By Jason Apuzzo. As many of you are aware, we’ve been highly critical of late of Sylvester Stallone’s new film The Expendables, which features an extremely nasty caricature of a CIA agent, as played by Eric Roberts. [See our thoughts on the film here and here.] Our criticism of the film in fact recently made The LA Times.
All of this is of note because in a recent interview Stallone did on Fox News with Bill O’Reilly on Thursday, August 19th, Stallone responds to unnamed critics who have taken him to task on his depiction of the CIA and of ostensible ‘imperialist’ American overreach overseas.
Since I’m not aware of any other film site that’s taken Stallone to task on these issues as we have, I will proceed under the assumption that he’s responding to Libertas – or has otherwise been made aware of our criticisms.
Watch the segment of the interview between 3:05 – 3:30 for Stallone’s remarks on this subject. His denials of our criticism are, unfortunately, difficult to square with what is actually depicted in his film – in which a druglord/ex-CIA operative collaborates with the brutal regime of a South American country in order to exploit that country’s cheap labor and resources.
One final note here: we like and respect Bill O’Reilly here at LFM. In fact, LFM’s own Govindini Murty has appeared as a guest on Mr. O’Reilly’s show twice. Unfortunately, however, Bill did not bother to actually see The Expendables before conducting this interview – something he admits at the outset. Had he actually seen the film, it’s unlikely he would have agreed with the characterization of the film by Stallone and others as being benignly ‘patriotic.’ It isn’t. The only flag Stallone waves in this film is his own.
[Editor’s Note: LFM Editor Jason Apuzzo has the day off. In his place he’s invited an old friend, Professor Jacques de Molay, to review Piranha 3D. As long-time Libertas readers may recall, Jacques is a Professor of Cinema & Neurosemiotics at the University of Northern California, and is a widely recognized Marxist intellectual.]
By Jacques de Molay.Bon jour, Libertas readers. Due to LFM Editor Jason Apuzzo’s vacation, and the fact that Piranha 3D is directed by the subversive French auteur Alexandre Aja, I have been asked to review this striking new film for the bourgeois film forum Libertas.
It could be said that the subject of Piranha 3D is ‘consumerism,’ albeit consumerism that is contextualised into a dialectic that incorporates within it both “T” and “A.” Except that in the case of Aja’s provocative, neo-deconstructionist exercise, female “T & A” in Piranha 3D is itself the object of consumption – as well as being approximately 10 meters high, unclothed and in three dimensions.
A parable of 'consumer' culture?
Aja understands that in America’s capitalistic society, the chief object of consumer desire and fetishizing is female flesh, itself. By thereby ‘incorporating’ into his film such pre-commodified females as Kelly Brooke (ooh-la-la!), Riley Steele, Ashlynn Brooke, et al as objects of ‘consumer’ desire in his film, Aja boldly poses the question: who are the ‘real’ consumers depicted in Piranha 3D? Are ‘we’ ourselves the piranhas here? And if so, what does this say about the state of deconstructive, post-capitalist feminism (i.e., whose ‘asses’ are being hung out to dry here?)
Piranha 3D takes place in the fictional bourgeois community of ‘Lake Victoria’ (substituting for Lake Havasu), a repressive middle class haven of Bush’s America – note the proliferation of police, armed with tasers (“Don’t taze me, bro!”) – that swells from a population of 5,000 to approximately 50,000 each year for the annual teen rite of ‘Spring Break.’ This annual bacchanal – which both legitimizes sexual profligacy, yet contains it within the strict confines of the corporate calendar – provides the ultimate ‘feeding frenzy’ for the film’s ‘consumer class,’ the piranhas. For the piranhas, the teens of Lake Victoria are truly ‘pieces’ of ass.
Early in the film we are introduced to our ‘hero,’ a classic WASP teen of the American middle classes named ‘Jake,’ played by Steven R. McQueen – who is the grandson of the famous actor Steve McQueen. And thus immediately one is reminded of the elder McQueen and his appearance in 1958’s The Blob, another film which thematized the devouring of teenage flesh by an insatiable ‘consumer’ beast. [Set to the music of Burt Bacharach.]
