Category: Articles

Hollywood Round-up, 9/17

By Jason Apuzzo. • I recently saw the trailer for the new Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck/Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp thriller-romance The Tourist, which also features Timothy Dalton and Paul Bettany – and I thought it looked great. Frankly, I didn’t think anybody out there made movies like this any longer (i.e., charming, Hitchcockian espionage capers with a light touch), and I’m very much looking forward to seeing it. I’m a bit concerned that the trailer gives away too much … but nonetheless I’m excited by what I see. The film looks to be what the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz Knight and Day was supposed to be but wasn’t. Jolie is obviously on a roll these days, making up for months of tabloid magazine gossip with some very solid projects. As for Depp, he still apparently feels the need to hide himself behind a bizarre exterior in order to convey whatever idiosyncratic humor he’s trying to put across. Still, I can’t fault his performances even if he’s never been my cup of tea. This looks like a film to rescue an otherwise dull fall.

• Reviews are starting to come out of Toronto on Werner Herzog’s new 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and the film just got picked up for distribution by IFC. John Carpenter is also back in the saddle directing, and his thriller The Ward also just unspooled in Toronto to mixed reviews. Poor John can’t be there, though, because he’s apparently still stuck here in LA doing jury duty – an odd fate for the director of Escape from LA.

Amber Heard of "The Ward."

• There’s a lot happening, as usual, on the sci-fi front. First let’s begin with James Cameron, who is apparently producing a new TV-series adaptation of his film True Lies. This was reported recently with great fanfare, but I’m allowed to be a little skeptical here because there are about 2,000 other Cameron-related projects that have been announced lately … so who knows? Since the original film was about fighting terrorists, I’m wondering how the storyline will be changed to fit Cameron’s new passion for indigenous resistance fighters. Anyway, Cameron has also apparently commissioned some new deep-sea explorations to the bottom of the seven-mile deep Challenger Deep (part of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific), from which he will shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated into Avatar’s sequel. [Or at least, that’s his excuse – probably so he can charge the expedition to Fox.] Cameron’s career is becoming increasingly intriguing, as he veers between Michael Moore and Jacques Cousteau. The question is: when he’s 20,000 fathoms down, will he find any beasts down there? [Inside joke.]

• In other sci-fi news, the Moscow-based alien invasion thriller The Darkest Hour has resumed shooting after a long delay precipitated by Moscow’s forest fires; more new pictures are out of Mad Men hottie January Jones in X-Men: First Class; and the director of the forthcoming indie alien invasion thriller Monsters has announced his next feature, which will apparently be “an epic human story, set in a futuristic world without humanity.” One hopes he intends that description ironically. Also: Lucasfilm has just put out a wonderful trailer for the forthcoming book by J.W. Rinzler on the making of The Empire Strikes Back. Be sure to check that out. I’m looking forward to that book more than any film this fall.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … we thought we’d take a look at Amber Heard (above), who stars in John Carpenter’s new film, The Ward, which just debuted in Toronto. The Ward is set in the 1960s, and deals with a group of five comely young women in a mental institution who attempt to outlast a lecherous ghoul who haunts the hallways. It sounds a bit like working for Letterman. Anyway, I hope she makes it!

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.

Posted on September 16th, 2010 at 3:11pm.

Living with the Infidels Episode 4 – “The Box”

PLEASE NOTE: Living with the Infidels Episode 4, “The Box,” features strong sexual innuendo. If that might offend you, please don’t watch the webisode. Otherwise, enjoy.

Here is Episode 4 of Living with the Infidels. We hope you enjoy the series. You might say that the series is moving toward its climax.

Posted on September 16th, 2010 at 12:20pm.

Model Turned Filmmaker: LFM Reviews Picture Me

By Joe Bendel. Prepare to be shocked: not only is there considerable drug use in the modeling business, some unscrupulous photographers sexually take advantage of the girls — and yes, in many cases they really are girls. Such are some of the revelations in super-ish model Sara Ziff’s video diary that she and her filmmaker boyfriend Ole Schell cut and shaped into the feature length documentary Picture Me, which opens in New York and Los Angeles this Friday immediately following the conclusion of the 2010 NY Fashion Week.

Though Ziff first started modeling at age fourteen, she really began pursuing it in earnest after graduating from high school – relatively late by modeling standards. Certainly beautiful, she seems quite successful, judging by the five and six figure checks she shows the camera. The close proximity of her supportive family is also an advantage, keeping her more or less grounded. Still, as we watch her over the course of a chaotic season, the exploitative nature of the business (even at Ziff’s rarified level) takes a toll on her.

Model, filmmaker Sara Ziff.

