By Jason Apuzzo. Isn’t this funny, as well as satisfying. In a head-to-head comparison of their opening weekend totals (see here and here), Angelina Jolie’s pro-American, anti-communist Salt beat Sly Stallone’s CIA-trashing/women-waterboarding The Expendables by the slender margin of $36 million (Salt) to $35 million (Expendables).
Fabulous.
In box office terms, that means that Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Steve Austin and a nasty storyline weren’t worth quite as much as Angelina Jolie and a little patriotism.
To celebrate, I’ve picked out one of the tastier pictures of Jolie from the Moscow Salt premiere (there are many). She’s certainly a lot better to look at than Stallone, isn’t she?
If any of you think I enjoy knocking Stallone by the way, I most certainly don’t. But when you trash your own country – and portray our intelligence agents as drug peddling, waterboarding torturers of women – then that’s the treatment you’re going to get here at Libertas. We’re not Hollywood star/celebrity suck-ups here. You can find enough of that on other sites.
I’d like Stallone to explain his depiction of the CIA in The Expendables to the widow of CIA agent and former Atlanta narcotics detective Scott Roberson, who was killed earlier this year in Afghanistan while working for the Agency. [Roberson was one of seven CIA agents killed in the same bomb blast in January.] The timing of his death was deeply tragic; the 39 year-old Roberson never got to meet his child, born in February to his surviving wife Molly, who now lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. You can hear more about Roberson’s life here. In its own way, Roberson’s life was a quiet and elegant rebuke to the hateful image Stallone is peddling in his film.
By Jennifer Baldwin. Which is the higher value: Peace or Freedom? Can there be true peace without freedom? Is freedom worth dying for? Is freedom worth killing for? What are we willing to do for our freedom – not just the soldiers, sailors, and marines—but all of us, what are we willing to do?
Few movies today wrestle with these questions, probably because they’ll bring up answers that the Hollywood establishment doesn’t want to face. The independent films we champion here at LFM are different, of course. They’re not afraid to face the issue of freedom. Freedom-loving films are out there; they’re just not the mainstream movies that garner all the press.
But that wasn’t always the case. As any movie fan with a passing knowledge of Hollywood in the 1940s knows, movies about freedom and fighting tyranny were turned out half a dozen a week back in those days, all in service to the war effort and the fight against the Nazis and Imperial Japan.
Edge of Darkness is one such movie. It has a message about freedom that is essential, even for us today, in understanding the sacrifices and requirements necessary for liberty. It also has lots of guns.
Edge of Darkness is a great film if you like the following things: Piles of dead Nazis; a religious minister mowing down Germans from a bell tower; and Ann Sheridan toting a big, honking machine gun. And boy, does she tote it!
This is a movie about the importance of firearms. I can’t recall the last movie I watched that showed just how much having freedom depends on having guns. Everybody is packing in this one – from the little old ladies, to gray-haired doctor Walter Houston, to the town preacher.
Needless to say, Errol Flynn handles a gun, but it’s Ann Sheridan striking a pose for firearms and freedom that really gets the film going.
These are the pleasures of Edge of Darkness. It’s a relatively unknown gem only recently released on DVD. It’s director is the underrated Lewis Milestone, director of one of my favorite films noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Milestone was no stranger to war movies, either, having directed All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930. Continue reading Classic Cinema Obsession: Edge of Darkness, New on DVD
By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: Stallone & Co. try to bring macho, 80s action fare back into style. Sly leads a rag-tag band of mercenaries into action against a rogue ex-CIA officer-turned drug lord and a South American Generalissimo. Along the way, Stallone develops feelings for the Generalissimo’s daughter, while co-star Jason Statham works out issues with his girlfriend. Mickey Rourke supplies the tattoos.
THE SKINNY: Thoroughly mediocre, straight-to-video style action movie on steroids. Basically a platform for Stallone’s Godzilla-scale narcissism … along with some nasty, leftist messaging about the CIA and American exploitation of Third World peoples, etc.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK:
• Making the villain of the piece an ex-CIA guy turned drug lord … who likes waterboarding women. Sorry, but this took me completely out of the picture. Shame on Stallone for jamming this junk into his film. Trying to cash in with the overseas audiences, Sly? You’re peddling an ugly stereotype of our intelligence services at a time when we can least afford it. Our intelligence people doesn’t deserve to get thrown under the bus just to reboot your career.
• Trying to make Jet Li the comic relief in the film. Stallone apparently confused him with Jackie Chan.
• The genuinely appalling stereotypes this film peddles about Central/South America. Apparently everybody down there is either a druggie, a peon, a Generalissimo, or a sexy spitfire right out of a telenovela. I guess you can get away with that stuff in a film nowadays so long as you gratuitously bash the CIA.
• The visual effects looked cheap, like something out of a Roger Corman movie. The cheap effects give the film a straight-to-video vibe that it never quite shakes.