We are also introduced to another ‘hero,’ Jake’s mother, a female sheriff played with gruff brio by Elisabeth Shue. Shue’s sheriff is a classic figure of Bush’s America, drilling martial ‘responsibility’ into her son and prudishly shielding him from on-line porn. We practically expect ‘Jake’ to enroll in Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University by the time the film concludes.
'Spectacular' bodies: the temptations of American consumerism.
In a scene evocative of 1957’s The Monster That Challenged the World (another film subtly promoting America’s military-police state), an earthquake at Lake Victoria collapses the ocean floor (the Wall Street collapse?) and opens an underwater chasm, unleashing an enormous swarm of ancient piranhas (releasing unholy forces from the capitalist id?). These savage aquatic creatures, possessed of unexpected shrewdness and cheeky charisma, have ostensibly lain dormant as eggs for millions of years – much like the flash-frozen, fried fish meals so popular in Western capitalist economies.
Soon enough, however, the ‘consumed’ will themselves become the consumers.
After the earthquake, these ‘unleashed consumers’ immediately surface … and confront actor Richard Dreyfuss, reprising his role as ‘Matt Hooper’ from Jaws. And thus the first character killed in this fable of Bush’s America is, predictably: the liberal Jewish intellectual.
In short order, however, we learn that the true villain of Piranha 3D is not so much the prehistoric fish … so much as it is a character named Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell), based ostensibly on “Girls Gone Wild” mogul Joe Francis. This character – who attempts to lure young Jake into his world of commodified females, alcohol and drug use – takes Jake, his benign romantic interest ‘Kelly’ (Jessica Szohr), and models ‘Danni’ and ‘Crystal’ (the astonishing Kelly Brooke and Riley Steele, respectively) into the isolated, outer reaches of the lake.
It is here – in this bucolic setting – that the signature sequence of Piranha 3D takes place, the sequence which will be talked about for years to come among film critics, academic semioticians, and older men wearing raincoats: a campy, underwater ballet between Ms. Brooke and Ms. Steele, performed to the strains of Léo Delibes’ “Flower Duet,” conducted fully naked and in 3D. Surely this will be remembered as Aja’s ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence in years to come, his defining moment as a visionary. I am not aware of anything resembling this sequence in the history of the cinema, at least in terms of the fetishizing of female flesh within the strictures of normative capitalist discourse – not to mention within the classical music canon.
It is here especially that Mr. Aja’s meaning becomes only too plain: we ourselves are the ‘piranhas,’ ogling after this commodified flesh. Here one begins to appreciate the sophistication of Mr. Aja’s vision, in comparison to the similarly 3D-mad James Cameron. Aja dispenses with Cameron’s tame, prudish alien titillation – and gives us the ‘real’ thing, in vivid three dimensions, as only a French director could.
Eager capitalist, reviewing his 'product.'
Soon enough the piranha ‘consumers’ begin wreaking their havoc. I have been informed by Editor Apuzzo that one of the conventions of bourgeois film criticism is not to ‘give away’ the ending, so we will limit our remarks to revealing that the Derrick Jones/Joe Francis character – clearly Piranha’s scapegoat in terms of channeling the audience’s anxiety over the exploitation of female flesh – comes to a uniquely spectacular end (aided here by 3D technology) … in which his male member is chewed off with gusto by the piranhas … who subsequently spit the member out, apparently as disgusted by Mr. Jones’/Francis’ exploitation of female labor as is the audience. [The piranhas’ refusal to ‘devour’ the male member also confirms suspicions that the fish are, in effect, masculine and heterosexual in sensibility. Are they fanboys, perhaps?]
Mr. Aja’s critique is thereby made plain: after the Wall Street collapse, commerce in today’s capitalist society can only end in bloody apocalypse – a farrago of bikini tops, chewed limbs … and shattered ideals.
On the acting front, special kudos should be given to Ving Rhames – the sturdy character actor who valiantly combats the marauding fish, at one point with an outboard motor – and to Christopher Lloyd of Taxi and Back to the Future fame, playing the stock ‘mad scientist’ character. His presence in American mainstream cinema has been missed.
A vision of the predatory American 'consumer'?