Ziff is probably rather bright and down-to-earth by industry standards, but that does not make her a fascinating personality on the big screen. She is, after all, a young woman in her early twenties with only a high school education.  (To her credit, she does enroll in college late in the film.) Frankly, her much less successful former roommate is a far more compelling figure. She can definitely tell a bad gig story, disturbing as it might be.

The real question is just what her freeloading b.f. did to earn his co-director, co-editor, and d.p. credits. In addition to being the subject, Ziff clearly shot much of the footage of her friends and fellow models herself. Hopefully Schell was very active in the editing bay. He certainly was not picking up any checks. In fact, some of the scenes he did indeed shoot feel almost as intrusive as the creepy lechers backstage snapping photos of the models as they change (a practice designers and agencies inexplicably tolerate, though it must violate American labor laws).

There are probably better modeling exposés available, but Picture should be sufficient to make parents think twice about allowing their daughters to pursue such a career. Even though one might expect it to have a glitzy E! sheen, Picture is a fairly dark and dingy looking affair, shot in backstage dressing rooms and crash pads on handheld consumers video cameras. Hardly glamorizing the model’s lifestyle, it shows the behind-the-scenes reality, zits and all.

It is hard to make a truly boring movie about beautiful women who are often skimpily clad. However, aside from a few insightful interviews with Ziff’s less successful colleagues, Picture is largely dependent on the sex appeal of its participants to hold audience interest. As a result, it is unlikely to make much of a lasting impression with viewers, unless they are fascinated by the modeling world to an unhealthy degree or have been stalking Ziff.  The film opens in New York and Los Angeles this Friday (9/17).

Posted on September 15th, 2010 at 1:24pm.

Hollywood ♥’s Shepard Fairey

Dreamworks "Megamind" poster to the left, Olivia Wilde ACLU ad to the right.

By Jason Apuzzo. Obama adulation in Hollywood has apparently not yet waned completely. Some are still apparently holding out hope … trying to resuscitate the dream, as its embers fade in the cold wind of Obama’s own narcissism. Note above-left the new Dreamworks Shepard Fairey-inspired poster for Megamind, with the villain depicted as an opponent of Obama-style hopefulness.

Perhaps more depressingly, since such partisan nonsense is to be expected from Dreamworks, is Tron’s Olivia Wilde (above-right) in a new Shepard Fairey-inspired ad for the ACLU. Is this the kind of activism we can expect from Ms. Wilde when Tron debuts in December, with what may be some subtle political messaging already embedded in that film?

I think it’s the smugness of these posters that bothers me most, their basic triteness, beside the fact that they feel like they’re about two years behind the times. Who is actually persuaded by this nonsense anymore – other than the young, poorly educated and easily impressionable … oh, right, that’s quite a lot of people these days. [Sigh.]

Posted on September 15th, 2010 at 10:36am.

Slackistan Gets UK Distribution

By Jason Apuzzo. As we’ve been reporting a great deal to you recently, many new filmmakers are emerging in the indie filmmaking scene who are challenging the reigning Hollywood narrative by which the Islamic world is depicted simplistically as a supine victim of American imperialism – rather than as a complex society, struggling to emerge out of punishing religious intolerance into a Westernized, middle class future. [See the Living with the Infidels web series below as an example.] A interesting example of this new wave appears to be London filmmaker Hammad Khan’s Slackistan, which Variety reports just got picked up for distribution in the UK, and which will be opening the forthcoming Raindance Film Festival.

Slacker babe from Hammad Khan's "Slackistan."

Since we obviously have a lot of new UK readers here at Libertas, we encourage you to go see the film when it’s released later this year, and come back to us with reviews. The film reminds me somewhat of a film coming out later this year here in the States called The Taqwacores, which showed at Sundance and which we’ve talked about previously here at Libertas. [Another film that comes to mind: No One Knows About Persian Cats, which showed at Cannes and which we reviewed here.] From a cultural standpoint, if you’re looking for signs of hope in the Islamic world, these films would seem to be it – although this ‘hope,’ of course, comes wrapped within the irony that young Islamic youth are becoming more like us in the West every day.

Are we happy about that? Is Fast Times at Islamabad High just around the corner? I can hardly tell whether this film is set in Pakistan or Encino.

Posted on September 15th, 2010 at 9:46am.

Living with the Infidels Episode 3 – “The Honey Trap”

PLEASE NOTE: Living with the Infidels Episode 3, “The Honey Trap,” features adult situations. If that might offend you, please don’t watch the webisode. Otherwise, enjoy.

Here is Episode 3 of Living with the Infidels. We hope you enjoy the series.

Posted on September 15th, 2010 at 8:06am.