the Christ, will be leading the production team according to Variety. Children’s book author N.D. Wilson (100 Cupboards) is attached to write the screenplay. John Shepherd is reported to have brought the project in for MPower. Beloved Picture’s team includes CEO Michael Ludlum, president Caleb Applegate, and VP Bob Abramoff.
I have not read The Great Divorce, but the story apparently involves a narrator who finds himself in a dark, gray metropolis – a city that serves as a kind of metaphorical stand-in for Hell. He eventually boards a bus bound for Heaven, discovering along the way that he and his fellow passengers are actually dead. The passengers are given the opportunity to enter the verdant, elysian fields of Heaven – although, ironically, most choose to cling to their past and return to their hellish metropolis. The novel apparently probes the many reasons that people resist the better life Christ has waiting for them.
Lewis’ novel was also apparently intended as a response to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, hence the title.
Due to the Narnia series, we all know that C.S. Lewis is hot right now in Hollywood circles – particularly in the Christian community. My sense from reading the internet write-ups on The Great Divorce (see the Wikipedia entry), is that there are significant opportunities for CGI here both in the depictions of the dark, hellish metropolis – and in the depiction of heaven. The bus, given the environmental sensitivity of our times, will probably need to be an electric bus. Just kidding.
We will continue to monitor this story. We’ve had Steve McEveety as a guest at several Liberty Film Festivals, and we want to wish him and his entire team the best on this ambitious project.
Mao’s Last Dancer will be released later this year, and is directed by Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) and stars Bruce Greenwood, Kyle MacLachlan, Joan Chen and Chi Cao in the lead role. We’ve posted on this film previously, and we’re looking forward to its U.S. release later this summer.
Mao’s Last Dancer takes place in the 1960’s-70’s, and tells the true story of Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin – who was taken from his impoverished family in rural China at the age of 11 by the Communist Chinese to train as a dancer in Madame Mao’s dance school in Beijing. The young Li soon became a star pupil due to his talent and indomitable work ethic – and at age 18 was given the opportunity to participate in the first cultural exchange program between Communist China and America, where he would eventually dance for the Houston Ballet Company.
The movie’s advocacy of democratic freedom appears to be refreshingly unapologetic. [See the trailer here.]
Mao’s Last Dancer has been picked up for distribution by Samuel Goldwyn Films, and is currently set for a limited U.S. release this August 20, 2010.
• LA Times conspiracy theory: TLC new channel for Red Staters, with channel featuring new Sarah Palin show. Channel reportedly aiming to be an “antidote to Bravo.” Does that include Bravo’s ratings? Lots of people who aren’t left wing like Bravo, too, which is why that channel is doing such boffo business. Memo to TLC: get ratings first, talk smack second.
• If somebody gave you this pitch, would you believe it: “Think Willy Wonka, The Matrix, and Avatar all rolled into one.” Apparently Warner Brothers did. I love LA.
[Editor’s Note: LFM is currently covering a series of provocative films debuting this week and next at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Jason Apuzzo. Why, exactly, did the West win the Cold War?
There are many theories. Most of them identify Ronald Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system as having been the final tipping point in that epochal conflict, after which point the Soviet Union was no longer capable – militarily, economically, or perhaps even psychologically – of sustaining its Cold War arms race with the United States.
This is certainly true, so far as it goes – and Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma’s extraordinary new documentary Disco & Atomic War certainly credits Reagan’s bold proposal as having had its desired psychological effect on the Soviets. But that isn’t really the story their film exists to tell.
What if the Cold War was instead won … by David Hasselhoff? What if American TV shows like Knight Rider and Dallas, or movies like Star Wars and Ninotchka – or lurid, 70s soft-core erotica like Emmanuelle – played an equal (and perhaps even greater) role in bringing down the communist system? This, essentially, is the subject matter of the compelling and drolly amusing Estonian/Finnish documentary Disco & Atomic War currently showing at The Los Angeles Film Festival (6/20).
Don't hassle the Hoff: in Estonia he won the Cold War.
Before proceeding further, let me briefly point out that I had the chance to visit Finland and the old Soviet Union during the time period depicted in this documentary – roughly the late 80s. Finland at that time was a kind of strange, anxious no-man’s land – a Western country that was nonetheless very much within the Soviet sphere of influence. As a teenager I remember taking the train from Finland into the Soviet Union, and idly fretting over the fact that I was carrying a paperback copy of Tom Clancy’s thriller The Hunt for Red October in my backpack. Would it get confiscated? Would I be labelled a spy? Would some Red Army jerk put a boot in my face?
If such fears seem quaint now, Disco & Atomic War brings them all back in vivid detail – because the purpose of this documentary is to examine the so-called ‘soft power’ influence of American and Western culture on the minds of Soviet citizens living in Estonia at that time, who were able through clever means to watch Finnish television broadcasts emanating from just over the border. As the film informs us, American popular culture – especially in the form of glamorous TV shows like Dallas – was deeply feared by Soviet authorities due to the ideas and expectations such programming planted in the minds of Soviet citizens.
If what you’re expecting from this film is a dry recitation of Cold War history, though, think again – because Disco & Atomic War is quite simply one of the funniest and most inventive movies I’ve seen in some time. The film wasn’t at all what I was expecting, or what you should expect from what might otherwise be labelled ‘an Estonian/Finnish documentary about the Cold War’ … which on the face of it sounds rather dull. Disco is actually a riot of surprises, a mash-up of historical documentary and personal narrative that attempts to put you into the mind of a young person living in a closed, totalitarian society – who is suddenly and shockingly exposed by bootleg TV antennas to … sex and disco, Texas millionaires, robot super-cars, and Luke Skywalker.
Nikolai, crafty creator of contraband TV antennas.