Given the repressive nature of American society in the long aftermath of the Bush years, Piranha 3D should likely have been rated NC-17, if not an outright X. In my less restrictive homeland of France, where we are better prepared to appreciate such material, I assume there will be a ‘French’ cut of the film – perhaps featuring an extended version of the breathtaking ballet sequence … and perhaps replacing the Delibes with Bizet.
[Editor’s Note: here at Libertas we are committed to providing a platform for freedom of speech, and a diversity of ideas – including those of today’s progressive left. We’d like to thank Prof. de Molay for his unique contributions to our understanding of the new film Piranha 3D.]
By Joe Bendel. Forget the Syfy (Sci-Fi) Channel’s Earthsea miniseries. Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the Earthsea novels and stories, would certainly prefer you did. Her reaction to Gorō Miyazaki’s anime adaptation of her fantasy world has also been decidedly mixed, but arguably not as vehement. In fact, Miyazaki’s film is not without merit, especially for those not intimately grounded in the Earthsea mythology. Three years after its Japanese premiere, Miyazaki’s Tales from Earthsea, finally has its American theatrical release, now screening in select theaters courtesy of Walt Disney.
While the legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki long sought to adapt Le Guin’s Earthsea stories, it was his son Gorō, a relative new comer to animated filmmaking, who was assigned the project by Studio Ghibli, the anime house co-founded by Miyazaki the elder. The result is a visually striking, if thematically familiar, fantasy.
Like the epics of Tolkien and Robert Jordan, Tales follows a young protagonist of destiny, Arren, a confused prince who has apparently just murdered his father, the king. Fleeing in shame, he encounters the wizard Sparrowhawk on the road. Like his late father, Sparrowhawk is concerned about the chaos sweeping over Earthsea. The weather is unseasonable, crops are failing, livestock are dying, and two dragons were recently spotted off the coast fighting to the death – an unprecedented event in the Earthsea fantasy world.
From Miyazaki's "Tales from Earthsea."
Naturally, there is a Sauron-like evil overlord to contend with. In this case, it is the androgynous sorcerer Cob, whose slave-trading minions are out to get Arren. Indeed, Tales follows the standard epic fantasy template, but does so reasonably well. There is also a pseudo-environmental motif of a world out of balance that should have appealed to Le Guin, but it is subtler and more nuanced than most “green” movie messages.
Miyazaki the younger is most successful creating an epic look in the film, employing watercolor backgrounds and hand-drawn animation for dramatic effect. Indeed, his fantasy landscapes and cityscapes have an exotic beauty that elevates Tales well above standard issue anime.
Redubbed for an American audience (not an uncommon practice with anime distribution), the English language cast mostly ranges from adequate to fairly good. Timothy Dalton (the under-appreciated James Bond) is the class of the field, lending his commanding voice to Sparrowhawk. In contrast, Willem Dafoe’s work as Cob often sounds campy, in the wrong way.
The first Disney animated release to carry a PG-13 rating, Tales is similar in intensity (and subject matter) to Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated Lord of the Rings. Richly crafted but predictable (as is the case with most contemporary fantasy fiction), Tales is better than genre diehards might have heard at their conventions. It is currently screening in New York at the Angelika Film Center, and in Los Angeles at The Landmark.
By Jason Apuzzo. We want to keep people pumped here at Libertas about seeing Bruce Beresford’s extraordinary and courageous new film, Mao’s Last Dancer. We’ll be showing you a variety of clips from the film, including this excerpt above for today. It features the lovely Joan Chen as dancer Li’s mother. This clip really gives you a sense of what you’re in for with this film, in terms of how bold it is. [Make sure to read Joe Bendel’s LFM Review of Mao’s Last Dancer.]
