By Jason Apuzzo. New York Magazine’s Vulture blog is becoming the place for scoops these days, and today they’ve got a whopper. Apparently Larry Ellison’s son David wants to finance a reteaming of Tom Cruise (in a limited, cameo-esque role), Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer on a Top Gun sequel. The screenwriter on this would apparently be Oscar-winner Christopher McQuarrie, who just wrote The Tourist and also wrote Valkyrie for Cruise. As a side note, David Ellison is currently helping to finance Cruise’s Mission: Impossible 4.
Cruise on The Bike.
I think this is a great idea, if executed properly. For those of you who weren’t around back then, Top Gun was the the movie from the 80s that romanticized American military life (without having to demonize any particular enemy nation). I personally know a guy who, I strongly suspect, was pulled into life in Naval aviation – and beach volleyball – at least in part due to this film. And who could blame him? Between the girls, the Kawasakis and the volleyball, it painted a pretty appealing picture of serving your country while flying jets in San Diego. [Whatever happened to Berlin, by the way?]
If it isn’t already obvious, folks, the 80s are mounting a major comeback these days – with Obama’s indirect help, I strongly suspect. A Wall Street sequel just came out; even Back to the Future is getting re-released this month, for goodness sake.
As a side note here: this is the Tom Cruise I miss, the guy in the shades on the motorcycle flying jets for his country – not the couch-jumping oddity we’ve come to know.
Obviously we’ll be keeping an eye on this one. Fun footnote here: years ago when I was in high school I was hanging out on the Paramount lot one day while Tony Scott was in post-production on one of his films. His Kawasaki – the one Cruise rides in the film – was parked in the lot. When nobody was looking, I hopped on. 🙂 Awesome.
I’ve just got to know just one thing about this sequel: will they be bringing back Iceman?
By Jason Apuzzo. The Wrap is reporting today that the anti-Islamic terror documentary Killing in the Name has been shortlisted for Academy Awards consideration. I’ve embedded the trailer for the film above – take a look.
Here below is how the film is described on its Facebook page:
“Four years ago, Ashraf Al-Khaled and his bride were celebrating what was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives, when an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber walked into their wedding and blew himself up, killing both of their fathers in front of their eyes. The couple lost 27 members of their family that day.
“It’s a sad fact that stories like Ashraf’s pepper the news almost daily. In the last 5 years, over 88,000 people have been killed or injured in terrorist attacks worldwide. The majority, like Ashraf, were Muslims.
“How can someone be so robbed of their humanity that they happily commit mass murder and suicide? It’s one of the fundamental human questions of our era, one that has haunted Ashraf since his wedding day, and what is now driving him to rise from horrific tragedy to take an unprecedented step – breaking the silence in the Muslim community on this taboo subject by speaking out against terrorism.
“KILLING IN THE NAME follows Ashraf in his quest to speak with victims and perpetrators, and expose the true costs of terrorism. From a jihadi recruiter for Al-Qaeda, the group responsible for bombing his wedding, to an Islamic militant behind one of the world’s worst terrorist attacks, to a madrassa filled with young boys ready to fulfill the duty of jihad, Ashraf takes us on a harrowing journey around the world to see if one man can speak truth to terror, and begin to turn the global tide.
“At times chilling and moving, terrifying and hopeful, KILLING IN THE NAME is a far- reaching and necessary first step in tackling what is arguably the most pressing issue of our age. As Ashraf puts it, ‘If we can’t even talk about it, this terror will never end.'”
We’ll keep an eye on this story, and we wish the filmmakers the very best with this project.
• The Playboy Mansion recently hosted a charity event to benefit our wounded warriors. The event featured motorcycles and Playmates, as well as a live auction of limited edition Playboy centerfolds and a prop gun once used by John Wayne. Honestly, I can’t think of a more patriotic way to spend one’s weekend outside of hunting Taliban.
Among the proclamations made at this parade was the following:
Ri Yong Ho, chief of the general staff of the North Korean army, said at the event: “If the US imperialists and their followers infringe on our sovereignty and dignity even slightly, we will blow up the stronghold of their aggression with a merciless and righteous retaliatory strike by mobilising all physical means, including self-defensive nuclear deterrent force, and achieve the historic task of unification.”
Take a look at the video above. Two words come to mind: farcical … and chilling.
By David Ross. Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize in literature — a laudable, long overdue selection — and Chinese democratic activist Liu Xiaobo has won the Peace Prize. This was an unusually reasonable and gratifying Nobel season. The Nobel establishment was evidently trying to perform emergency reconstructive surgery on its own reputation after giving President Obama the Peace Prize.
Vladimir Nabokov.
I read Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World (1981) twenty-five years ago. I was a fifteen-year-old intern in the Washington office of Congressman Bill Gradison (R-Ohio). One of my fellow interns lent the book to me. I was enraptured. The plot long ago evaporated from memory, but I still have certain tableaux fixed in my mind; I still recall a certain mood of welling apocalyptic energy. I haven’t read Vargas Llosa in the intervening decades, but I have long meant to give his work a further try. I now have my impetus.