• Seeing Sly, Bruce Willis and Schwarzenegger together after all these years … meant exactly nothing to me, because these guys basically stand for nothing anymore other than their own careers, and their personal narcissism. Schwarzenegger? He’s currently presiding over the ruination of my state. Willis? When Live Free or Die Hard went overseas, he let the title be changed to Die Hard 4 in order not to ‘offend’ international audiences. So watching all these ‘tough’ guys smirk and preen and chew cigars means zero to me now; besides, at this point Angelina Jolie could probably kick all their asses.
WHAT WORKS:
• I don’t know whether it’s plastic surgery or ‘roids or what – but both Stallone’s face and Mickey Rourke’s are starting to look like Paul Klee paintings. They bulge and twist in interesting, novel directions and hold your interest.
• Statham. The key to Statham is: he’s a handsome guy, without being pretty. Being pretty is what ruined Van Damme.
• Due to clever editing and sound effects, I almost thought the fight scenes were good. Jet Li was really wasted, though.
• Inheriting the Maria Conchita Alonso role from the 80s, Gisele Itié is certainly sultry. I like the way she says ‘You Americans’ in this film. The phrase has a kind of smoky, insolent lilt coming out of her mouth. Too bad she gets waterboarded.
• It was good to see Dolph Lundgren again, and a great idea to have him fight Jet Li. Poor Dolph still can’t act, though.
Body fetish: it's all about how you look.
The Expendables is basically Stallone’s victory lap, his valedictory statement on the action film. But even though I’ve always been pro-Stallone in the past (how many of you can say you once snuck into a midnight screening of Cobra? I can), I can’t go with him here. I really think the only thing Stallone stands for any more is himself and his career – and his wife’s excellent skin care products, of course.
Personal narcissism was always an important subtext of Stallone’s films – you see it in the long, loving close-ups of Sly’s pecs in films like Rambo II or Rocky IV – but in The Expendables Sly turns narcissism into a creed, a kind of warped code of honor. We learn in this film, for example, that Sly and his mercenary band will basically go anywhere and do anything for money. Except in this case, Sly doesn’t take a job offered to him by Bruce Willis because he would then be – indirectly – working on behalf of the CIA. [By the way, you know Bruce Willis is a villain in this film because he’s a clean-shaven white guy wearing a suit. In current movie iconography, that reads as bad.] Being a patsy for the CIA is apparently not cool in Sly’s world. What is cool, instead, is doing the exact same dirty work – and risking the lives of his team – in order to rescue the Generalissimo’s hot daughter, who wouldn’t even leave with him when she had the chance. In essence, Stallone has the opportunity to do something for his country – albeit indirectly, and perhaps on behalf of a nasty character (Willis) – but he passes up the opportunity to indulge a personal whim.
It’s too bad that’s where Stallone’s head is, nowadays. That kind of me-first mentality keeps this film from being the men-on-a-mission classic it could be, like The Guns of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare or Ice Station Zebra. This movie has no sense of mission whatsoever, no sense of higher purpose other than the resuscitation of a star’s career. I don’t know what ‘The Expendables’ are fighting for, or why I should care. All we really learn from watching this thoroughly mediocre film is that South American women are as hot as ever.
• While we’re on the subject of underwater madness … Piranha 3D has a delightfully campy new poster out (see right), plus word comes now that there will be no pre-screenings of the film for critics. Hooray! Now they won’t be able to ‘protect’ us from actually having some fun.
Is this poster now giving us the subtext to this film? [Note the piranhas in the murky distance, gaping at the topless female.] Does this somehow mean that fanboys themselves are really just ugly little piranhas, needing be stopped?
I’m looking forward to this film more and more. By the way, I’m officially allowed to speculate about Piranha 3D having a ‘subtext’ because its director is French.
The trailer basically associates the film’s frightening alien invasion of Los Angeles with the ‘invasion’ of the New World by Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries. And these associations are spelled out in the trailer by … Dan Rather, and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell! [By way of quoting Stephen Hawking’s recent comments on the dark possibilities associated with alien contact.] Talk about ‘on-the-nose’ filmmaking.
So it looks like Skyline will thematically be taking us directly into Avatar territory: i.e., sub-rosa critiques of White European Invaders as the metaphorical ‘aliens’ we really need to fear. [Sigh.] That’s too bad, because the trailer otherwise looks promising … except for the fact that I’ve already seen this film before, when it was titled War of the Worlds.
One might potentially interpret Skyline as a reverse-riff on the theme of Christian ‘rapture,’ by the way. Just a thought.
Alien invaders gobbling up innocent citizens of Los Angeles. Expect indigestion.
By the way, according to Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog, here’s Fury Road’s storyline: “Keough will play one of the ‘Five Wives,’ a group of women that [Mad Max] must protect from the bad guys. Zoe Kravitz, Teresa Palmer and Adelaide Clemens are three of other wives.” This film is looking better by the day – much more enticing than what I was expecting. Book me in. Incidentally, since Mad Max is actually protecting women in this film, it’s now obvious to me why Mel Gibson won’t be playing Max anymore.