“As I depart for my annual August vacation, I leave you with a highly recommended magical experience you must not miss. A giant hit at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival, Mao’s Last Dancer, by the great Australian director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy), is a feel-good film bursting with courage, energy and overwhelming inspiration … In the cherished tradition of heartbreaking movies about personal triumph against impossible odds, it is a combination of Billy Elliot and Rocky …
“At 19, granted unheard-of permission from Mao’s regime as one of the first exchange students to travel abroad, on a three-month student visa, in 1980, Li [the dancer and protagonist of the film] faces new hurdles. His parents expect him to bring honor to their humble station, his country expects him to represent China like a good, loyal and cynical comrade, drawing attention to Communism while trusting no one. Terrified and confused, he is the first boy from his province to travel to Beijing, much less the world beyond. Landing in the U.S. in a stiff, outdated, Chinese government-issued suit, he is like Dorothy arriving in Oz. Housed and guided by the kind but flamboyant Stevenson (wonderfully acted by the charismatic Bruce Greenwood), he takes little time overcoming culture shock, adjusting to alien Chinese restaurants and realizing that the Communist propaganda drummed into his head about America as a place of deprivation and darkness is a lot of hokum. The more he experiences of Texas cooking, kung fu movies, miraculous kitchen appliances, American hospitality and tennis shoes, the more distanced he grows from the ideals of Communism and the rigid dogma of Chairman Mao. (Against the rules of the Cultural Revolution, he also discovers the thrill of admiring political defectors like Nureyev and Baryshnikov without fear of arrest while watching forbidden tapes.) Capitalism, he confesses, is groovy …
“Distilling so much drama and turmoil into two hours is not easy, but by the time the film completes Li’s long and arduous journey, in 1986, when his parents are finally allowed to fly to the U.S. to see him dance for the first time, you will marvel at how much is accomplished. I predict the highly charged emotional finale will leave you cheering … Mao’s Last Dancer is a masterpiece.”
By Jason Apuzzo. We reported recently here at Libertas about how the CW’s reboot of the Nikita franchise will be making the CIA the villains of the piece. So far as we’re aware, we’re the only site currently making a fuss over this.
Variety (registration required) is now reporting today that the show is currently turning heads for a different reason – namely, the raciness of it’s advertising.
At Libertas, of course, we dive right in to such controversies.
As I mentioned in my earlier post about this show, what alerted me to this show to begin with was a gigantic, eye-popping billboard of star Maggie Q slapped up against a building here in LA. The poster was the already quite racy one of her in a red dress (see here). Now, apparently, the people at CW are trying to get huge billboards of Maggie Q in leather and tattoos (see left) into major markets like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles – and even here in LA not everybody’s going along with it.
Let me begin by stating the obvious: it would be spectacularly hypocritical of me to complain about the sexiness of this show’s advertising, given our regular featuring of pin-ups here at Libertas. On the contrary: we love this sort of thing, as it speaks to the sort of freedoms we enjoy here in the West that are routinely frowned upon in totalitarian societies (both of the Islamo-fascist and communist variety) elsewhere in the world.
Plus, the girls look cute – which should be reason enough.
Cheerleaders.
With that said, even I think that putting up 50ft. billboards of Ms. Q in leather and tattoos in public places like malls, where families and children may gather, is probably a bit much. And for safety reasons, I don’t think it’s too good of an idea to put these billboards near freeways. The one of her in the red dress (see here) is more than enough to get the point across.
What bothers me more is that this new show apparently goes The Full Stallone in taking a nasty swipe at the CIA. Why aren’t people more bothered by this? Let me put it this way: why are we so prudish about the sex component to this series, yet so completely untroubled by what the show is depicting in terms of our own government?
Attacking our intelligence services is such a terrible idea at this point in time, as those services struggle under the combined weight of low morale, rampant anti-Americanism overseas and budget cutbacks. And here’s another problem: shows like this do, eventually, get syndicated in foreign markets … and what kind of effect do you think they have, particularly among those already inclined toward hating America? [Foreign distribution rights to Nikita have already been sold to the UK and Australia.]
Much as with The Expendables, I really wanted to like this show. It had the potential of being a kind of sexed-up version of 24 – or a weekly Salt, if you will – and in fact that’s what the show should have been. Instead, they had to make America’s intelligence services into the enemy, into ruthless murderers bent on assassination. What a shame.
The only silver lining here, I suppose, is that the CW is giving us a better-looking show this fall called Hellcats. The show is apparently based on the book, Cheer: Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders. I’ve put the trailer for the show below. This cheeky comedy-drama’s premise is described this way:
Hellcats revolves around Marti, a pre-law college student from the wrong side of the tracks. When budget cutbacks and her mother’s constant carelessness cause her to lose her scholarship, she joins the Hellcats, the college’s competitive cheerleading team.