Vargas Llosa is a rare conservative among winners of the literature prize. The Nobel committee has notoriously blackballed conservatives and non-progressives since the 1960s. Pound, Borges, Nabokov, and Updike had undeniable claims on the prize but were all criminally denied. Solzhenitsyn and Saul Bellow were the exceptions to the rule. Note however that the committee’s official commendation of Vargas Llosa exudes academic left-wingery (“for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”) as if to make clear that the committee observed the usual bien pensant considerations. “Cartography of structures of power” may be the clumsiest phrase ever employed by the Nobel committee, and that’s saying a good deal: some of its commendations read like thesis statements plucked from overly earnest high school term papers.
There were, admittedly, reasons to snub Pound, but the snubbing of Borges and Nabokov was an outrage against intellectual honesty. Updike had two strikes against him: he was an non-self-loathing American and he was a quiet conservative (see his brilliant essay “On Not Being a Dove” here). He was the only haute-novelist who did not vocally oppose the Vietnam War, and he consistently defended the religious sensibility against the galloping secularism of the age. When the Twin Towers were struck he did not, like Susan Sontag, rail against American imperialism, but wrote in a mood of deep and genuine heartbreak (here). Other Americans whom the Nobel committee has ignored, in order of victimization:
Wallace Stevens
Thomas Pynchon
Marianne Moore
William Carlos Williams
Tennessee Williams
Philip Roth
Richard Wilbur
Norman Mailer
Edmund Wilson
Cynthia Ozick
John Barth
Had she lived into middle age and realized her great genius, Flannery O’Connor would have been another conservative whom the Nobel committee could have boasted of snubbing.
The Wall Street Journal comments on Vargas Llosa’s ascension (here) and interviews the Nobel hero (here). Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker sends fluttering our way the usual clever nothings (here).
[UPDATE: Read here how Swedish leftists are apparently outraged that Llosa won the award, because he isn’t “one of us.” Thanks to LFM’s Patricia Ducey for the heads-up.]
We are all now able to share these performances live across the world. At 1 p.m. the curtain rises in New York; at 10 a.m. in California we sip our coffees and wait for the theater to darken; in Switzerland they dress in formals and make an evening of it. Now in its fifth season, “The Met: Live” is the perfect marriage of myth, movie artistry and music – and it’s also affordable at roughly $22 per ticket. Last season’s Tosca and Turandot, thoroughly grounded in the familiar narrative territory of romantic literature and soaring arias, won me over – and so I ventured out recently to what I hoped would not be a morning misspent with Herr Wagner …
Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde.
To be honest, in 21st century America our sensibilities have been trained to respond to the conventions of moviemaking – i.e., camera angles, close-ups, etc. – so as a neophyte opera fan, I find these ‘movie’ productions almost better than some of the live productions I’ve seen. “Not if you had good seats!” my opera loving friend counters, but how many of us can afford that $200-plus ‘good’ ticket? In the Met: Live productions, the production team expertly uses the camera to enhance the storytelling so that we’re not, for instance, continuously scanning a huge faraway stage for the action. So for anyone who did not grow up with this art form as part of their national culture, the familiar conventions of filmmaking prove an invaluable aid here. In addition, the Live broadcasts open with a backstage tour, led (on this occasion) by Deborah Voigt, and include interviews with the cast (with shoutouts to their countrymen) and wardrobe/production staff, along with a “making of the Ring” mini-doc – all of which makes the opera very accessible.
The Met: Live opened October 9 th with Das Rheingold (“The Rhine Gold”), the 2.5-hour prelude to Richard Wagner’s massive-in-scope “Ring-cycle.” The entire cycle runs approximately 15 hours and is meant to be seen in four sittings. In this epic undertaking, Wagner creates an entire mythical world, borrowed from Norse and medieval German sagas, with gods and creatures engulfed in struggles for power and greed and love, all culminating in the four-hour Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).
Rhine maidens.
The opera opens with three entrancing Rhine maidens who guard the store of magical gold under the Rhine – and the evil Alberich, the dwarf who unsuccessfully woos the beauties. Angered by their rejection, he renounces love and steals their gold and forges it into a ring that the mermaid-like creatures have promised will allow any who possess it to rule the earth. We then meet the gods Wotan, his wife Fricka, and their progeny. Wotan would like to rule the earth as well, and outsmarts Alberich to steal the ring. Plot complications ensue, and the ring eventually ends up in other hands – Wotan trades away the ring for a safe home for his fellow gods. At the conclusion of DasRheingold, his reunited family ascends into beautiful Valhalla, safe at last. Yet, as we hear the strains of familiar chords, we know that the peace of Valhalla is but a chimera; something is coming – something larger than life, something wonderful.
Terrence Malick, incidentally, who is a student of German philosophy, used the image of the water nymphs in the opening scenes of New World – mirroring the opening of Das Rheingold. I can only wonder if this was intentional. Another mythmaker, J. R.R. Tolkein, long-ago acknowledged his borrowing of the all-powerful gold ring for his own ‘Rings-cycle’ – as well as his indebtedness to Wagner’s vision.
Given the sterility and vapidity of our modern day myths (currently, Avatar), exploring opera, theater, short films or foreign films as we do at LFM can only enrich our understanding of filmmaking culture, infusing it with the chords and themes that have resonated in humanity through the ages; indeed, this may be the only way that new film practices will emerge, once the tiresome contemporary genres of the anti-hero, of puerile sexuality, or of nihilism have run their course.