• In a recent post entitled, “Christopher Nolan’s Dead Women,” Culture Snob’s Jeff Ignatius notes something that I’ve detected, as well:
In at least four of Christopher Nolan’s seven feature films, the plots and/or fixations are initiated or propelled by the death of a man’s spouse or girlfriend. Considering that Nolan’s primary thematic interest is obsession, isn’t this a little strange?
Yes, it is. Ignatius later dances around the obvious question: namely, whether some, dark misogynistic impulse is at the imaginative core of Nolan’s work. I wish more people would take note of this, because it’s a deeply disturbing aspect not only of Nolan’s work, but of the fandom that worships him.
CH: You know, the good part about that is maybe I’ve contributed to helping women appreciate themselves the way they are, that we don’t all have to be a Size 2 to be beautiful. Anything I’ve done to help change people’s minds about that is something to be proud of, I think.
We share her pride.
Kelly Brook of "Piranha 3D."
•The new trailer for the Christina Aguilera/Cher/Stanley Tucci Burlesque runs through about every biopic cliché in the book, but the funniest part to me is the ending when you learn that Burlesque is going to be out in time for Thanksgiving! Yes, perfect Thanksgiving fare! I know I’ll be there, right after passing the gravy boat.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Piranha 3D’s Kelly Brook has a new interview out today in which she reveals that Piranha 3D’s French director Alexandre Aja discovered her in an LA restaurant … while she was eating fish and chips.
By Jennifer Baldwin. One of the things I love about Mad Men is the tone of the show. It’s dispassionate, restrained, observant. In its first season, the show had a tendency to get a little condescending towards the era, but thankfully, show runner Matthew Weiner has managed to pull back on this tendency and just let the era “be” — he doesn’t flinch from showing the faults of these characters and their society, but he also doesn’t preach at us about how horrible these people and their world were. He just lets the world of the show play out, and it’s up to us how we judge things. Compared to other shows and movies set in the 1960s, Mad Men is one of the least preachy.
The increasingly detached, observant tone of Mad Men is what helps make it so fascinating, both as drama and as social commentary. This third episode of Season Four is no exception. The characters and their choices are given to us with very little commentary or editorializing from the writers and it’s up to us, the audience, to decide how we feel about them.
Anna and Don.
At its most basic, Mad Men is a character study. People who’ve tried just watching one episode here or there find they can’t get into the show, but that’s because it’s hard to jump in midstream when you’re watching the lives of fully developed people unfold before your eyes. It takes time to get to know someone, and the characters of Mad Men — the life blood of the show — are as multi-faceted and complex as fictional characters get. It takes time to get to know them.
This week’s episode, in fact, made me feel something I never thought I’d feel for a character I never thought I would like: Greg, Joan’s husband (a character I had previously nicknamed “Doctor McRapist Jerkface”). But somehow, just as they did with Pete over the course of the first couple of seasons, the Mad Men writers have made Dr. Greg sympathetic. When he bandages Joan’s finger after she cuts herself in the kitchen — the way he calms her down, comforts her, takes charge — it was endearing. Suddenly, a character that I couldn’t wait to leave for Vietnam so he could get killed was a character I kinda, sorta, unbelievably cared about. It was a moment that made me realize that Joan married him not just for the stability and because he was a good-looking doctor, but because he has a heart, that she saw something good in him, even though he had committed a despicable act against her (the rape scene from Season Two). It’s the kind of character moment that Mad Men excels at: a seemingly “bad” character doing a good thing.
Lane.
Of course, that’s the whole appeal of a character like Don Draper; a character we’re fascinated by and care about, even as he does some pretty bad things. This week’s episode gave us the two sides of Don: the caring, sensitive, wounded Dick Whitman and the swinging, boozy, divorcee businessman Don Draper. When he visits Anna Draper in California and finds out she has terminal cancer (and that she hasn’t been told about it), we witness his heart breaking before our eyes.
But then Don returns to New York, takes recently-left-by-his-wife Lane Pryce under his wing, and the two go out for a night of drinking, excess, and eventually, prostitutes. Don echoes the line from last week — about the conflict between doing what we want versus doing what’s expected of us — and he encourages Lane to do what he wants and not what’s expected of him. Lane sleeps with the prostitute that Don has gotten for him; he’s chosen self over duty. Lane won’t be jetting off to England any time soon to try to repair his marriage.
And so, another thread in the fabric of a stable society is thereby cut. “Don Draper” seems to be winning out over “Dick Whitman” this season. And he’s bringing characters like Lane Pryce with him. It remains to be seen whether these two will find any lasting happiness on the path they have chosen. Welcome to 1965.
One final thought: Don and Lane really should have gone to see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of my favorite films, instead of Godzilla vs. The Thing (or Gamera, or whatever Japanese monster movie that was). At least they didn’t go see It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