Perfect! A series about a young gal forced into a life of cheerleading due to tragic circumstances. [Is Roger Corman running this network?] Between the new terrorist-fighting Hawaii Five-O and this, I think we’re set now.
I’m as surprised as anyone right now to be denigrating one of Stallone’s films and talking up a (semi-)competing picture by Angelina Jolie. This isn’t exactly what I expected at the outset of the summer, to say the least. But we try to stick to the content of films here at Libertas, and to what messages films convey, rather than to individual star personalities. I think it’s very dangerous to get caught up in the personalities of stars, unless those stars remain disciplined and consistent in terms of what projects they choose. Since the decline of the old studio system, such stars are actually rather few and far between.
Stallone, to me, chose a distasteful storyline (at least with respect to the villain) around which to launch his career comeback – whereas I was very pleasantly surprised by what Jolie did with Salt. And for me it really ends there: with the films, and what they convey about our country and the spirit of freedom which it still embodies. As a side note, I think the business of equating masculine male action stars with patriotism is fine, so long as those stars happen to be fighting on our side.
• We like Frank Miller here at Libertas, and Frank is apparently collaborating with Evan Rachel Wood and Chris Evans on a big new ad campaign for Gucci products. Check out the teaser for the ad campaign below. It looks fun.
• California has apparently run out of film tax credits. Don’t you just love this? The California Film Commission has already allocated the entirety of its $100 million in tax credits available this year to 30 projects, and now has a waiting list of 45 projects. According to the LA Times:
“The demand is far exceeding the supply,” said California Film Commission Executive Director Amy Lemisch. “We ran out on the first day of funding.”
The program, enacted last year to stem the flight of production from California, provides a 20% to 25% tax credit on qualified production expenses that can be applied to offset state income or sales tax liabilities. Although limited in scope compared with what other states offer — the incentive doesn’t cover talent costs and excludes commercials, for example — it has been popular, especially among independent filmmakers.
As an indie filmmaker myself, I can tell you that the production situation here in this state is lousy. Basically nobody wants to film around here unless they have to, and unfortunately most indie productions have to. Having a Governor in office who was once a motion picture star himself was supposed to help this, but as we know … [Sigh.]
This is actually a good sign. You know why? Because if dudes are blowing out their knees on-set, that means they’re filming some serious action on this show. Things are looking up.
• Some internal memos apparently just got leaked out of Paramount, and we now know what projects are currently in that studio’s pipeline. Among the projects leaked were: A Baywatch movie (hooray! what took so long? lack of blondes in LA?); a Nevada Smith remake (how do you top Steve McQueen? or Karl Malden, for that matter?), and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Dictator, in which he supposedly plays a deposed foreign dictator who gets lost in the United States. That last project could be hilarious if it’s done properly.
January Jones of "Mad Men."
True story about Nevada Smith: apparently Indiana Jones was originally supposed to be named ‘Indiana Smith,’ but Spielberg changed the name to ‘Jones’ because he was afraid audiences would confuse Indy with the McQueen character.
[Are you reading a word I’m saying here, or are you just looking at the picture to the left? Just checking.]
• Hollywood is apparently very afraid of the new Google TV initiative, as Google expands the reach of its media empire-in-the-making. The new Google TV technology is the latest effort, following on the heels of Apple TV, to combine TV with the internet. Personally I think the entertainment industry is far too worried about this. I see no evidence suggesting that there’s a public demand for this fusion of TV and internet right now, until such a fusion becomes much more fluid than it currently is. Also on the tech front today: apparently James Cameron has been assisting NASA as they plan to put a 3D camera on Mars.
• Ernest Borgnine will be receiving a lifetime achievement award from SAG. Congratulations, Borgie! It was a pleasure for Govindini and I to meet him a few years back. He had such a powerful handshake (at age 90!) that my hand is still recovering. Borgie’s just as vital and colorful as ever, and has undoubtedly enjoyed one of the great cinema careers of all time. Not bad for an Italian kid from North Haven. 🙂