As a young person living in California at the time these things were exciting enough to me … but for young people in Estonia, co-directors Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma make it clear that these pop culture phenomena were nothing short of revolutionary. Disco & Atomic War meticulously re-creates the Estonia of the late 70s-late 80s, which was apparently used by the Soviet regime as a kind of laboratory experiment for determining the exact repercussions of having a population subjected to a steady stream of Western influence.
That’s right. [SPOILER ALERT.] The Soviets secretly allowed the Estonian population to be exposed to Western entertainment emanating from Finland, in order to gauge how their people would respond. It was a dangerous experiment – one that would prove fatal to the communists’ grip on power.
As Kilmi and Aarma tell it, Estonia was a kind of quiet, Soviet backwater state at the time that just happened to find itself in close proximity not only to Finland … but to giant TV towers constructed by the Finns (with, it was understood, U.S. backing) in order to broadcast American entertainment directly into the Evil Empire. And what exactly did these daring, constantly-under-threat Finnish TV stations broadcast into Soviet Estonia? Frothy TV fare like Dallas (a show which, in the eyes of the Estonians, featured “men with brilliant white teeth, and beautiful but unhappy women … in a land where everyone is a millionaire … a captivating, spiritual seance”); or shows featuring dancing girls and discos (the Americans’ “secret weapon”); or late night reruns of Ninotchka, the delightful Greta Garbo-Billy Wilder satire on Soviet bureaucrats. There was also Star Wars, George Lucas’ electrifying spectacle that strangely seemed to prefigure both the collapse of the Soviet evil Empire, and the very means (the ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system) by which that Empire was cowed into defeat.
Western siren: Sylvia Kristel as Emmanuelle.
Nothing seems to have had such a great effect on the Estonians, however, as David Hasselhoff’s Knight Rider series … and also the lurid, 70s nudie classic, Emmanuelle. The two most hilarious sequences in Disco & Atomic War involve recreations of how young Estonian kids would gather around foreign cars and begin speaking into their shiny new digital wrist watches, hoping that the cars would come alive like Hasselhoff’s Pontiac. In a later sequence, we see almost the entire nation of Estonia struggle with antennas (some made of simple metal pipes, others made with mercury from thermometers) in order to catch fleeting glimpses of curvaceous Sylvia Kristel writhe in passion in Emmanuelle.
What Disco & Atomic War captures is how utterly hopeless Soviet efforts were to counteract these seductive Western entertainments … and if you’re sensing some parallels with our current struggle against the Islamo-fascists, you’re right on the money. If you watch films like the recent No One Knows About Persian Cats (see the LFM review here), you will form the inescapable conclusion that Iran’s youth are exactly where Estonia’s were some twenty years ago … watching bootlegged Western music and movies, copping rebellious youth attitudes (including punk music), ignoring state restrictions in their daily quest for sex and excitement. Disco & Atomic War is a kind of visual treatise on this type of ‘soft’ Western power, as opposed to military modes of power, and how utterly explosive these modes of influence can be on shaping the imaginations of a population. As the film relates, it’s probably no coincidence that the same year Dallas reruns stopped playing illicitly on Soviet TV screens, the Soviet Union collapsed. [In fact, in his only on-camera interview since being ousted from office, the Soviet puppet dictator of Estonia directly blames Finnish/Western TV broadcasts for the collapse of his own regime.]
I can’t recommend Disco & Atomic War enough, and if you’re in LA on Sunday, June 20th – and anywhere near the vicinity of the downtown around 10pm – I recommend you pop in and see it. [Click here for more details.] If there’s any justice in the world, the film will be short-listed for Oscar consideration. It will show you a side of the Cold War we don’t hear enough about … and give you a sense of what remains our most potent weapon in the battle against tyranny: the alluring freedom of our popular culture.
I’ve embedded the trailer below – which, unfortunately, does not quite do justice to the baroque wit and sophistication of this magnificent little film.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Steven Spielberg’s War Horse now has its star: Jeremy Irvine. This film is looking like Empire of the Sun redux for Spielberg, and will probably a major tear-jerker. Bread-and-butter material for him, although World War I traditionally a tough sell at the box office. My personal World War I favorite? Easily The Blue Max with George Peppard, James Mason and the luscious Ursula Andress.
By Jason Apuzzo. The LA Times is featuring an interview today with Joel Surnow, creator of TV’s 24 series. Joel kindly invited Govindini and I to the 24 set a few years back, and at the Fall 2006 Liberty Film Festival we premiered scenes from the pilot of Joel’s comedy show The Half Hour News Hour, a series that later ran on Fox News. The jokey scenes from the pilot featuring Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter got an especially rapturous response, as I recall.
In the interview Joel discusses his forthcoming miniseries The Kennedys that will be showing on The History Channel. That series has already been the source of some controversy, as radical left wing documentarian Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed) and his allies in the media have been trying to portray Joel’s series as a hit job against the Kennedy family. Joel throws a bucket of cold water today on Greenwald’s paranoid speculations, reminding people that the writer of the Kennedys series, Steve Kronish, is actually a liberal Democrat. Here’s Joel on the controversy surrounding the series:
I think part of it [the controversy] was driven by the fact that it’s going to debut around the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s inauguration. For those looking to sustain the Camelot image, they’re worried. But they don’t need to be.
In the interview Joel also talks about setting up his own production entity for the series, and the overall benefits of working independently. We want to wish Joel the best for The Kennedys. Joel’s been responsible for a lot of great TV projects before, whether on 24 on Le Femme Nikita – and we’re sure this one will be colorful, as well. One thing is for certain: whatever one thinks of the Kennedy family, they were an important part of American history in the 20th century – and they’ve certainly never been dull …
Lewis’ novel was also apparently intended as a response to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, hence the title.
